Melting pot, hah!

The U.S. Census Bureau provided more evidence this week of just what a dull, homogenous place Pittsburgh has become, compared to the rest of America.

The city that once had people of different nationalities every few blocks, speaking different languages while worshipping different religions, is a regular Mayberry RFD these days, compared to many metropolitan areas. Details came from the American Community Survey, an annual cross-examination of more than half a million Americans. Government officials are using the survey to replace the long form that was part of the census every 10 years up through 2000.

In the Pittsburgh metropolitan area in 2005, fewer than 3 percent of household residents were foreign-born, compared to more than 12 percent for the entire country. In about 95 percent of the region's households, English was the only language spoken, whereas the U.S. figure was 81 percent. Only two of every 100 residents of the area identified themselves as either Asian or Hispanic, compared to 19 of every 100 Americans generally.

The xenophobic among us might think the statistics represent good news, but we would gladly give such folks a shove out the region's door in favor of some good Venezuelans, Burmese and others more likely to flood our living space with new ideas. Amazingly, it's possible to find good Chinese and Mexican restaurants around Pittsburgh, but our guess is they're not in quite the same abundance as elsewhere.

Free time to fritter

Here's some good news: It takes us less time to commute to work than for most of America. Bet you never realized that when yelling at the cars mystifyingly crawling in front of you into the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

For the seven-county region, the typical one-way commuting time in 2005 was 24.6 minutes instead of 25.1 minutes for the nation. Add it up over the course of a typical working year, on the off-chance that you're lucky enough to be employed all year, and -- voila -- that's four extra hours of free time! Don't waste it, for gosh sakes. Watch an extra football game. Memorize your kids' Social Security numbers. Read every single article in a newspaper one day, including motorcycle fatalities in boroughs and townships you never knew existed.

For residents within the city of Pittsburgh proper, with mean travel time of 21.7 minutes, the annual savings can reach 27.2 hours, and that requires more serious thought. Someone could do something preposterously productive in that amount of time, like, say, read a book. Why, that's enough time to watch a Steelers highlights DVD something like 27 times, allowing an opportunity for a snack midway through.

Don't act so smart

Here's another thing we have plenty of within the city other than time on our hands: smart people. Actually, we shouldn't say that. We've got a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in school, and that's not quite the same thing.

Thanks to the cluster of universities and medical centers within Pittsburgh, 15 percent of the city's population has graduate or professional degrees, compared to 10 percent for both the metropolitan area and nation. These knowledgeable professors, doctors, lawyers and others with master's degrees or Ph.D.s must be the reason so many intelligent things occur within Pittsburgh, such as:

Centre Avenue being spelled the way it is.

The wrong-way bus lane through Oakland.

Shadyside's failure to be even remotely close to Shady Side Academy.

No-growth policies

Young women continue to share half the blame for the region's lack of population growth, or perhaps more so. Since there are fewer of them here than elsewhere, due to our skewed older population, you might expect them to show some effort at generating more babies than the average American woman. Ah, but that would be mere wishful thinking.

Across America, 108 of every 1,000 women between ages 20 and 34 in 2005 had spit out children in the past year. In southwestern Pennsylvania, however, it was just 90 of every 1,000, and within the city itself, the estimate was only 72 of every 1,000. Just do the math, you people with master's degrees in fractions; that's right, for every two babies Pittsburgh women are producing, females elsewhere are producing three. This is no way to fill up a Port Authority bus to its maximum operating efficiency, people.

Now even The Morning File, one of the most male-dominated institutions in male-dominated Pittsburgh, acknowledges it can be painful to transport something the size of a human infant through a birth canal. We've analyzed it this way and that, examined all the angles, and it just doesn't compute. So we're not insensitive to certain hardships to which we will never be exposed. But is it too much to ask young women of Pittsburgh to be as fertile as those elsewhere? Are you just holding back to avoid long lines at the mall, or what?

A lot of senior moments

No reference to Pittsburgh's demographics is ever permitted without some reference to its elderly, so here's some cold, hard geezer facts.

Among every 1,000 household members in 2005 (the American Community Survey ignores inhabitants of nursing homes, prisons, college dorms and other group quarters), 20 of them in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area would have been 85 or older. In the United States, 13 of every 1,000 were that age. So there's something like a 50 percent greater chance that the person whispering loudly behind you in a movie theater around Pittsburgh ("Who is that actress? Oh, I think I know her. Wasn't she in that movie we saw last year? I wish she'd speak louder. I can't hear a word she's saying.") is quite elderly, compared to sitting in a movie theater anywhere else -- except Florida, of course.

First Published: September 1, 2006, 4:00 a.m.