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Pgh also lost population due to a change in household size. There are not very many areas in the city that have been abandoned and razed like you see in Detroit or Cleveland. My neighborhood’s population is down around 7k residents since it’s peak in 1970 but there are very few (perhaps 10 or so) empty houses in the entire neighborhood.
As was pointed out on another thread, household size declined everywhere in the US.
While Pittsburgh did decline, proportionally to its metro area, it turned out pretty well.
Since 1970
The City lost about 41% of its population while its metro lost about 18%.
Detroit lost 51% while its metro lost 5%.
Cleveland lost 52% while its metro lost about 10%.
Buffalo lost 45% while its metro lost 16%.
What aspects of Pittsburgh allowed the city to weather deindustrialization proportionally better than its peer cities.
I personally think part of the reason is due to the fact that more Pittsburgh suburbs were factory towns that themselves were devastated by losing their mills, rather than true suburbs. This lead to people leaving the region rather than the city. Also there was a racial element were there were fewer Blacks in the inner city of Pittsburgh so there was less "white flight".
Because you're picking 1970 as the starting point and not 1950. From its peak population the city has lost 55% of its population, not 41%.
Pittsburgh lost more of its population from 1950 to 1970 than those other cities. Detroit and Cleveland lost around 17%-18%; Pittsburgh lost over 23%.
The real difference in the areas is that Pittsburgh lost a full 18% of its metro population. By contrast Detroit only lost 4% from its peak and is currently growing, within 195,000 of reaching peak population.
As was pointed out on another thread, household size declined everywhere in the US.
All cities have different densities of housing. I don't know what that means in terms of the OP's question here but you clearly can't just look at the fact that household size has declined without paying attention to how many households are in a square mile in a neighborhood.
The real difference in the areas is that Pittsburgh lost a full 18% of its metro population. By contrast Detroit only lost 4% from its peak and is currently growing, within 195,000 of reaching peak population.
Regardless stil all those cities lost more of their city proper population and less of their metro.
I picked 1970 because it seemed wrong to use two different time tanfes for city and metro.
1. A lot of the industry ended up outside of the city, which left a good deal of the 19th/early 20th century urban fabric intact, and also meant that even 100 years ago, a big portion of the city was dominated by "professional class" workers (Oakland never had any factories, for example, except right down by the waterfront).
2. The steel industry in the region began to slow down in the 1920s, right when the federal government slammed the doors shut on mass immigration from Europe. This meant there were relatively few blacks who moved north to Pittsburgh as part of the "Great Migration" (Pittsburgh stopped getting black migrants in the 1950s, about two decades earlier than the "auto belt"). It meant in turn that white flight was limited during the really bad urban riots era, because the black population wasn't large enough to create racial panics throughout a whole side of the city like in Cleveland and St. Louis. There certainly were large portions of the city that suffered - neighborhoods like Homewood, Garfield, Beltzhoover, and Perry Hilltop - but there were also large swathes of the urban core (like South Side and Lawrenceville) which never experienced appreciable white flight, which sort of primed them to become gentrified enclaves once feelings about urban cores changed.
3. The universities began helping stabilize the East End in the mid 20th century. The Pittsburgh region lacks any notable "college towns" yet the city proper has Pitt, CMU, Duquense, Chatham, Carlow, and Point Park University. Shadyside in particular was in a lot of ways the first example of Pittsburgh gentrification, when hippies moved there in the 1970s and the neighborhood began getting densified with houses being subdivided and crappy apartment buildings replacing a lot of the houses.
My wife is Afro-American from Homewood. I visited her old neighborhood and it was pretty much a carbon copy of the racialized ghettos you see in North St. Louis and East Cleveland. The difference as you say is that the Pittsburgh metro as a whole is not nearly as black as Cleveland, St. Louis, and definitely not Detroit. In that respect, it is very demographically similar to Cincinnati, another city that isn't perceived as "hopeless" as the other Rustbelters. With that said, I think St. Louis is like a mix of Pittsburgh and Cleveland as far as racial demographics and urban stability, we have the mass ghettos like Cleveland, but also the leafy, "liberal" university areas that never declined are now expensive as ever.
My wife is Afro-American from Homewood. I visited her old neighborhood and it was pretty much a carbon copy of the racialized ghettos you see in North St. Louis and East Cleveland. The difference as you say is that the Pittsburgh metro as a whole is not nearly as black as Cleveland, St. Louis, and definitely not Detroit. In that respect, it is very demographically similar to Cincinnati, another city that isn't perceived as "hopeless" as the other Rustbelters. With that said, I think St. Louis is like a mix of Pittsburgh and Cleveland as far as racial demographics and urban stability, we have the mass ghettos like Cleveland, but also the leafy, "liberal" university areas that never declined are now expensive as ever.
I think the difference between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh is that Cincinnati has more of a highly to even predominantly Black lower income to middle class suburban segment that is north of the city. Cincinnati is also about 40-45% Black.
I think there's a general notion that Pittsburgh is currently doing better than many of its industrial peer cities, but I don't think these stats in particular really illustrate that.
The good thing is that all of these cities have basically stabilized their population losses since 2010 or so and are seeing new developments that haven't happened in years or decades. Pittsburgh's somewhat ahead of the curve on parts of that, which I think is mostly thanks to the presence of its strong research universities within its urban core, but it's good that many of the other cities are following a similar trend. In fact, Cincinnati and Milwaukee actually estimated slight population gains in their 2016 estimates which would be.
This 10 minute video from Time Magazine sums up exactly how Pittsburgh was able to transform itself.
And the key is the legacy institutions created by its industrialist fathers. The amount of wealth poured back into the city during the industrial revolution really rivaled much larger cities and its institutions still do today.
The Pittsburgh arts scene is far above its class.
As well as its eds and meds scene, considering other peer cities.
I think the difference between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh is that Cincinnati has more of a highly to even predominantly Black lower income to middle class suburban segment that is north of the city. Cincinnati is also about 40-45% Black.
Over half of Allegheny County's black population is now in the "suburbs" as well. Many of the old mill towns of the Mon Valley, along with suburbs to the east of Pittsburgh in general, are seeing rising black populations, due to a combination of gentrification out of improving city neighborhoods and continued blight and population decline in some black parts of the city. The mill towns had sizable black populations going back to before the 1920s, and even the "true suburb" of Penn Hills had a black neighborhood in the 1940s.
My wife is Afro-American from Homewood. I visited her old neighborhood and it was pretty much a carbon copy of the racialized ghettos you see in North St. Louis and East Cleveland. The difference as you say is that the Pittsburgh metro as a whole is not nearly as black as Cleveland, St. Louis, and definitely not Detroit. In that respect, it is very demographically similar to Cincinnati, another city that isn't perceived as "hopeless" as the other Rustbelters. With that said, I think St. Louis is like a mix of Pittsburgh and Cleveland as far as racial demographics and urban stability, we have the mass ghettos like Cleveland, but also the leafy, "liberal" university areas that never declined are now expensive as ever.
I am sitting in my office on Frankstown Ave in Homewood as we speak. Yes. Homewood is still in a steep decline and the mass demolition is starting to cause an urban prairie. I preferred the abandoned rowhouses over the over grown lots. There is hope though. With the continued development of east liberty coupled with the transportation line running through the hood .....we are starting to see improvement in and around the Martin Luther King Jr. east busway. Homewood now has a cashless upscale coffee shop in a former post office.
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