New Geography

Tag: Pittsburgh

  • Calling Pittsburgh Depression-proof is a Journalistic Felony

    A guest-post from Bill Steigerwald in Pittsburgh:

    If the New York Times went to Berlin in 1936 to write a story about how that city was “Depression-proof,” would it forget to mention that Germany was being run by a bunch of Nazis? If it went to Pyongyang tomorrow would it go ape over that city’s tidy orderliness without noting that North Korea was a totalitarian hellhole? If the Times bureau in Moscow reported on wheat production in Ukraine in 1933, would it overlook the government-designed famine that was killing – oops, sorry, let’s not go there.

    Seriously, is it too much to ask for a little Journalism 101 from America’s Rag of Record?

    On Wednesday the Times, following a similarly lame piece of Chamber of Commerce journalism done by the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Nov. 23, did a glowing Page 1 story (“For Pittsburgh, There’s Life After Steel” by David Streitfeld) about the Pittsburgh region’s alleged imperviousness to the national recession.

    You see, cities that have pioneered deindustrialization, shed huge chunks of population and shifted to service economies that run on curing sick people, college kids and government bureaucrats, as the former Steel City basically does, are now recession-proof, the rationalizing goes, because they’ve essentially been in low-grade recessions for decades.

    Anyway, the Times – like the Plain Dealer and the parade of other national media that periodically traipses to this great town to gawk and glorify Pittsburgh’s many natural and man-made assets – forgot to tell its trusting readers that the city of Pittsburgh (where the Steelers and young Mayor Luke Ravenstahl play) is bankrupt and essentially in state receivership.

    Nor did the Times note that Pittsburgh’s ever-dwindling, ever-aging, relatively poor and under-educated population (down in the city to 310,000 from 650,000 about 50 years) is subjected to crippling high taxes and deprived of basic city services like reliable snow-plowing.

    Nor did it note that Pittsburgh’s city schools spend more than $20,000 per student per year yet are hemorrhaging students annually.

    Nor did it note that the city has wasted scores of millions of tax dollars on failed Downtown retail redevelopment schemes, subsidized professional sports stadia and a series of mass-transit boondoggles like our under publicized “Tunnel to Nowhere,” a 1.2-mile, $435-plus-million light-rail tunnel under the Allegheny River.

    It’s tragic enough that the Times’ national editors think that an over-taxed, chronically mismanaged city that has been deindustrialized, depopulated and abused by its political rulers for 70 years is favorably situated to deal with recession.

    But to not devote one paragraph to the shameful failings and idiocies of Pittsburgh’s public sector is a journalistic felony. Somebody please show the Times’ editors how to Google the word “Potemkin.”

  • Postindustrial Strength Brain Drain Policy

    In the discussions of the stimulus and infrastructure problem, little attention has yet been paid to addressing brain drain. Yet for many regions – particularly in the old industrial heartland – no issue could be more critical.

    Perhaps the most important investment in regional human capital occurs at local schools. Enterprise looks to the secondary and post-secondary institutions within the area for labor. In this regard, it makes sense to fund better learning with local and state taxes as long as that talent remains within that geography.

    Older industrial age cities and states are particularly dependent on a parochial labor pool. That’s the political legacy of the industrial economy. Workers tended to put down deep roots and this lack of geographic mobility made unions the only means to fight depressed wages.

    But the conventional solution for regional decline has been greater ‘investments’ in education. Yet increasingly high local and state taxes for education no longer make sense. In fact it can be argued that Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh have often been victims of their own success. Excellent schools – particularly in the suburban periphery – increased the geographic mobility of the next generation. When tough times hit in the late 70s and early 80s, these young adults were ready to embrace opportunity wherever it may be. When they left for Houston, Phoenix or Tampa, they took all those tax dollars with them.

    Out-migration isn’t a problem when your region is benefiting from some other place’s investment in human capital. But if no one is moving to your city or state, then retention of talent becomes a matter of economic survival. This is difficult to accomplish when your graduates are smart enough to know about greater opportunities that exist all the way across the country. It is also made worse when your local businesses are loath to pay the prevailing national market rate for the labor it needs.

    In this sense then, plugging brain drain can help depress wages and make a place like Charlotte that much more attractive to Rust Belt graduates. Remember, captains of industry made a lot of money exploiting captive labor markets.

    The dependence on local talent also disrupts network migration. Cities that must attract “foreign” workers develop pathways that make it easier for future workers to move there. It also helps connect the local economy to the global one, as has occurred on the west coast, with Asian immigrants opening connections to Pacific Rim economies and in south Florida, where Cuban migration has created a dynamic international business sector.

    Furthermore, getting newcomers helps outsource the costs of cultivating human capital. Low tax regimes bank on in-migration. Poor local schools don’t really matter when the best and brightest from the Rust Belt are moving into your brand spanking new crystal palaces. In this sense, the “legacy economy” is subsidizing Sun Belt boomtowns.

    The Rust Belt needs to learn from the Sun Belt. The game is all about attraction. The geographic mobility of talent within the Rust Belt would be a good place to start. Instead of squeezing the local labor pool, pave a new path to a fellow postindustrial city with a similar tax burden and effectively starve the boomtowns. Your neighboring legacy economy feels the same pain you do. Talent churning between the two locales beats the futility of fighting brain drain.

    Even growth states such as Georgia are overly concerned with who leaves. Sun Belt (i.e. growth) states obsess the out-migration of native graduates as much as Rust Belt (i.e. shrinking) states do. The same policy boondoggle in Ohio exists in Georgia. Across the board, there is a prejudice for homegrown talent.

    In contrast, I think older, now shrinking cities must embrace out-migration and focus more on growing the numbers of newcomers. These people will bring the new ideas and connections regions like ours need. Leave the self-destructive nativism to the Sun Belt.

    Read Jim Russell’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.

  • Rust Belt Realities: Pittsburgh Needs New Leaders, New Ideas and New Citizens

    The current recession provides a new opportunity for Pittsburgh’s elite to feel good about itself. With other boom economies from Phoenix to Miami on the skids – and other old Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo even more down on their luck – the slow-growth achievements of the Pittsburgh region may seem rather impressive.

    Yet at the same time, the downturn also poses longer-term challenges for which the local leadership is likely to have no answers.

    In large part, Pittsburgh’s “success,” such as it is, has been based on what may be called a “legacy economy,” essentially funded by the residues of its rich entrepreneurial past. This includes the hospitals, universities and nonprofits whose endowments have underwritten the expansion of medical services and education, which have emerged as among the region’s few growth sectors.

    The other great advantage Pittsburgh has – as do potentially other shrinking Rust Belt burgs – is lower housing prices. That’s the good news. But the lack of a great surge in housing prices during the real estate “bubble” also testifies to the region’s general lack of overall attractiveness and its languid job market.

    The current national economic meltdown now changes these realities, and in ways that may not allow Pittsburgh and other slow-growth burgs as much comfort as they might wish.

    For one thing, the “legacy” economy is almost certain to start shrinking as the portfolio investments of universities, hospitals and nonprofits begin to erode. After all, these institutions rode the boom elsewhere for a long time; they now will reap the consequences of that dependence.

    Perhaps even more important, the great housing advantage seems certain to weaken as a net positive. As prices in Florida, Arizona and even California begin to decline, Rust Belt residents who’ve been thinking of moving to warm weather, more dynamic economies and lively entrepreneurial environments will now have their chance.

    To thrive, Pittsburgh simply cannot rely on being somewhere that is a good place to go to school, get sick or die. It needs to offer restless, entrepreneurial people an opportunity to succeed and do something new.

    As local blogger Jim Russell notes, the real problem with his hometown is not that people leave, but that others do not come to replace them. People always leave places, but exciting locales – Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Houston or San Francisco – also attract large numbers of new people. The immigrants, many of them seeking the “main chance,” are generally the people who shake things up and bring new energy to places.

    Who seeks their “main chance” in Pittsburgh? Certainly not foreign immigrants, who are staying away in droves. Metropolitan Pittsburgh has one of the lowest percentages of foreign-born residents in the nation. Even Detroit, with its sizable Arab population, has some sort of ethnic vibe.

    In the short run, some might argue, not having immigrants relieves the stress on schools and eases potential social tensions. Yet in the America that is emerging, these newcomers represent arguably the most dynamic new element and harbingers of the future. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015 they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Rather than compliment itself on not exhausting itself by running too fast, the Pittsburgh region should think about producing enough of a pulse to attract immigrants and aggressive young people. A place that reassures itself on the basis of its stable, homogeneous and rapidly aging population seems doomed to achieve little better than self-satisfied stagnation.

    City leaders may be proud to see Pittsburgh hailed in the media – most recently by USA Today and the Cleveland Plain Dealer – as a poster child for urban “renaissance,” yet these glowing accounts are clearly not inspiring many people to settle there.

    Indeed, in a nation with the most vigorous demographics in the advanced industrial world, the City of Pittsburgh continues to suffer one of the most precipitous declines in population. Like the former East Germany, the town needs more coffins than cribs. Even the suburbs of Pittsburgh have been losing population.

    More worrisome, there seems no strategy – or even an inclination of needing one – to change this reality. Rather than stimulate the grassroots economy, the region for decades has sought to revive itself by spending billions on new stadia, arenas, convention centers and cultural facilities, sometimes in the process demolishing vibrant working-class neighborhoods or local business districts. Meanwhile, the roads and bridges of the city – which continues to battle bankruptcy – are in a constant state of disrepair.

    Every time I read about or visit Pittsburgh, the powers that be have a new project to prove to themselves that the city actually has a life. Most recently, it’s a lame-brained scheme to create a 1.2-mile, $435 million (at least) transit tunnel under the Allegheny River to connect Downtown’s heavily subsidized office towers to the North Shore’s even more heavily taxpayer-funded pro sports stadiums and a future casino.

    Yet, in reality, Pittsburgh’s “Tunnel to Nowhere” is simply part of the same old brain-dead development strategy that may impress visiting journalists or conventioneers but creates little in the way of good new jobs or long-term opportunities.

    You have to think about what the energetic people who come to a community really want – things like economic opportunities, single-family houses and good schools for their kids. Who but speculators and city officials cares about luring the latest ESPN Zone or Planet Hollywood? These kinds of venues are simply commodities now, with no sense of place and available in any city of decent size willing to subsidize them.

    So what should the Pittsburgh region do differently?

    The first thing would be to consider using its scarce public funds to revive the old urban neighborhoods and leafy suburbs that constitute Pittsburgh’s greatest competitive advantage. These are places that may attract students now, but to matter in the long term, some of these young people must stay after they graduate. This will be particularly critical as the current “echo boom” begins to fade and the now record-high number of students begins to drop.

    Second, the region should target growing small businesses. The era when Pittsburgh was a big-business town is all but over. In 1960, 22 Fortune 500 companies were headquartered there. Now it’s roughly a third that number. High taxes, tiresome regulatory regimes and the enormous burden created by outsized city employee pensions have hit the small entrepreneur hardest. Addressing these issues is more important to them than new arts venues or jazz clubs.

    Finally, the city needs a shtick to call its own. It might look at its historic strengths as an innovative engineering city. Pittsburgh could look also to its hinterland, a region rich in beauty and resources, as part of its competitive advantage.

    All of these things could provide linchpins for a true renaissance – one driven not by public relations and shiny new subsidized edifices, but by the energy of its people.

    That’s what has always made for great cities – and what will do so well after this current recession has passed into memory. Pittsburgh has the potential to catch the inevitable next wave that will emerge after the crisis, but only if it can get past its long-standing celebration of mediocrity.

    This article originally appeared at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Pittsburgh Turns 250 Years Old Today

    But instead of a nice birthday card, my home town of Pittsburgh could use a sympathy card. It’s been a tough last 100 years for a once great and powerful city.

    The first 150 years were not so bad. On Nov. 25, 1758 British Gen. John Forbes named the city for prime minister William Pitt after chasing the French from the militarily and economically strategic triangle of land where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio.

    Historically, we started off on a roll, thanks to our strategic location on the rivers, North America’s first oil and gas boom, and lots of coal. By 1909, when social scientist Paul Kellogg cataloged the city’s industrial might in “The Pittsburgh Survey,” he said it was not just “first among American cities in the production of iron and steel” but also “first in electrical apparatus and supplies.”

    “In coal and coke, tin plate, glass, cork, and sheet metal … its output is a national asset,” Kellogg wrote, adding that Pittsburgh’s banking capital exceeded “that of the banks of the North Sea empires and its payroll that of whole groups of American states.” “Here,” Kellogg claimed without exaggeration, “is a town, then, big with its works.”

    Unfortunately, that world famous powerhouse of iron and steel is long gone. Today the Pittsburgh region’s de-industrialized economy runs mainly on providing health care for its aging populace, the education of about 140,000 college students and the construction of taxpayer-subsidized professional sports stadia and mass-transit boondoggles.

    In her 1969 book The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs traced the origins of Pittsburgh’s economic downturn all the way back to 1910. But its demise, she claimed, was abetted and accelerated after World War II by its downtown political and corporate powerbrokers. These are the direct ancestors of the civic movers-and-shapers, government redevelopment planners and political hacks who have been mismanaging our city so horribly for the last 20 years.

    The post-WW II power elites cleaned up Pittsburgh’s poisoned three rivers and Venutian atmosphere, but Jacobs said they also worked overtime to protect incumbent steel and manufacturing industries and discourage new industries from being born. They also launched misbegotten urban renewal projects in three poor and/or black neighborhoods – the Hill District, East Liberty and the North Side – whose destructive effects still afflict the city.

    As most Americans know, having its biggest economic eggs in heavy manufacturing turned out not to be such a good long-term plan for Pittsburgh when the steel industry collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. Its metropolitan population went into its nationally famous free-fall. In 1960, there were 2.4 million people in metro Pittsburgh and 604,000 in the city of Pittsburgh. Metro Pittsburgh was the 12th biggest TV market in the USA. Today, Pittsburgh metro has a population of 2.3 million and – incredibly – there are just 310,000 souls left in a city that peaked in 1950 with 676,000 people. Metropolitan Pittsburgh is ranked 26th today.

    As its population has shrunk, the region has emulated the demographics of Western Europe and Russia. Its population is disproportionately old (24 percent are 65 or older, about twice the national average) and since 1990 more Pittsburghers have died each year than have been born – a net loss of 25,000 people since 2000 alone. It also has fewer foreign-born immigrants (about 3 percent) than any major American metro area.

    This is all the more the shame since the city boasts many priceless assets. These include a relatively low crime rate, great old middle-class city neighborhoods, affordable suburban homes in good school districts, top universities like Carnegie-Mellon and Pitt, major league sports teams, big-time cultural attractions and a beautiful landscape of hills, hollows and wide rivers.

    These assets are one reason why “Places Rated Almanac” crowned it the country’s most livable city in 1985 and again last year. In 1985 The New York Times immediately dispatched a reporter to Pittsburgh to check out the claim and he wrote back that “With its breathtaking skyline, its scenic waterfront, its cozily vibrant downtown, its rich mixture of cultural amenities, its warm neighborhoods and its scrubbed-clean skies, it no longer is the smoky, smelly, gritty mill town of yesteryear.”

    Pittsburgh – which, for the record, hadn’t been “The Smoky City” since about 1950 – is re-discovered by the bicoastal media every few years. Brendan Gill of the New Yorker came here in 1990 and famously raved about the beautiful terrain, the old architecture and ethnic neighborhoods and said if it were a European city people would travel hundreds of miles out of their way to visit it.

    So if the place is so great why are people – especially young people – leaving in droves? For one thing pay scales are low and the general populace, though friendly and unassuming, fully embraces not risk-taking but the two unofficial regional religions – unionism and Steelerism.

    When it comes to pop culture and new retail chain outlets, Pittsburgh’s at least 5 years behind L.A. or San Francisco, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Pittsburgh remains a fine city in which to raise a family, grow old and die. What travel writers never seem to notice when they parachute into town however, is the chronically sorry state of Pittsburgh’s public sector.

    A one-party (Democrat) town since 1934, the city of Pittsburgh has been run like Argentina ever since. Over-taxed, over-regulated, over-planned, quick to abuse its eminent domain powers, it’s now virtually bankrupt. Its finances are now overseen by the state. Its budget flirts with red ink each year. On the horizon loom huge pension liabilities that it can’t possibly pay.

    City Hall can barely provide a decent level of basic services. Meanwhile, they find money to subsidize downtown retailers who often go bust and leave. The city’s redevelopment gurus have handed out tens of millions of taxpayers’ cash to private businesses. The most recent example was giving PNC Financial $48 million in public subsidies to build its new and superfluous skyscraper downtown where vacancy rates, pre-recession, stood well in the double digits.

    Pittsburgh’s public school district is equally inept and even more expensive. It spends well over $20,000 a year per student while enrollment – nearly 40,000 in 1998 – is down to 26,600 and falling. The graduation rate is 64 percent, according to a recent Rand Corp. study. Local school and property taxes are among the highest in the country.

    The region’s roads and parkways are in bad shape – can you spell p-o-t-h-o-l-e? – and designed for 1950s traffic counts. The city of Pittsburgh’s parking tax could be the highest on Earth – 40 percent. City firefighters have some of the highest public salaries in town – and trade their votes for sweetheart contracts.

    The poster child for mismanaged government bodies, however, is Pittsburgh’s public transit monopoly, the Port Authority of Allegheny County. For the last 20 years, as its ridership has fallen steadily and its annual budget has hit $350 million, it consistently enriched its union workers and managers with high salaries, super-generous benefits and pensions.

    Port Authority budgets have outpaced inflation since 1980 and with fares covering about a third of operating costs, it has had to ask for higher and higher subsidies from the state to keep its mostly empty buses lumbering around town. Since the late 1970s, it has spent upwards of $2 billion (in current dollars) on three dedicated busways and a rinky-dink light-rail system that serves about 12,500 suburban round-trip commuters a day.

    The transit agency’s proudest boondoggle, however, is the North Shore Connector, aka “The Transit Tunnel to Nowhere.” Arguably the premier transit boondoggle in North America today, it’ll cost $435 million (a low-balled figure that hasn’t been adjusted to reflect reality in several years) for a 1.2-mile twin light-rail transit tunnel under the Allegheny River from Downtown to the taxpayer-subsidized pro sports stadiums and not far from the new casino.

    The tunnel’s construction currently is tearing up a huge chunk of the North Shore between PNC Park and Heinz Field. It is projected (most dubiously, of course) to carry 16,000 passengers a day – by 2030. A local think tank, the Allegheny Institute, worked out the per-trip subsidy to be $15.50. Set to be completed in 2011, it will be a miracle if the project comes in under $600 million.

    Today Pittsburgh’s regional economy is what it’s been for the last 40 years – stagnant at best. Yet perversely, but predictably, its civic boosters are trying to sell the anemic economy as something to be thankful for because it is “recession-proof.” Since Pittsburgh never had a housing bubble, the spin goes, the foreclosure crisis will hardly affect it. Because Pittsburgh has all those extra citizens on Social Security, the economic meltdown will be less severe. Maybe becoming a morgue might be even safer.

    Yet somehow the local spinmeisters continue to put a bright spin on Pittsburgh’s century-long death spiral. For example, USA Today recently cranked out a big upbeat feature on how wonderful Pittsburgh is – without mentioning such unseemly things as high taxes, bankruptcies or out-of-control government agencies.

    And on Sunday, Nov. 23, the Cleveland Plain Dealer – hometown paper of a city arguably in even worse shape – published a similarly glowing piece of chamber-of-commerce journalism with the headline “Pittsburgh’s renaissance holds lesson for Cleveland.” It began with the sentence “The city that once defined rust belt decay might show the rest of the nation how to weather a recession.”

    True to form, it went on to say that while the rest of the country “reels in debt and despair, Pittsburgh is on the move: A new $200 million downtown office tower, upscale condos, a casino, a new hockey arena and a riverfront convention center.”

    What the Plain Dealer never bothered to note, of course, was that the office tower, the pricy condos and the hockey arena were not being built in downtown Pittsburgh because they actually made economic sense. They were being built only because local politicians had handed millions of dollars in public subsidies to their private, well-connected owners. If this is the road to an urban renaissance, it’s certainly an expensive one. Most likely, it will prove the path to yet another dead end.

    Bill Steigerwald, born and raised in Pittsburgh, is a former L.A. Times copy editor and free-lancer who also worked as a docudrama researcher for CBS-TV in Hollywood before becoming an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

  • Pittsburgh’s Brain Drain Game

    Rust Belt communities are obsessed with brain drain. The demographic losers of economic restructuring, cities are employing a variety of strategies to stop the bleeding and keep the talent from leaving the region. Akron, OH recently voted down a proposal to lease the city’s sewer system in order to fund a scholarship program designed to plug the holes of out-migration. The voters balked at the initiative partly as a result of the 30-year residential commitment necessary to reap the full benefits of the funding for post-secondary education in Akron schools.

    You would think plugging the brain drain seems like a good idea. I thought so when I decided to help Southwestern Pennsylvania solve its declining population problem. However, a few months into the project I determined that the exodus from Pittsburgh ended almost two decades ago. The devastating loss of young adults in the early 1980s still echoed throughout the area and informed a great deal of policymaking.

    The most comical anti-brain-drain campaign was Border Guard Bob, a product of the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance who was invented to keep local graduates around home. The pitch was that Pittsburgh is too great of a place to leave, if you knew where to look. Bob was retired before his unveiling, hopefully because he was too ridiculous even for our local leaders, but the spirit behind it remained.

    I’m not aware of any successful anti-brain-drain program, but Pittsburgh continues to try despite having more college graduates than the region can employ. If anything, Greater Pittsburgh suffers from a glut of talent that stubbornly tries to stay. Average wages are below even those in nearby Cleveland, which sports notably more unemployment and a much more acute foreclosure crisis. Yet the initiatives keep coming.

    The Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Project (PUMP) claims to better enfranchise young adults living in the city. The ultimate goal is to retain talent by giving them reasons to stay. Empowering residents is noble enough, but I doubt PUMP can deliver the population boost the City of Pittsburgh desperately seeks.

    Maybe the problem is not that Pittsburgh or other Midwest cities are unattractive places to live. Instead the roots of the out-migration lie elsewhere – in dysfunctional economies and wretched politics. It’s not lack of “cool places” to hang out but things like a declining tax base and a growing pension debt that effectively hamstring the city.

    Frustrated job seekers aren’t heading to the Sun Belt because they need a cooler place to hang out. They are looking for jobs and opportunities. And if they hang around until their thirties, they then leave to the surrounding suburbs and their better schools.

    The Pittsburgh Promise, a child of the Kalamazoo Promise, offers a better alternative. Thanks to money from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the City doesn’t have to lease its sewers in order to provide graduates from Pittsburgh public schools with scholarships. The suburban schools don’t look quite so attractive when we are talking about a free ride for college.

    But even if it’s a step in the right direction, the Pittsburgh Promise still won’t keep families from moving to Charlotte, NC. It certainly won’t attract families from Austin, TX. Therein lies the flaw. There are no mechanisms to bring new talent into the region. Without substantial in-migration, particularly immigration, no Rust Belt city is likely to experience an economic renaissance. But the focus is always on the people who leave. The real problem is why people don’t come.

    Just about anywhere in the Rust Belt, the perception of brain drain and actual rates of out-migration are horribly out of whack. This past summer, the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University issued a report that concluded that the number of young adults in the state was growing faster than the national average during the period of 2000-2006. The cry to stop brain drain in Michigan – epitomized by Governor Jennifer Granholm’s “cool cities” program – has never been louder. The rhetoric doesn’t concern me, but the ineffectiveness of the programs should give everyone pause.

    Basically fighting out-migration is a losing cause. The US Census found a positive correlation between increasing levels of education and the greater likelihood of leaving a region. Should Pittsburgh stop investing in its schools in order to better retain residents? Of course not. But this is no more absurd than spending a lot of money to keep people from seeking opportunity elsewhere.

    If you are a parent, then the idea of moving in order to improve your children’s opportunities makes sense. However, for a community to invest in a student likely to leave the economic area presents a conflict of interest.

    The Pittsburgh Promise isn’t a bad idea. Maybe it will encourage people to stay or even move in from the suburbs given the carrot of subsidized college tuition. But that won’t alleviate anemic regional population growth. Pittsburgh needs to sell itself globally as a place where you can access opportunity, either for yourself or your children. Pittsburgh must attract new blood. Pittsburgh, essentially, needs economic growth.

    I’ve labored over the best way to align the interests of individuals with that of the community concerning geographic mobility. I think the solution is, counter-intuitively, to promote out-migration. Pittsburgh’s exodus during the early 1980s was impressive, perhaps uniquely so. The result is what I call the Burgh Diaspora, the scattered expatriates who still retain an unusual preoccupation with their hometown.

    My idea is to use the Burgh Diaspora like an alumni network, to help Pittsburghers get a leg up on globalization. You can always find an ex-neighbor prepared to help you. Facilitating this odyssey could deepen loyalty and might eventually spark a return migration. But my hope is that non-natives would also appreciate this value proposition, seeking access to the diaspora network.

    Read Jim’s Rust Belt writings at Burgh Diaspora.