Editorial: Return to the office, for Downtown Pittsburgh's sake

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | December 10, 2022 | The Editorial Board

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

The beating heart of the Pittsburgh region is the Golden Triangle, and people are its lifeblood. For the sake of the social and economic health of Downtown, and of the entire city and region, employers in the urban core should encourage as many workers as possible to return to the office, at least a few days each week.

It’s not just about maximizing the number of warm bodies in office chairs: More workers mean more lunches and happy hours, more shopping and catering, more cycling and transit riding, more haircuts and shoe shines. In other words, more people mean more of the social and economic activity that makes an urban core neighborhood vibrant and attractive, as opposed to sparse and gloomy.

Due to the city’s unique geography, Pittsburgh has always had an uncommonly dense central business district, which means it has traditionally depended on the social and financial energy generated Downtown to power the rest of the region. While the national trend is for jobs to move to the suburbs, more than 50% of Pittsburgh’s office square footage remains in the Golden Triangle and nearby neighborhoods. And according to a New York Times analysis, Pittsburgh ranks fifth in the country for the percent of downtown real estate dedicated to office space. That made the city especially vulnerable to a widespread shift to working from home.

The recovery of Downtown activity levels from the COVID collapse in spring of 2020 has been discouraging. The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership recorded a daily average of 87,117 people in the Golden Triangle — including residents, employees and other visitors — for the month of November. That’s a decline of more than one-third from the same month in 2019. And the trendline has flattened to a plateau.

[AF_Blue]

Can we assume the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is shilling for new subscribers, since current subscribers are fleeing the downtown Democrat hellhole, and have no plans to renew their subscriptions?

[GOPJ]

Could be...

Also as much as liberal newspaper love to humble themselves in front of the black democrat community (or what white liberal ‘elites’ tell them is the black democrat community) - folks who live in inner city hellholes do not subscribe to newspapers in large enough numbers to keep a paper’s door’s open.

*Ok, Chicago’s Defender pulled it off - but that was a black paper..

[jdsteel]

That is true. And the liberal rag has a union strike happening .

[Segovia]

Cities all over this country are getting exactly what their policies represent. They want political power hubs where they control the government and the votes. They want to urbanize the country’s population to look like China, with everyone living in cubicles. They want to reverse the urban flight that started the exodus from major American cities a generation ago. The taxes, the city crime, the welfare state they’ve created have achieved the exactly what they abhor. Now there’s no logical reason for people to live in these hell holes they’ve created.

[Elsie]

Everybody knows its perfectly possible to run companies with almost everybody working remote.

Not MANUFACTURING, or the service industries.

Medical is a bit difficult as well.