Revisiting Pittsburgh

For a couple years at the end of the 2000s I was in Pittsburgh a bunch of times, partly to work on a commercial district revitalization plan in the Lawrenceville District and I knew people running the Strip District organization (but the consultant I was working with ended up being a problem and the people running the commercial district revitalization group left, so we had no client, etc.).



As is my way, I spent a lot of time figuring out the city in terms of its revitalization trajectory.  Then, despite decades of incredible work, it still languished.

After I responded to something Richard Florida wrote about Pittsburgh, in "Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes," he re-tweeted it, saying it showed great understanding of the city's conditions.  (The items are appended at the end of this entry.)

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And note later, I termed Pittsburgh an example of best practice revitalization, along with other cities  like Bilbao and Liverpool.  See "Economic restructuring success and failure: Detroit compared to Bilbao, Liverpool, and Pittsburgh," 2014.

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Nigel, our e-correspondent from New Zealand, shares with us the new City Journal article on Pittsburgh, "A Renaissance Runs Through It: What Pittsburgh’s latest comeback tells us about urban revitalization," and just reading the first couple paragraphs makes me realize it's a perfect example of my argument about the long time needed to reach critical mass in population and business activity to the point where revitalization not only is evident but has a sustainable momentum.

Despite the fall of the steel industry (and failure/consolidation of other businesses like Westinghouse, Gulf Oil, eventually Heinz, etc.), it still had a core of leading businesses (Alcoa, Mellon Bank, etc.) including finance, universities, and medical care..

Decent neighborhoods. Attractive building stock. A strong history of innovation.  Foundations (Heinz and shockingly the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation which was controlled by the otherwise conservative Richard Scaife--"Richard Mellon Scaife dies: funded conservative groups ... and historic preservation in Pittsburgh," 2014") committed to investing in the city.

Some really awesome community organizations doing really great stuff.  For example, both the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust are not just national best practice, but world class in their work on historic preservation and the development and maintenance of cultural facilities specifically.

Some of the foundational ideas in Richard Florida's books are based on his experience in Pittsburgh, because when he was there, large numbers of people didn't stay after college, but some did, creating businesses, but the ecosystem wasn't there enough to keep the businesses or the people once the businesses moved into different phases where they needed different types of access to capital and talent.

But now, Pittsburgh is a center of research and practice for automated vehicles and robotics, and the start up business ecosystem is much more healthy than it was 15 years ago when Richard Florida taught at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Nice neighborhoods got better, neighborhoods that languished are now significantly improved ("One hidden element of the revitalization of Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood) and housing prices in neighborhoods I looked at in the late 2000s have more than doubled in the ten years since.

I think it was more a function of time and the fact that time is necessary to rebuild both the ecosystem and the masses of people able to bend the curve towards city improvement. 

Because all the while, sprawl and the growth and development of the suburbs continues apace, which is why urban retail
and the Downtown still languishes on that score.

-- "Has DC reached revitalization critical mass, so that local government missteps don't matter?," 2011

Despite the cold weather, and the difficulties, Pittsburgh had the right conditions to rebuild after the loss of the steel industry.  It just took 30+ years.

And yes, the city was an early poster child for urban renewal dating to the 1950s, and for urban renewal, some of it, at least Downtown, was decent.  Efforts in the Hill District and East Liberty were flawed.  In Allegheny, a toss up.  Etc.

(This isn't an image from DC, but illustrates the point.)

DC as an example.  Similarly, using DC as an example, it took 20+ years after the introduction of Metrorail to DC before you started to see a critical mass improvement of the city -- because while not absolutely intention, Metrorail also served DC neighborhoods which were close to the core and comprised of attractive historic building stock and an urban form that favors walking, biking and transit

After 25 years or so, as the core stabilized, this revitalization pushed out beyond the core, to neighborhoods like Columbia Heights, H Street NE, and Petworth.

But with DC and economic studies of the value of transit, I know for the first 20+ years, studies didn't find much effect.  I think that's because the time frame you need to look at is much longer than people realize.

And is hard to discern in any case, when you look at data at the metropolitan scale.

For DC proper, or Arlington County, you need to look at the core part of the system in those communities and measure the impact before and after, at the "submarket" scale even, not the entire city.

Note that studies by the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota found that the greatest economic impact from transit are at the core of the system.

-- "Transit oriented development can take decades to realize, so two years is too short of a time to be expecting it (Austin Texas)," 2012
-- The Hiawatha Line: Impacts on Land Use and Residential Housing Value (Feb 2010, CTS 10-09)
-- Transportation as Catalyst for Community Economic Development(Dec 2007, CTS 07-07)

That makes sense.  It's where you have the most critical mass. Or what others call "the network effect."
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From the 2010 piece, "Urban economic development strategies: do you invest in people or places? ... yes":

... the point is that you need to have people-focused institutions that are place-committed. Capital can move anytime. But locally focused and locally committed institutions won't move. And if these institutions can develop a focus on improvement that is based on best practice, innovation, and quality then they become the levers and fulcrums of a new kind of industry.

If they don't, revitalization efforts are muddled and don't ever amount to very much.

The elements.

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1. A number of quality universities that continue to attract talent, and at least two of the universities have strong engineering education programs which

2. These universities help develop new technologies and generate spin off businesses which build the region's economy and provide higher paying jobs.

3. It doesn't hurt that the University of Pittsburgh Hospital System is world class, especially in organ transplantation. This anchors medical care as a key "local" industry.

4. The city still has a handful of large national and global companies, a mix of manufacturing-research based companies like PPG and the U.S. headquarters for Bayer AG, software companies, and service industries (such as Mellon Bank). This means that there are still job and idea-producing industries there, even though these businesses are subject to the same concentration and downsizing trends affecting such companies.

5. Pittsburgh has a couple of incredibly strong foundations still present locally, focused on funding organizations and initiatives that improve the city both socially and economically.

6. Innovation, The region has a legacy and history of innovation that is embodied in organizations, including civic organizations and civil society so that groups are problem and self-help focused.

7. The arts organizations there have some heft. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has focused on re-establishing arts uses downtown and maintaining and extending the arts infrastructure there. The Carnegie Institutions set a standard of excellence as well. Etc.