Amazon’s search for a place to build a second headquarters is an important moment for Pittsburgh, an opportunity to showcase our rags-to-riches story for a company that could help us to even greater levels of achievement and cast off those lingering perceptions of a smoky city. In many ways, the contest is Pittsburgh’s to lose.

If Amazon wants to locate what it’s calling HQ2 in a place similar to Seattle, where it is headquartered now, Pittsburgh is a highly credible choice. Both were blue-collar towns rendered cool by a new economy, cultural achievements and progressive agenda. Pittsburgh’s education and health care systems are better than Seattle’s. In 20 years, Pittsburgh may be regarded as the more important place.

Pittsburgh would be a much better headquarters choice than many other likely contenders, including Philadelphia, with its East Coast weather and swaths of abject poverty; Houston, now under water; St. Louis, battered by racial strife; Chicago, with its sky-high homicide rate; or Detroit, with a labor pool nowhere near as deep and educated as Western Pennsylvania’s. Pittsburgh has good housing stock, a diverse population, reasonably good race relations, a low crime rate and an availability of land within the city and nearby. Uber and Google already have operations here. Amazon has a small presence, too, on the South Side.

To be competitive, however, Pittsburgh must show that it’s moving quickly to address the problems that do exist here. That means advancing a bold, if costly, plan to address stormwater overflows that regularly send raw sewage into the rivers and into residents’ basements. It means addressing cleaning up the multitude of problems at the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority. Image-conscious Amazon won’t want its workers living in houses with sewage or tainted drinking water. Our mass-transit system cannot be starved of the resources it needs to improve. Notions of reducing the footprint of Pittsburgh International Airport should be banished — this is a time to be talking about growth.

Mark Belko

Pittsburgh could be a contender for Amazon’s HQ2 — if it will pay the price

Wooing Amazon also means redoubling efforts to improve the Pittsburgh Public Schools and forging collaborations with neighboring municipalities that would experience a trickle-down effect from Amazon’s presence here. It means promoting the things that make us distinct, such as the Pittsburgh Promise college scholarship program, a long history of philanthropy powered by serious endowments, a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods and even the hundreds of sets of city steps.

Whipsawing — pitting cities against each other to see which will cough up the best package of incentives — has become commonplace among companies and professional sports teams. Amazon is clearly looking for a good deal. If the game is going to be played in this case, however, Pittsburgh must give the challenge all it can, realizing that what Amazon is proposing — a campus of up to 8 million square feet, employing as many as 50,000 — is aspirational. Those numbers are years away from being realized, if they ever are fully.

City and regional officials, with leaders of the business and foundation communities, not only must rise to the challenge but rally residents to the cause. A primary advocate should emerge, most likely Mayor Bill Peduto, who is comfortable in national public-policy circles. They must also be vigilant that state officials, many of them from Eastern Pennsylvania, do not use their clout to favor a bid from Philadelphia.

Amazon, a successful purveyor of everything from appliances and books and clothing to zithers, is likely to be a discerning buyer, too. Pittsburgh’s bedrock values — honesty, innovation and industry — could be intangibles that help seal the deal. Let’s not lose for trying.

First Published: September 10, 2017, 4:00 a.m.