Pretty smart people finding more appeal here in Pittsburgh
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Most of the jobs these days must be in measuring stuff.
Almost every day, I'm directed to another story or press release about a new civic measurement for Pittsburgh, and it's generally good news. Take an article by Richard Florida in The Atlantic last month, "Where the Brains Are Going."
Pittsburgh is grabbing a higher percentage of college graduates these days, says Mr. Florida. In fact, our take of the nation's diploma-holders is going up even as battered Sun Belt cities are losing their appeal. But the level of detail in this measurement is so fine that it would be almost immeasurable to the casual observer.
As the accompanying graph shows, the Pittsburgh metro area had the tiniest fraction more college graduates arriving than it had departing between 2007 and 2009. It's among the nation's few large metropolises where a loss has become a gain.
This calculation was made by William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution, who was riffing on data gleaned from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. It would seem nothing to write home about, much less write a national magazine piece about. But, as Mr. Florida points out, this uptick is happening as migration to Phoenix, Las Vegas and other metros in the sand states is slowing.
As local economies there have imploded, "young adults are flowing towards larger cities, college towns, knowledge-based and creative economy metros, and even some older Rust Belt metros are beginning to increase their ability to retain and attract" young college grads, Mr. Florida wrote.
Many will recall that Mr. Florida wrote a best-selling book in 2002 called "The Rise of the Creative Class," which hit the shelves while he was still a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University.
In the years preceding that book, Mr. Florida would occasionally write pieces for this newspaper about how Pittsburgh needed to do nontraditional things like build a climbing wall on Mount Washington to attract high-tech talent that likes to get high (on walls, I mean).
We never built that climbing wall, and Mr. Florida left. But in the years since, Pittsburgh has extended its running/biking/skating trail system and beautified its riverfronts. We're kayaking the waters and biking to work as never before.
First Published February 15, 2011 12:00 am
