The Pittsburgh Citizen

I am into the home stretch with this ten-part series on Pittsburgh's current revitalization, its causes and cures. Today's installment briefly takes up a couple of technical points, which means I'll skip over Chris Briem's blast at Friday's downer of a Wall Street Journal column about Pittsburgh's past masquerading as Pittsburgh's future. I'll save a comment on that piece for Part X.

Instead, the more fortuitous timing is the Post-Gazette's item about the tour of Pittsburgh that County Exec Dan Onorato gave to the National Association of Counties. The focus of the tour and explanation for Pittsburgh's rise from the ashes was Hazelwood and the close-in Mon Valley: The Waterfront Mall. The Southside Works. The light office space in Hazelwood. Former industrial space -- former homes of major US Steel, LTV, and Jones & Laughlin steel works -- eventually cleared, and still later reborn as corporate office space, housing, and shopping.

(A question for Pittsburghers: I thought that J&L was bought by LTV in the late 1960s, so that the PG is misleading when it talks about LTV as the South Side works and J&L as the Hazelwood works. But maybe my history is wrong? Or maybe the J&L/LTV distinction survived in terminology despite the ownership change?)

The point that I want to address is the role of land use and redevelopment policy in Pittsburgh's revival. The tour that pointed to the Waterfront, the South Side Works, and Hazelwood makes the implicit argument that official economic development policy and economic development organizations have played key roles.

The view here is that the argument has a point. Earlier in this series, I expressed skepticism of the argument that Pittsburgh's government has somehow orchestrated the revitalization of Pittsburgh. There is no doubt that official land use and redevelopment policy has had a mixed record in Pittsburgh over the last decade and more. Successive plans to renovate parts of Downtown Pittsburgh, particularly the Fifth & Forbes corridor, and failed investments in new department stores Downtown, make that point pretty clearly. There is also the matter of one Bernardo Katz, and the less said about him, the better. Current efforts are far from uniformly successful. Pittsburgh's city government has been ham-handed in punishing skeptics of its development plans, especially when those skeptics occupy public offices that have a role in reviewing those plans. The lead economic development agency in Pittsburgh, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, was distracted by a weird corruption scandal that nearly ate the whole of government.

But the URA is out there, bureuacracy and all, plugging away. In a city whose unofficial motto might be "Don't just do something, stand there" -- that's the theme of the WSJ article -- the URA has been moving around, buying property and helping to package it for development. The Waterfront development in Homestead isn't a URA project (that mall owes its existence instead to the state-level TIF ("Tax Incrementing Financing") program). But the office developments along the Monongahela River? URA. South Side Works? URA. Housing and commercial development elsewhere in the city? URA. Not all of it is URA-assisted, by any means, and complain about tax subsidies and political favoritism (and we should, and we have), but without URA efforts Pittsburghers wouldn't see a lot of the amenities that they now look to as evidence of the city's current bright status.

There is a line of criticism that argues that local government shouldn't be involved in real estate development, as the URA has been. The private market is a better guide to private investment, it is said, and who knows how great Pittsburgh might be today if the URA weren't around. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not true. I'm usually not impressed by "what-if" stories. Private development capital hasn't exactly been beating down the door in Pittsburgh until relatively recently, and even in recent years the pattern of private investment has been hit-or-miss (even in the suburbs) and often it's been driven by TIF incentives). Even a policy of "let the market decide" is still a deliberate policy choice.

Read more at Pittsblog.

[Part I is here] [Part II is here] [Part III is here] [Part IV is here] [Part V is here] [Part VI is here] [Part VII is here] [Part VIII is here]