Mexican Cool

Mayor Luke wants to make Pittsburgh the new cool. Is building economic ties with Mexico more likely to pay off? The city can build all the cool taxpayer-financed urban pseudo-shopping malls it likes, but unless Pittsburgh finds a way to bring more money to the region than Pittsburgh ships out, who's going to shop there?

The Cupcake Class Expands Its Territory

Yes, I may be the last to know, but the soon-to-open Dozen Cupcakes in Squirrel Hill already has some competition: CoCo's Cupcake Cafe, on Ellsworth in Shadyside, is also in the upscale cupcake business.

“We’ll be open late as an alternative to the bar scene,” says Mullen, a Regent Square resident whose company Good Chemistry has designed products for American Eagle and Barney's. “Ellsworth is going to rock at night--I think it’s what Walnut used to be.”

I've heard that Whole Foods is in this business, too, selling cupcakes for $2.75 a pop (and a four cup minimum). True? Cool. This earlier take on the East End and its environs is finally getting some traction.

I remember when $2.75 used to buy a whole gallon cake. Cupcakes came in one flavor and one flavor only. And when I wanted a drink, I got a drink, not a cupcake.

Meanwhile, Back at the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence

Yesterday, the Post-Gazette this nice Q & A [with the occasional transcription error] with the new director of the Small Business Development Center at Pitt's Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence, Tom Juring. Tom is the second non-Pittsburgher to take over a big chunk of the IEE's economic development program in the last couple of years -- Sherry Balmat, who now runs PantherLabWorks, is the first. And Tom, like Sherry, brings to Pittsburgh a healthy dose of California-style skepticism of the "we don't do things that way" mentality.

Learning from Youngstown

Jim Russell beat me to the post with this comment on developments in and around Youngstown, Ohio:

Mayor Williams and his cadre of urban scientists moved into a vacuum. Youngstown has developed into a frontier geography, a fringe space, where novel ideas thrive. Cleverly, the city used the anxiety about population loss to engage citizens, activating them in the process. People are talking, but there appears to be little opposition to the renewal scheme of downsizing the city.

As word gets out that all the old bosses have left Youngstown, developers will smell opportunity. I must admit, I'm intrigued.

Jim also links to this piece in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, on interesting ideas from 2006:

At its peak, Youngstown supported 170,000 residents. Now, with less than half that number living amid shuttered steel factories, the city and Youngstown State University are implementing a blueprint for a smaller town that retains the best features of the metropolis Youngstown used to be. Few communities of 80,000 boast a symphony orchestra, two respected art museums, a university, a generously laid-out downtown and an urban park larger than Central Park. “Other cities that were never the center of steel production don’t have these assets,” says Jay Williams, the city’s newly elected 35-year-old mayor, who advocated a downsized Youngstown when he ran for office.

Williams’s strategy calls for razing derelict buildings, eventually cutting off the sewage and electric services to fully abandoned tracts of the city and transforming vacant lots into pocket parks. The city and county are now turning abandoned lots over to neighboring landowners and excusing back taxes on the land, provided that they act as stewards of the open spaces. The city has also placed a moratorium on the (often haphazard) construction of new dwellings financed by low-income-housing tax credits and encouraged the rehabilitation of existing homes. Instead of trying to recapture its industrial past, Youngstown hopes to capitalize on its high vacancy rates and underused public spaces; it could become a culturally rich bedroom community serving Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which are 70 miles away.

Something that Jim leaves implicit is something that Youngstown may be learning before Pittsburgh: The city as an urban experience may be going and gone . . . forever. The automobile and interstate highways killed city-based manufacturing and then killed downtown, and now the internet is killing them all over again. As I wrote here, after reading Douglas Rae's fabulous history of New Haven and, by extension, of the 20th century American city:

Cities, in other words, aren’t arguments for themselves. If you build it, they may not come, at least not in numbers sufficient to justify the investment. New Haven is like Pittsburgh, where I live now, and like dozens of other mid-sized cities that owe their former prominence to accidents of industry and now find themselves wondering what, exactly, to do next. New York is the exception that proves the rule; elsewhere else in the U.S., no one rushes downtown in the evening just to hang out with other people. And there is little, if anything, that governments can do to change things. The forces of governance are too powerful for that. City governments didn’t need to do much to sustain urban fabrics in the late 1800s. City governments don’t have the power to do so today.

In other words, cities became cities 150 years ago because of a confluence of technological and social interests that are unlikely ever to be repeated, and cities faded during the last two-thirds of the 20th century because the techno-social tides changed gradually and eventually dramatically. We can't fight history; we can only go with the flow. Rae is the anti-Florida, someone whose instinct is to look at the historical fabric of urbanism rather than the interests of a professional [creative] elite, and someone whose argument deserves special attention in a place like Pittsburgh. Physical connectivity built cities 150 years ago. Can virtual connectivity justify them today?

Virtual Pittsburgh

Jim Russell at Burgh Diaspora goes Jim Morris one better:

The Steelers connect Pittsburgh with its Diaspora, the framework for Morris' suggestion that Pittsburgh "overcome geography with the internet." Connectivity is an emerging metric for gauging economic development. The New Pittsburgh is already thriving in cities around the country. There are Austin Burgh and Raleigh-Durham Burgh, homes to Cool Pittsburgh.

Connecitivty is a great watchword these days; Pittsburgh couldn't do much better. Operationalizing a "Virtual Pittsburgh" takes some doing, however. Ideas? Start with Jim (Russell)'s GlobalBurgh forum.

Jim Morris on Valley v. Valley

CMU West Coast Dean Jim Morris has a great essay in the recent Pittsburgh Quarterly:

I loved the Pittsburgh of the 1950s, but it’s dead. Let’s get past the denial stage of grieving and build new industries. It took 100 years for the vibrant, innovative industrial culture of Pittsburgh to run down. It took 50 years for Stanford to grow Silicon Valley from some scientific ideas. Austin, Seattle and Raleigh-Durham took comparable times to grow their industries.

Nearly 40 percent of Silicon Valley residents are between 20 and 40 while the equivalent Allegheny County cohort is 26 percent. On this point, The Economist reports a hopeful future for Pittsburgh. Its analysis deserves a fuller hearing. While we may never boom again, more students from our 34 universities are staying. In the meantime, we may find old codgers clinging to power too long while the new generation waits to step into place.

In the past 25 years Pittsburgh has tried many straight-forward steps: environmental cleanup, business-friendly university policies, state support for technology transfer, high-tech support groups, greenhouses and captive venture capital funds. They are important, but they don’t address the elusive cultural issues the generation gap presents. Here are some out-of-the-triangle ideas:

Read the whole thing.

The New Pittsburgh Philanthropy

As part of my occasional series on The New Pittsburgh, I've been waiting for an opportunity to write something about local philanthropic and not-for-profit communities. I found it in this sidebar to today's announcement that the merger wave in banking has finally crashed over Mellon Bank. Recipients of Mellon's foundation largesse are being assured that their financial gravy train will continue uninterrupted:

As part of the unveiling of its merger with Bank of New York, Mellon announced the creation of a new $80 million Mellon Financial Foundation that will give out twice as much money to southwestern Pennsylvania as the previous foundation did -- $4 million a year, double the previous $2 million. It also pledged that the $1 million that it currently spends per year on area sponsorships and nonprofits will not change.

That's nice, obviously, as long as it lasts, but it raises a bigger question about the structure of local philanthropy.

Pittsburgh is legendary among cities its size for the quality of its foundation community, which I have always understood to be a legacy of the city's industrial history. The Mellon announcement underscores that belief. The not-for-profit community that is supported by those foundations, and by the elaborate fundraisers that are reported in the social section of the Post-Gazette, also strikes me as impressive. Going forward, it's clear that the not-for-profit sector of Pittsburgh has to remain vibrant and both well-supported and well-funded if the city is to have any chance of recovering and maintaining any semblance of urban vibrancy.

And yet. I wonder about the not-for-profit sector's dependence on foundation money and on big fancy fundraisers. I wonder about the sustainability of that model as big institutional donors -- individuals and foundations alike -- either leave town or decide to leave the dance, so to speak. When the checkbooks are gone, where does that leave the organizations? I don't know enough about the community to have a good sense here; I'll invite comments. Is membership and community building a strategy of choice in Pittsburgh? If it is (or even if it isn't) -- why, or why not? Does the not-for-profit sector struggle with the same inertia that characterizes so much of Pittsburgh? My sense is that it does, but I'd appreciate your thoughts.