Pittsburgh stands tall amid national turmoil

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The decade from hell?

Been there, done that.

As the nation looks back on the last 10 years with a collective shudder -- the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, 9/11, two wars, Hurricane Katrina and last year's financial meltdown -- many Pittsburghers believe that they've already had their own rendezvous with near-death.

That would be the 1970s, when the steel industry began to crumble, and the 1980s, when metropolitan Pittsburgh dropped more population than the combined losses of Detroit and Cleveland when some actually thought this mighty city, the one-time industrial capital of the world, would cease to exist or at least sink into the backwaters of globalization.

Didn't happen.

Indeed, President Barack Obama declared us alive and well last spring, when he announced we'd been chosen to host September's Group of 20 summit: We'd shaken off the "Rust Belt" moniker and re-emerged as a model of innovation in technology, health, finance, green jobs and energy.

As Pittsburgh native and Newsweek writer Howard Fineman told a journalist roundtable at Carnegie Mellon University before the summit, Mr. Obama was telling the world to keep investing. Or, as Mr. Fineman put it: "Trust us. We can pay you back. Look at Pittsburgh."

The G-20, for good or ill -- the police response to protesters and Downtown's lockdown still rankles many -- was a great cap to the decade. But we'd already banished what University of Pittsburgh law professor and blogger Michael Madison calls the "psychic hangover" caused by steel's collapse.

"Ten years ago the public sphere was nostalgic; it still longed for the return of a dominant industry, which could be steel or something like steel," he said. But when we cured that hangover, "we released a great deal of innovative energy across the region."

That energy is pulsing all over town: In the heart of Squirrel Hill, there's the award-winning search technology company Vivisimo, a spinoff from Carnegie Mellon. Then there's Lawrenceville's cluster of art galleries, eateries and shops in its 16:62 Design Zone. From small to big, from the Penn Avenue arts corridor in Bloomfield-Garfield to the North Shore's large-scale developments to the Eastside shopping complex in East Liberty, the cityscape is filling out and luring people in.

"Five years ago I'd ride along the new riverfront bike trails and see no one," said Eve Picker, a developer and self-described "urban changemaker" who reclaimed a number of old buildings and warehouses, beginning in the 1990s, and turned them into lofts.

"It's a traffic jam now on Sundays. I was so shocked I had to stop and get off my bike."

Many of these achievements were years in the works, however, bearing fruit only in the past decade, and driven, Mr. Madison and others say, by Pitt, UPMC and Carnegie Mellon -- the big players in terms of employees, budgets and dollars cycling through the region.

"We still don't yet know how significant they can really be in terms of contributing to the region's growth," he said. "Put a different way, if eds-and-meds are so great, then why isn't the Pittsburgh economy doing better? Part of the answer is that if it weren't for eds-and-meds, Pittsburgh might look truly dreadful."

That concentration of universities has, over the past 10 years, drawn more people from abroad and kept younger people here -- maybe not in huge numbers, but enough to take some pride in. Hilary Robinson, dean of CMU's College of Fine Arts -- who was herself recruited from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland in 2005 -- said she'd been tracking one particular statistic.

On average, over the past 10 years, 11 percent of CMU's freshman class has come from Pittsburgh, while on average, between 18 and 19 percent of the graduating class choose to stay here and seek employment.

"CMU is actually contributing more students to Pittsburgh at the end of four years than those we take in at the beginning," she said.

When she was being wooed by the university, she said, the city's "fantastic cultural infrastructure" immediately sold her.

"The Carnegie International, the Andy Warhol Museum, the Mattress Factory and the Pittsburgh Symphony are well known abroad. To have those in a city this size, well, Pittsburgh punches above its weight," said Dr. Robinson.

Many people have had similar "aha" moments in recent years, arriving for a short stay and deciding to put down roots, particularly artists drawn by the city's low housing costs. Tanya Andrea Stadelmann, an Australian filmmaker and photographer, came here in October 2008 as part of a music duo and fell immediately in love with "the architecture, the hills, the rivers, the people -- and the rent was about a quarter of what I was paying in Sydney," she said, laughing.

We did lose the International Poetry Forum this year, but aspiring writers are finding the city a congenial place to live: the number of independent small publishing houses rose from a handful in 2000 to 18, as of September. And there are at least two dozen reading series -- at the Gist Street Reading Series, Uptown, they have to turn people away.

Recent sightings of Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe and Jake Gyllenhaal testify to the city's continued lure as a film location, although a recent cut in the state's tax credit may hurt that.

Nonetheless, "there's been a real sea change in peoples' attitudes in terms of arts and culture in everyday life," said Charlie Humphrey, executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. "Before when I would introduce myself as an arts administrator, people would look at me like I had an arm growing out of my forehead."

All good, but Pittsburgh is still a "no-growth" city, lagging in many important indicators that smart-growth cities need to thrive. Immigration is still low, public transit is weak and repair of infrastructure -- water and sewers -- is a looming nightmare. So, too, the region's fabled public-private partnership seems on shaky ground, given the recent squabble between Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and local universities over a tuition tax. The mayor lost that battle.

Ms. Picker bristles, in fact, at the makeup of the region's political establishment, calling it "an overwhelmingly white male power base that hasn't shifted very much and isn't strategizing about where we want to go and what we want to become.

"The only reason I began my loft project in 1997 was because of two women bankers, who essentially put me in business," she said.

Those women haven't been as visible in recent years, contends Sara Davis Buss, a local lawyer who served for three years on the Sports & Exhibition Authority. Recently, she tried to help a female client borrow money and went looking, unsuccessfully, for female bankers who might be more sympathetic.

"I couldn't think of any. Where did they all go? I'm still astounded when I go to meetings and I'm the only woman in the room," she said.

Nonetheless, the local wage gap between men and women has narrowed significantly, and the number of women appointees to city and county boards and commissions has risen to 50 percent, up from 20 percent 10 years ago, according to the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania.

A decade ago, one woman was on Pittsburgh's City Council -- now there are three. Two women were on the Pittsburgh Board of Education in 2000, but that number has risen to five. There are two female university presidents -- at Chatham and Carlow -- and the chair of the Regional Asset District Board is a woman.

Moreover, the region probably has one of the most highly educated female labor forces in the country, added Christopher Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh. While no firm numbers are yet available, "we are so far off the charts" in terms of educated females, he said.

There is still not much of a black middle class in Pittsburgh, however: the city's African-American community remains one of the poorest per capita of any large city, and racial disparities in the city's criminal justice system are "deplorable," said Larry Davis, dean of the School of Social Work and director of Center on Race and Social Problems at Pitt. But two recent developments give reason for hope, he added -- last year's election of President Barack Obama and the Pittsburgh Promise fund, which awards college aid to graduates of the city's public schools.

"I can't quantify it, but there seems to be a sense in minority communities that things are going to get better," he said.

Still, in a region whose fate is inextricably tied to the city's, one hard fact remains -- Pittsburgh has lost more than half of its population since World War II, and we continued to lose people, albeit more slowly, during the past decade.

All in all, though, "I think we grew up in this decade and Pittsburgh really came into its own," said former Mayor Tom Murphy, who left office in 2006 after three turbulent terms. He is now traveling the world for the Urban Land Institute -- he's visited 70 cities in the past three years -- preaching Pittsburgh's turnaround.

Never mind that his much maligned Downtown redevelopment plan (remember Fifth and Forbes? Remember Lord & Taylor?) disappeared in a cloud of political acrimony and bad economic numbers. Today, though, the combative former mayor's legacy -- the stadiums, the riverfront trails, the convention center -- may be undergoing a positive re-evaluation.

Murphy's Law of cities goes something like this: There are five world-class urban centers in this country: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Miami. There is a second tier of "buzz" cities -- Seattle, Boston, Austin. Pittsburgh, he said, is in a third tier with Cleveland and St. Louis, although he argues that "I got us to two and a half. My goal was to get us to two, to really create a buzz about the city, and I almost did."

Some of his political enemies, and urban experts with no ax to grind, might beg to differ with that assessment. But Mr. Obama bought it, and indeed, the former mayor claims, Pittsburgh did, for a few weeks in September, get some serious second-tier buzz.

Nonetheless, this is a city staggering under the weight of massive pension obligations, inventories of vacant real estate, expensive services and a host of other problems -- including very public fights with private partners. With little prospect of help or coordination from fragmented local governments and a paralyzed state Legislature, getting to the next level will be tough, Mr. Murphy said.

Indeed, to those who would brag about all the cool neighborhoods, all the new development, all the young, educated, and/or foreign people moving to the city in the past decade -- one block in Point Breeze boasts a Finnish television journalist, a German family therapist and a British software designer for Google -- Mr. Murphy offers this dark countervision:

"My neighborhood is empty," he said of Perry Hilltop on the North Side, where he and his wife, Mona, have owned a home for years. "Six houses across the street are vacant, eight houses adjacent to us have been torn down in the past 10 years, and for every story you see about new people moving here, I see lots of neighborhoods emptying out.

"It's an inevitable consequence of population loss, of people moving here with smaller families while the elderly continue to die off," Mr. Murphy said. "Ours isn't even a zero sum game, it's a negative sum game."

The city once called "Hell with the Lid Off" avoided the decade from hell, but we're not free and clear yet.