The Pittsburgh Citizen

The G-20 is coming! The national and international media are here (yes, they're here already). And they all want answers to the same question:

How did Pittsburgh do it? How did Pittsburgh "revitalize" itself and achieve the "renaissance" that justifies holding the G-20 in the first place? How did Pittsburgh get so hip?

This post is the first of several that will take a crack at answering those questions. Back in March, I offered a short thumbnail. The new series of posts will offer more detail.

To start:

Question: Did Pittsburgh revitalize itself?
Answer: No; cities don't "revitalize" themselves, at least not if you assume that "cities" or "a city" can decide to do such a thing.

Question: Has Pittsburgh been revitalized?
Answer: In some superficial respects, yes; in many structural ways, no.

Question: Is Pittsburgh undergoing a renaissance?
Answer: Only if you focus on bright, shiny buildings in the Downtown neighborhood and in a couple of neighborhoods nearby.

Question: How did Pittsburgh do it? I pose that question because many people will ignore or overlook the previous questions, and the answers. There's no doubt that the tone of the city and the region is different and sunnier today than it was even five or six years ago. Pittsburgh is acquiring a not-altogether-deserved international reputation as a successful post-industrial city, largely because the cost of living in Pittsburgh is so low relative to the range and depth of its urban amenities.

Why is the cost of living in Pittsburgh so low? Because over the last 30 years, so few people have wanted to move here. Why is the range and depth of its urban amenities so rich? The answer to that question is the start of the answer to "How did Pittsburgh do it?" The rest of this post is devoted to beginning at the relevant beginning.

Question: Why did Pittsburgh need to do it?
Answer: Because Pittsburgh screwed itself up in a big way. In many significant respects, Pittsburgh's current success begins with Pittsburgh's massive failure.

As everyone in the world knows, for the first half of the 20th century Pittsburgh was the home of an extraordinary and extraordinarily successful confluence of industry and finance. Pittsburgh built the world.

The steel industry and related businesses were so successful, wealthy, and powerful in the Pittsburgh region that they largely interfered with processes of entrepreneurship that might have diversified the economy. The demise of steel in the 1970s and 1980s was not a surprise; it was foreseen, and its effects -- which were dramatic and traumatic -- might have been mitigated. But planning for the transition wasn't done. For more, refer to the work of Ben Chinitz, cited in earlier posts at Null Space and also here at Pittsblog (and here). And refer to the work of Clayton Christensen, who characterized mini mills as a disruptive technology that led to the demise of complacent steel companies that continued to rely on vertically integrated production.

If you have read Pittsblog before, you know that I'm not a fan of historical explanations (or prognostications) that rely too much on personal virtue and heroic figures. You will no doubt read a lot in the next few weeks about Pittsburgh's can-do spirit, about the resilience of its citizens, and about the never-say-die ethos that characterizes the region. (I've even contributed to that theme, here and there.) But other regions are happy to characterize themselves the same way, and truthfully. There's no credible way to claim that Pittsburghers are better (more entrepreneurial or innovative, faster, stronger, able to jump higher) than residents of St. Louis or Providence or Detroit. (Cleveland, of course, is a different matter.)

A new book from Pitt professor Franklin Toker thoughtfully suggests that Pittsburgh's many neighborhoods are what keeps the city afloat. That's a common view and a highly romantic one. But I think that it's wrong. Pittsburgh's neighborhoods are strong, and they've provided an important social fabric for what remains of the city's population. Think of the neighborhoods, however, as a lattice that allowed Pittsburgh residents to hang on, but with little momentum of their own.

Sometimes, key individuals can be galvanizing in important ways -- both good and bad. More often and more important, however, are institutions.

And in some critical ways, identified above, Pittsburgh's key institutions let the region down. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost when the mills closed. Hundreds of thousands of people left the city and the region. Because so many of those mill jobs were highly paid, thanks to the successful efforts of labor unions to negotiate to help their members with both wages and benefits (steelworker wages increased in the 1970s even as demand for steel declined and steelworker employment fell), the amount of money that left the region with those people was likewise enormous.

Paradoxically, however, during this same period (beginning in the 1950s), other Pittsburgh institutions were working dynamically to move the city forward. In the short term, the most visible of those was the Allegheny Conference on Community Development (the ACCD), a private group of civic leaders (mostly from the business community, including some leading steel industry players ) that partnered with the city of Pittsburgh (led by Mayor David Lawrence) and Allegheny County to address some of the city's most pressing environmental and infrastructure issues. The ACCD led efforts to clear Downtown Pittsburgh of the relics of its industrial past. Train sheds at the point were replaced by the Gateway Center towers, for example, and Pittsburgh's skies were largely cleared of the smoke that prompted the legendary description of Pittsburgh as "hell with the lid off." The Port Authority and Point State Park were also products of this era, now recalled as "Renaissance I." Pittsburgh's leaders concentrated on the structure of Downtown and on some key infrastructure issues, and did so successfully, at precisely the right moment. With additional (if not always successful) investments in Downtown during the 1960s, 70, and 80s, Pittsburgh's Downtown retained a strong foundation on which current development has built.

Read more at Pittsblog.