This is not to bash Pittsburgh by any means. I love the city. It holds a place in my heart that many have for New York or San Francisco. It is the place my grandparents raised three sons on a Westinghouse paycheck. It is the home of my favorite sports teams and my favorite view in the world, pictured above. Pittsburgh means family and, to me, family means home. So I paid attention when I came across an article in The American Prospect titled “The Pittsburgh Conundrum” by John Russo.
Forty years after the decline of the steel industry, Pittsburgh has emerged from the ashes of deindustrialization to become the new Emerald City. Its formidable skyline gleams with homegrown names—PPG, UPMC, and PNC.
Touted as the “most livable city” by the likes of The Economist and Forbes, its highly literate and educated workforce has contributed to a robust and diverse local economy known as a center for technology, health care, and bio-science.
It is a leader in startup businesses. Uber and Ford’s announcement in 2016 that they would base development of their self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, rather than in Silicon Valley, is a telling example of the power of high-tech image and low costs.
Pittsburgh also ranks high in housing affordability. Residents can easily walk or bike to public libraries, museums, and arts and entertainment venues. Some see Pittsburgh as a model for economic development and a new urbanism that could revitalize the Rust Belt and other former industrial regions.
But, like so many things in this economy, the picture is more complicated and the answers, as well as solutions, to inequality are harder to find. Yes, when my father grew up in Pittsburgh the skies were overcast from the smokestacks of the city’s famous steel mills and the rivers were full of sludge. In my own childhood, trips to Pittsburgh from West Virginia could be timed by the quality of the air.
Today, the air and water are clean and the city is by any objective measure beautiful. Christopher Nolan even chose Pittsburgh as his Gotham when filming “The Dark Knight Rises”. I don’t visit nearly as much as I would like. The people that tied me to the city have mostly passed. But seeing this city revitalized with my own eyes brightens my heart in a way few things can.
So what’s the problem? Say it with me, GENTRIFICATION. In every major city in the country formerly working class and poor neighborhoods are becoming more expensive, less diverse, and less recognizable to those who grew up there just ten years ago. Williamsburg gentrification pushing into Bushwick. Pretty much all of San Francisco gentrified already. Renaming Harlem for crying out loud?
And there are more fundamental questions: Can—does—Pittsburgh’s success extend beyond city limits? Can it resurrect its broader Rust Belt region? What can Pittsburgh do—what can we do—for the broader regions that it has left behind?
The Pittsburgh Metropolitan area comprises the counties of Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland counties as well as the city itself. Taken together, the picture is not as rosy. The population is shrinking. Conservative fear mongering about immigration is on the rise. Donald Trump carried the region even though the city voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton.
All of this leaves me thinking that Pittsburgh might just be the exemplification of the nation writ small. Perhaps looking at this one region allows us a glimpse into what is going on in the rest of the US. Large liberal cities with money contrasted with poorer rural and suburban areas that are increasingly voting Republican.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows wide swings in employment over the last decade, but non-farm employment in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area declined by about 15,000 between October 2016 and March 2017.
A University of Pittsburgh study reports that 23 percent of Pittsburgh residents live in poverty, and 43 percent earn less than 200 percent of the poverty level. Furthermore, outside its urban core, a larger number of individuals actually live in poverty than in Pittsburgh itself.
Somewhere in here is at least the chance to look at what has happened to the economy and with it the political balance over the last 40 years, a wholly imprecise number based loosely on my age. I will spare you my recitation of the section of the article that covers the opinions of various scholars across the political spectrum. Suffice it to say that those leaning right want less government and those leaning left want to protect the poor from the most dire effects of income inequality.
What is missing from the larger discussions of urban and regional development are any fully formed progressive solutions. Even the most progressive of recent political campaigns offered little.
While Bernie Sanders championed “New Deal Reforms” and a “new Bill of Rights” that, he claimed, would create “an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy,” other than making housing affordable and increasing wages and benefits, he put forth no concrete plans for dealing with the broader crisis of urban and regional economies.
Some of Richard Florida‘s more progressive pillars found their way into Martin O’Malley’s campaign, but that never got off the ground.
So, what do we do moving forward. Sprawl will become an increasingly difficult issue, especially if gas prices continue to rise and outlying exurbs compete with each other in a race to the bottom of taxation and regulations in an effort to “attract business”. Income inequality will continue to rise. City cores will continue to homogenize along economic lines. The haves in the cities will be fine and the GOP will continue to make hay out of blasting “liberal elites” in those cities to it’s rural and suburban base.
There is a good reason why no one has offered clearer strategies, though. As Pittsburgh shows, there are no easy answers to challenges facing metro regions. When we look beyond that city’s core, we clearly see that even the place most often praised for having gotten economic renewal right still battles uneven development and inequities just beyond the city limits.
None of the strategists offer much hope for the many former mill towns and rural communities in western Pennsylvania. Without a new and enduring infusion of economic vitality, smaller towns and rural areas outside the upscale metropolitan hubs will show persistent signs of economic struggle. Some may be beyond repair.
The answer, according to John Russo in the article, is pretty simple but you won’t like the answer. In short, what Pittsburgh and the rest of the nation need is a healthy dose of Socialism. In other words, what we need is a party that is willing to propose and enact policies to reign in unchecked Capitalism, an economic system not a political philosophy.
There is one bright spot that I found in the article. The Center for American Progress has come up with a commission working Toward a Marshall Plan for America: Rebuilding Our Towns, Cities, and the Middle Class. “It will call upon the expertise of urban and rural leaders who represent labor, business, education, health, faith, community and economic development, and racial justice to help understand the problem”. It is, at least, a good starting place. It also sounds like what I think the Democratic Party should be.
Even with the best of intentions, urban planners and economic developers are complicit in sustaining the broken socioeconomic system that Florida suggests is central to the urban crisis.
They need to recognize that the problem goes beyond even secular stagnation, segregation, gentrification, inclusion, regional integration, and the business and government efforts so prominent in their narratives.
The problem is with capitalism as it currently exists—its reliance on inequality and racism, and its externalization of its social costs.
*emphasis added
Here’s the part where I lose some of you. The older I get, the more I tend to agree with Russo. It isn’t enough to say that we stand with the poor and bet that a “Better Deal” slogan will peel off some Republican votes in the coming years.
Someone needs to work on giving the people a voice in the only place we are guaranteed it by the US Constitution, the halls of government. End Citizens United. Get rid of soft money, bundlers, and Super PACS. Return the power of the ballot to its rightful owners, the individual citizens of the United States of America.
And don’t for a second think that this is a call to “abandon identity politics” either. If the events of the past year haven’t been enough to convince you, let me spell it out. We are in the middle of more than a culture war. We are in the middle of a fight for the kind of nation that we will become in the next few months, years, and decades.
The GOP is steadfast in its belief that the answer is guns, Evangelical Christianity, and free market Capitalism. The Democratic Party cannot be the party of a more diverse Capitalist class and expect to win enough votes to make any real change. In this light, it really is a competition like professional sports. You’re just rooting for the blue laundry. The game stays the same and the owners are the real winners.
Any real change to the way this country treats or acknowledges its past actions toward Native Americans and African Americans needs to look at the reason the conditions exist in the first place. Again, in case I haven’t made it painfully obvious how I feel right now, the answer to the problem lies at the heart of Capitalism. Any real racial, sexual, or gender equality worth the name begins by looking at the underpinnings of the system that created the inequality to begin with.
This is a hard diary for me to write. I grew up pretty comfortable in my medium sized town in Southern West Virginia. Union membership was only beginning to decline and the coal mines were still limping along well enough to provide a living for a lot of people and their families. The Eighties were good for my family and those of most of my friends on Wall Street. Not to mention, I was White. That, at least, hasn’t changed.
Today, the unions are a shell of their former selves and many individual members vote for Trump style populists anyway. The coal is almost gone. A heart wrenching number of mountain tops no longer exist due to the final stages of extraction. No kidding, this is called mountaintop removal mining and its effects are slowly killing the streams and riverbeds as well as the air.
My Pittsburgh of the mind was supposed to be my escape from all of that. I went to college and grad school. I worked hard at something I loved. But one fairly serious chronic medical condition and I can no longer do what I trained to do. And at the risk of being boastful, I was pretty damn good at it. So here I am, like so many of my fellow citizens, underemployed and wondering how to pay for my medical care on top of everything else while scrambling to make ends meet.
It turns out that the Pittsburgh of my mind is just like the real Pittsburgh. It is flawed foundationally. Maybe if I had studied something else. Maybe if I had been diagnosed and begun treatment earlier. Maybe if I had worked just a little harder. But here I am. And I am angry, just like so many of my fellow middle and working class Americans.
You want a Democratic Party that can win elections? Roughly 43 percent of eligible voters didn't vote in 2016. I’m betting that real progressive populism brings in enough votes to beat pretty much every Republican in every race in the country in 2018. Or, in the words of the last winner of a presidential election, “What have you got to lose?”