Planners nearly killed Steel City, but ‘eds,’ ‘meds’ and market-based development have given it new life.
Pittsburgh
If you want to see how to revive a city—and how not to—come to Pittsburgh. No other modern American city has worked so hard for so long in so many ways to reinvent itself. It transformed itself from the Smoky City to the Renaissance City in the 1940s, and that was just the beginning. Pittsburghers today refer to that era as Renaissance I because they’re now up to Renaissance III—or maybe IV, depending on how you count.
The past rebirths enthralled urban planners and put Pittsburgh high in the rankings of “most livable” cities, but a problem recurred: fewer people actually wanted to live there. By 2010 the population was barely 300,000, less than half its size in 1950. As one of the many who’d fled town, I feared Pittsburgh was beyond revival.
But in the past decade, neighborhoods have come back to life and young workers are flocking to Pittsburgh instead of fleeing. The city’s comeback has been aided by outside economic forces (like the fracking boom), but it’s due largely to the lessons Pittsburghers learned from their past mistakes.
The spirit of Pittsburgh’s first renaissance was captured by a painting in 1949 on the cover of Time, which showed the banker Richard King Mellon heroically towering above Pittsburgh’s smoke-filled skyline as a construction crane lowered a golden architect’s triangle on its downtown. Mellon and his fellow master planners were guided by the reigning architectural ideal, Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” with its “towers in the park” linked by highways, and by the progressive zeal for government-led urban renewal. They achieved some successes—cleaner air and rivers, new parks, new corporate headquarters downtown—but they also obliterated neighborhoods, replacing the street grid with an “ersatz suburb,” in Jane Jacobs’s words. “Pittsburgh,” she complained in 1962, “is being rebuilt by city haters.”
The rebuilders’ largest project was in East Liberty, a district known as Pittsburgh’s “second downtown.” Planners turned it into an outdoor mall in the 1960s by closing the main streets to traffic. They cleared dozens of blocks, displacing thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses to make room for promenades, plazas, large parking lots, a new mini-beltway encircling the district, and three high-rise subsidized housing projects.
Most figured the planners knew best—until they saw the results. Shoppers didn’t want a suburban mall in the city. Restaurants, theaters and stores shut down. As the middle class cleared out, East Liberty became notorious for drug dealing and other crime, especially at the high-rise housing projects, which the police started calling the Crack Stacks.
By 2000 East Liberty was “The Land That Retail Forgot,” as a headline put it. But another renaissance was under way, led by a local nonprofit group called East Liberty Development Inc. Instead of grandly remaking the area, it worked gradually, bringing cars back to the streets and coaxing private developers and stores to the perimeter of the district.
Most important, it focused on reducing crime. It worked with other nonprofit groups to tear down the high-rise housing projects and move the tenants into new mixed-income developments. It bought up dilapidated properties in crime “hot spots” and hired off-duty police officers to patrol them. Crime fell by half from 2008 to 2012, and property values more than doubled as people and businesses moved back to East Liberty.
The city’s revival came not from the plan for a Radiant City but from traditional market-based development and the unexpected consequences of philanthropy. The Mellons and other benefactors gave lavishly to local universities and medical facilities, pioneering the urban economic strategy now known as “eds and meds.” Google moved in 2010 into an abandoned factory at the edge of East Liberty, and Uber in 2015 opened its driverless-car research center in a nearby neighborhood with so many robotics companies it’s known as “Robo Row.”
“We get a steady stream of people from California who would like an easy commute and a house that’s bigger than a garage,” says Kamal Nigam, who oversees the more than 600 techies in Google’s office. “Pittsburgh is basically the best small city in the country. You’ve got the cultural institutions of a much larger city and great neighborhoods where you can walk to work or to the movies or a bookstore.”
Tech workers, who now collect a third of the wages in the region, have changed the city’s politics by electing a mayor and City Council committed to the full progressive agenda. The master planners, it seems, never go away. They only change tactics.
Dedicated progressives always know what’s best for a city. In the 1950s, they were sure that neighborhoods could be saved only by demolishing them and erecting towers; today, they fight to prevent change that doesn’t satisfy their idea of social justice. That means resisting the supposed evils of gentrification—never a problem during the decades that East Liberty was desperate for anyone to move in anywhere.
Activists are now busy opposing new development in East Liberty and other neighborhoods, and the city is about to introduce “inclusionary zoning,” which would force apartment developers to set aside units for low-income tenants paying below-market rents. There’s also a plan to impose a progressive checklist of requirements on future projects, like reducing “climate impact” and providing “wealth and ownership positions for disadvantaged populations.”
Will this new master plan be enough to choke the city’s revival? The Pittsburgher in me hopes for the best. But if people start fleeing the city once again, we can all rest assured of one thing: Pittsburgh will get to work on another renaissance.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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John Tierney is a contributing editor at City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here. This piece was adapted from City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal