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PrintEveryone knows Pittsburgh boomerangers like Karen Siple, Anne Stromberg and Christine Cortez.
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Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Karen Siple returned Nov. 6 after 20 years in Phoenix to be with her parents, Jim and Pat, in the home in which she grew up in Murrysville. Click photo for larger image.
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All in their early 40s, the women moved back to their birthplace this year, for a common reason.
"I think it's because my values changed, and I just wanted to be closer to family," said Siple, who left a satisfying sales position in sunny Phoenix to return last month to her parents' home in Murrysville.
"My parents are getting older ... and they're still very capable, but there's going to come a day they need me, and I want to be there for them."
Strong family themes were also sounded by Stromberg, who returned to Upper St. Clair with her husband and two children from suburban Washington, D.C., and by Cortez, who left Georgia to be with her mother in Whitehall.
Sometimes it seems that these returnees are everywhere, back in their hometown, with different priorities and different waistlines from half a lifetime ago.
But there is no evidence that Pittsburgh reels back in more of its natives than anywhere else does. Experts on migration say that the most likely second move by anyone who moves away from home is to go back to their origins.
What's clear, instead, is that Pittsburgh attracts too few people of any background. It continues to hemorrhage population -- at a slower pace than in the 1980s, but still more than any other city its size.
It strikes out on the three key components of population growth:
Every year, more people move out of southwestern Pennsylvania than move in from elsewhere in the United States. The numbers who leave no longer dwarf those from comparable cities, but Pittsburgh still suffers because its incoming population is meager compared with those moving into other metro areas, and that is largely because of a lack of job openings here.
Other cities with net losses from domestic migration more than compensate with a large influx of international immigrants. That's not the case in Pittsburgh. One of the nation's great melting pots a century ago, its number of new foreigners is tiny, though growing.
Pittsburgh is the only significant metropolitan area outside of Florida where more people die every year than are born. That unusual equation will continue to be a population drag even if domestic or international in-migration picks up.
Do we have to grow?
Is a growing population necessary for a region to be a healthy, attractive place to live?
Not if you ask Anne Stromberg, whose memories of recent years in Loudon County, Va., the fastest-growing county in America, include agitation with traffic and rude people. Her husband Kevin, originally from Carrick, applied for an FBI transfer to Pittsburgh, and she obtained a similar health insurance account position to the one she had in Washington.
Now their daughters have a grandmother chauffeuring them to sports activities and aunts and uncles to hang out with. If there's traffic or rudeness, it's vastly diminished.
"We have made the decision that for a better quality of life, we needed to head home," said Anne Stromberg, who returned to Upper St. Clair over the summer. "We may not get top positions in sales or the FBI, but we will have family and friends around us all the time."
The Strombergs returned without hesitation to a city that is joined by Buffalo as the only metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people that are suffering ongoing population decline.
While the demographic trends are depressing to some people, they're not universally negative.
There also can be problems when areas grow too much, too fast.
Analysts note that parts of the Southwest have seen such an influx of relatively unskilled, uneducated immigrants that they have experienced school overcrowding, increased crime and pressure for more social services. In burgeoning communities elsewhere, including metropolitan Washington, convenient, high-quality housing has become unaffordable for run-of-the-mill working people, who have been forced into long commutes.
"Having a steady population [as opposed to constant increases] can be OK," said William Frey, a demographer at the University of Michigan. "It helps stability for planning and understanding of what can happen from one year to the next. It's more an issue of who is going to live there and who is going to move in or out, rather than the number of people."
By one important measure, Pittsburgh isn't doing poorly at all, adds Paul Gottlieb, a Rutgers University associate professor of economics.
He suggests per capita income is a better yardstick of the health of a region than population numbers. In a recent report for the Brookings Institution, he placed Pittsburgh high in a favorable category of metropolitan areas called "Wealth Builders," for showing income growth above the national median and population growth below the median during the 1990s.
"You want to make the people already in your place as well off as possible," Gottlieb said, as opposed to attracting lots of outsiders who compete for the good jobs while creating congestion and inflating housing prices.
Per capita income goes up if a region's population is relatively stable but its economy starts tilting toward better paying, skilled jobs, such as the technology fields that have become increasingly important in Pittsburgh's economy.
But like other analysts, Gottlieb sees danger in Pittsburgh's negative population trends, as opposed to the moderate growth experienced by such other "wealth builder" cities as Kansas City, Memphis and Columbus. The loss of population skews certain data -- such as per capita income and housing prices -- to make them appear positive, when they're actually the result of the region's inability to attract new people.
Most places have more churn than Pittsburgh, both in people coming and people going.
That's why Siple was so struck, when she walked into a Murrysville bank to open a checking account, that employees seemed to know the names of all their customers. It was so different from high-churn Phoenix, and she loved it.
That stability and connectedness was an attraction to Cortez as well.
"It is amazing how we Pittsburghers help each other" compared with other places she has lived, said the respiratory therapist, who is looking to finish a college degree in journalism now that she is back.
Most recently a resident of St. Simons Island, Ga., and Jacksonville, Fla., Cortez said the economics of those places might be better for both governments and individuals.
More important to her, however, is that "when I think of Pittsburgh ... I do not think of how the city has gone bankrupt. Money, in my eyes, does not make Pittsburgh my home. It is the people and the little things, the closeness of the blue-collar people, a closeness that only a Pittsburgher knows and understands."
Dwindling tax base
Demographers and economists acknowledge Pittsburgh's assets, but they say the dwindling population causes significant problems.
Foremost is the decline in the tax base, which the city of Pittsburgh has already experienced. The population of the city proper -- about 325,000 out of the metropolitan area's 2.4 million -- is only half of what it was a half-century ago.
A higher percentage of people in the city and many suburbs are now retirees who no longer contribute payroll taxes. That means there's less money to maintain the infrastructure of roads, bridges, sewers and schools. A declining population also makes it that much harder to provide the necessary patronage for existing businesses, arts organizations, sports teams and other endeavors.
Don Smith, vice president of economic development for Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, noted that most job growth nationally has come in the service sector. If there's not a growing population in need of additional services, there's little chance to create more of those jobs.
"If we add retail, without adding people, it's just taking money away from somewhere else," Smith said.
If losing people is bad for the numbers game of the economy, it also nibbles away at the quality of who's here.
When Pittsburgh was losing population at the worst rate in its history, a good number were either hard-working manufacturing employees or new college graduates with professional aspirations.
"When we lost all those people who moved in the early '80s and mid- '80s, when the economy went into the tank, it meant we're sort of missing a generation of people who would be senior managers or entrepreneurs who would be starting their own companies and looking to grow the region," Smith said. "They're just not here."
"Migration literature shows that the people who leave are the most risk-taking," Frey added. "Maybe you're losing some of the most successful people that way."
The international deficit
Of the nation's 61 metropolitan areas with at least 1 million people in 2000, Pittsburgh was one of 32 that saw more people move to other parts of the United States between 2000 and 2003 than those who moved in from elsewhere in the U.S., according to Frey, who is considered the nation's leading analyst of migration trends.
While there were 23 cities with a worse rate of out-migration than Pittsburgh's in recent years, in most cases they more than compensated for those losses with a combination of international immigrants and births exceeding deaths, Frey found.
But the Pittsburgh region suffered a net loss of 13,762 residents from domestic migration, and yet gained only 8,184 international immigrants from 2000-2003. That meant it was down 5,578, a negative number compounded by producing 11,081 more deaths than births.
That added up to a three-year population loss estimated at 16,659. Not as bad as the 1980s -- when annual losses alone averaged more than that -- but not good, especially compared with other regions, even comparable cities in the Rustbelt.
"I don't know how to shrink a region to success," said Brian Kelley, senior program officer for community and economic development at the Heinz Endowments.
"First off, it's not really a good image and do we really want to support the same and even more regional infrastructure on a population that's substantially less?"
By comparison, even though Philadelphia had nearly 30,000 more people leave than arrive domestically, it had at least 42,000 international immigrants show up and added more than 50,000 people by births over deaths. That's a net gain of more than 62,000.
A recent Carnegie Mellon University report noted that Pittsburgh has a lower percentage of foreign-born residents than any of the top 50 metropolitan centers except Cincinnati. The lack of international immigration sets back population potential in two ways, because immigrants also tend to have larger families than Americans born here.
Pittsburgh has had trouble attracting the Hispanic and Asian immigrants who comprised America's main growth over the past decade because it has so few of them here to begin with, and has relatively few jobs in the service sector with which to welcome them.
Christopher Briem, a regional economist for Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research, said there are a few bright spots, however, in recent demographic data: the number of international immigrants locally has increased over previous decades; the immigrants Pittsburgh attracts are of high educational status; and the region's net loss of people today comes more from retirees than young, working-age people.
As for "boomerangs" like Siple, Stromberg and Cortez, he loosely estimated their number at about 10,000 annually, which is not unusually high, considering how many people the region lost in recent decades.
Siple and Cortez are unlike most people moving into a region because they didn't have jobs lined up first.
Siple is unemployed for the first time in 16 years after a successful tenure as a sales representative with Farnam Companies Inc.
Now she's scanning newspaper want ads.
"I don't see nearly as many jobs [advertised] as in Phoenix, but I was prepared for that," she said, and she has savings from all those years of work to help her through.
She and her cat Frankie will live economically for now with her parents, in the same two-story colonial where she grew up. She doesn't have any regrets about returning. Instead, while lying in bed on her first night back Nov. 6, she kept thinking about how she wouldn't have to go through any more tearful goodbyes.
"I made the right decision," Siple remembers thinking. "I felt relieved not to have it in the back of my mind I'd have to return to the airport."
