THE PITTSBURGH SKYLINE
Posted on 09/23/2009 6:57:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Pittsburgh, The city of bridges has built a bridge from its steel past to a diverse 21st-century economy. The summiteers arriving on September 24th can take note
EVEN on an overcast day, the view from Jeffrey Romoff’s office is spectacular. Across the river are waterfront baseball and football stadiums. Dozens of bridges span the Allegheny to the north-east and Monongahela to the south-east. The two rivers merge to form the Ohio River. Not one soot-churning mill is in sight. Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s governor, observed that it used to be “you couldn’t see a bloody thing”. Steel was once the largest employer in the region. Now the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC), an $8 billion health-care conglomerate, is western Pennsylvania’s biggest employer, with 50,000 people. Last year Mr Romoff, UPMC’s chief executive, moved his headquarters to the old US Steel tower, the city’s tallest building. UPMC’s logo now sits on top of it.
Pittsburgh does not rely solely on UPMC or the health industry the way it once leant on steel. When the steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s, the city and region lost 120,000, or about half, of all its manufacturing jobs. Some 50,000 Pittsburghers left the region annually. The city’s revival since then has been part organic and part good long-term planning. State and local officials provided investment, while universities and community and corporate leaders came together to develop economic and business strategies for the region. Pittsburgh’s employment has, over the ensuing three decades, diversified quite well.
Leaders from the world’s 19 largest economies plus the European Union will be in Pittsburgh on September 24th and 25th. When the White House press corps heard the G20 was to be hosted by Pittsburgh, many sniggered. Usually such meetings are held in capitals like Beijing or London, not rustbelt cities. But, as Barack Obama said on September 8th, Pittsburgh has “transformed itself from the city of steel to a centre for high-tech innovation—including green technology, education and training, and research and development.”
Today, its main industries, health care and education, are thriving. Pittsburgh’s health-services business has almost tripled in size since 1979, creating more than 100,000 jobs. More than 70,000 work in research and development in the metro area’s 35 universities (Jonas Salk produced the polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh in 1955) and 100 corporate research centres, such as that of Bayer usa, a pharmaceuticals company. Greg Babe, its head, says six jobs rely on one Bayer job.
Pittsburgh has changed itself physically too. The waterfront, once lined with factories, has been given over to parks. The building hosting the G20 is the world’s first and largest LEED-certified (meaning green) convention centre and sits on the city’s former red-light district. Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, which provides investment and advice to the region’s bioscience firms, is housed on a redeveloped brownfield, the former site of a strip-mill. SouthSide Works is a 123-acre (50-hectare) development made up of shops, offices, hotels and apartments that sits on the former site of an LTV Steel plant. Manufacturing continues to employ 8% of the workforce and the city is still home to US Steel. It is also a centre for innovation in robotics, electronics and nanotechnology.
Entrepreneurship has been fostered. Innovation Works, a state-aided seed fund, supports firms in their earliest stages of development. Susan Catalano, a neurobiologist working to stop Alzheimer’s symptoms, moved her start-up to Pittsburgh’s South Side to take advantage of this help. Thanks to universities of the stature of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, many new companies and recruits are drawn in. Pittsburgh’s unemployment rate, at 7.8% in July, was lower than the national rate of 9.4%.
Forbes magazine recently named Pittsburgh as one of America’s best cities for job growth. Some 30,000 jobs are available in the region, says Bill Flanagan, of the Allegheny Conference, an economic development group, an increase of 10,000 since the beginning of 2009. Pittsburgh has 8.4% of the nation’s nuclear engineers. Westinghouse, a nuclear-power company, is on a hiring spree. People are drawn to the region’s well-paid jobs, low cost of living and good schools. The EIU, a sister company of The Economist, ranked it the most liveable city in America. It boasts the top-flight Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Opera, as well as a host of theatres. Gorgeous Victorian townhouses can be bought for amazing prices.
Thanks to a thriving economy and a minor budget surplus, Pittsburgh looks set to stay in good shape. It largely missed the housing and dotcom booms and busts endured by the rest of the country. In fact, it is currently building a new sports arena, a new hospital and, for the first time in decades, housing in the downtown area. Because of a 2003 brush with bankruptcy, it cut its municipal workforce by a quarter, and took many hard decisions, such as closing fire stations, making it well-placed to cope with the current recession.
As well as 1,100 delegates and 2,000 journalists, the city is preparing itself for an onslaught of protesters. One website, resistg20.org, promises a mass march and other protests to disrupt the summit. Some 35,000 people rallied at the G20’s April meeting in London. Luke Ravenstahl, the city’s 29-year-old mayor, is quadrupling the 900-strong police force by shipping in 1,500 state troopers and borrowing cops from cities like New York. The city’s businessmen and politicians are hoping that the protesters and the politicians won’t wholly eclipse their own impressive tale of transformation.
Philadelphia better be prepared. I hope they take steps to protect the Liberty Bell and other historical sites.
To the Mod : I want to change the title but I can’t.
Isn't this the same bunch that trashed Seattle a few years ago? Philadelphia better be prepared.
You're thinking of the World Trade Organization, not the G-20. And the WTO didn't trash Seattle, wackos protesting them did.
I hope they take steps to protect the Liberty Bell and other historical sites.
This is Pittsburgh. The Liberty Bell will be safe and sound, 300 miles away.
Uh... make that "groan-inducing." Need coffee.
Did you read the story? It isn't about Philly. It that other city in PA where they collect Lombardi Trophies.
Not really--I once lived in Philly for about 6 months, and have never been to Pittsburg.
In any event, they better be prepared for a major trashing job!
This is in Pittsburgh. However, the Philly cops have experience in dealing with these nitwits from the 2000 GOP convention, and are actually sending some cops to Pittsburgh to help out with them.
Also, what changes do you want to the title?
Wow, that bridge is very yellow.
I’ve never visited Pittsburgh, but would like to sometime. I hear the area is beautiful (as long as it’s not winter) and hey, I’ve always kinda liked the Stillers.
}:-)4
Sounds as if they are. From local news reports, they seem to have some pretty good intel on the groups prone to violance and have been doing some premptive strikes, hitting them with hosts of citations for thing ranging from operating a bus without a CDL, setting up unlicensed and uninspected kitchens and camping on private property. They are keeping them off balance for now. The ACLU is as you would expect running down to the Federal Courthouse a couple of times a day charging infringment of 1st Amendment rights, and so far the judges are not buying it.
Pittsburgh is pretty compact geographically with a very limited number of access points into the business district. For all intents and purposes, they are shutting downtown for two days -- starting a midnight tonight -- making it sort of a secure compound. Maybe that will make it easier to jump on these punks if they start any trouble. Add to that the Pittsburgh Police are not know for giving hugs or kisses. It's not that they are Gestapo, but they have a very low tolerance for BS. They will give a smack down very hard and very fast.
I just hope it works out and we get through this with none of the good guys getting hurt.
Sorry for posting excerpt from Bloomberg, did not know it’s not allowed.
I wanted the title to be (Pittsburgh’s economic revival is a model for the rest of the world). It got truncated when I posted it and only c’s got posted somehow.
Thanks.
Headline has been fixed.
Bloomberg mentions that Pittsburgh is one of the few cities in the USA that is weathering the housing crisis relatively well.
Read here : http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aUY90NWSaEXQ
TITLE : Pittsburgh’s Economic Revival, Bond Debt Offer Lessons to G-20
That's very true. A $500k home here would be $3 million or more in most other markets. New single family home prices on a nice lot in a good suburb with good schools start around $160k.
Property taxes can be a little high, but the home you get for the money more than make up for that. I guess that's the big advantage of living in a 'low growth' (really zero growth) area.
They’re shutting the city down for 3 days. I work for a financial institution downtown and we are off Wed.-Fri. to be made up over the weekend. This fustercluck is costing businesses millions of dollars in revenue and will hopefully lead to a change in city government next election cycle.
According to this from a year ago, it was $42,902. Probably has not changed much since then.
It ain't NYC, but I think your dollar would go a lot further here, especially in terms of housing.
http://www.alleghenyconference.org/PRA/RegionalData/WageRates.pdf
Te site you referred to says this :
“Pittsburgh’s 10.5 percent total increase in average annual wages between 2005 and 2007 was the sixth-highest increase among the top 40 regions. In contrast, the average wage grew by less than 8 percent in regions such as Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; Cincinnati; and Orlando, Fla.”
It seems like Pittsburgh is doing VERY WELL compared to a lot of comparably sized cities in the nation.
We missed the housing boom, but then again, missed the housing bust as well. Unemployment is almost 2 points below the national avg, so knock on wood, it does seem to be better off than other areas.
On the other hand, we still have zero population growth and an aging population too boot. If that continues, we will pay for that in the out years.
That’s all very good to know—and I will be praying with you.
I am confident that the city of Pittsburgh will be able to tax, fine, regulate to death any breathing entity....this is a city that taxed the truth out of Studio Wrestlers!
There is amazing architecture in this city, left behind by all of the successful post residents of the Golden Triangle.
There are Victorian homes all around the city that can be bought very reasonably.
Need to get the hipsters from Zeus knows where to move from MY neighborhood to Pittsburgh. For what they are paying in rent here, they can probably fix up an old victorian in da Burgh. Of course, at their age, it is so important to be “in New York,” at least until mom and dad stop sending money and they realize that they will never earn a living with their music or art in NYC.
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