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Old 05-18-2011, 04:40 PM
 
Location: Squirrel Hill
1,349 posts, read 3,559,706 times
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Plenty of gentrification of various stages in Pittsburgh. Examples include South Side, Lawrenceville, East Liberty, Northside, etc. There is just a lot of blight in the Pittsburgh metro, really unavoidable for a city that experienced fairly rapid dramatic population loss and still continued to bleed population until very recently (at best, population loss may or may not still be occuring). To think that significant redevelopment will come to Braddock, Mckeesport, or several other areas anytime soon just isn't realistic... demand for it isnt that high and plenty of other areas will likely see it first.
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Old 05-18-2011, 04:49 PM
 
Location: On the Rails in Northern NJ
12,380 posts, read 26,759,552 times
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This seems to be a major issue all over PA that is ignored by the Regional and local Govts. Unlike NJ or NY which has taken steps to address it....
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Old 05-18-2011, 06:45 PM
 
Location: Kittanning
4,692 posts, read 8,988,628 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MathmanMathman View Post
It depends on the condition of the homes for one. They were probably built cheaply just to house workers and not meant to last..... Communities can be rebuilt with a sensitivity to the previous architecture but I'm not sure housing of Braddock's type would fit the 21st century.
I want to address the myth that Braddock's housing is all substandard, cheaply-built squalor. So untrue! Walk around the neighborhood and you will see large brick homes abound. Or better yet, see the Braddock photo tour I will be posting in several minutes.
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Old 05-18-2011, 06:49 PM
gg
 
Location: Pittsburgh
26,137 posts, read 25,783,846 times
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Look the place is toast for the next 25 years. Nothing going to happen. Life is short. Move to an area that is positive. It is okay if it falls. Someday it will come back, but no time soon.
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Old 05-18-2011, 07:38 PM
 
7,112 posts, read 10,087,828 times
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What are the prospects for the Braddock steel mill staying open? If it were to close, I suggest turning that brownfield into an expansion of Kennywood. I mean, they could build a cool pedestrian bridge across the Mon and make a huge expansion of Kennywood on the other riverbank. That might be more appealing to encourage a redevelopment of Braddock.
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Old 05-18-2011, 07:58 PM
 
Location: Pittsburgh
7,541 posts, read 10,203,280 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MathmanMathman View Post
What are the prospects for the Braddock steel mill staying open? .

Probably pretty good, US Steel invested a lot of money at ET when they brought in a continuous caster not that many years ago.

Braddock could definitely rise again. When Mr. Carnegie brought ET to Braddock, the population and wealth soared more than 10 fold in the last quarter of the 19th Century.

Something else currently unforeseen could happen to change Braddock's fortunes.
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Old 05-18-2011, 09:09 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,219,944 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gnutella View Post
What a lot of people don't understand about Pittsburgh's "suburbs" is that not all of them were meant to be suburbs. In the Pittsburgh area, everything located away from the rivers and major creeks is suburbia, while the little nuggets of land along the rivers are a combination of streetcar suburbs and factory towns.

Factory towns were heavily industrialized, and the factories were those towns' raison d'etre. They were the first to go into decline once suburbanization became a big trend after World War II. Nobody wanted to live near the nasty factories, and I can't necessarily blame them either. This is why the oldest of the post-World War II suburbs are located not only immediately around Pittsburgh, but also not far from the factory towns along the Monongahela River, which had more industry along its banks than the other two rivers combined. The houses in these towns are mostly substandard, essentially being the first instances of mediocre tract housing in the United States. Examples of factory towns include Braddock, Duquesne, Glassport and Clairton on the Monongahela River, Millvale and New Kensington on the Allegheny River, and McKees Rocks and Aliquippa on the Ohio River.

On the other hand, some river towns were designed to be getaways for the rich once upon a time, and they specifically shunned heavy industry. These were the streetcar suburbs. Because of the industrialization along the Monongahela River, these kinds of towns were located along the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers instead. These towns have held up much better than the factory towns, and remain some of Pittsburgh's more desirable suburbs. The houses in these towns are larger, and were built with much more care, unlike those in the factory towns. Examples of streetcar suburbs include Aspinwall, Fox Chapel and Oakmont on the Allegheny River, and Bellevue, Sewickley and Edgeworth on the Ohio River. (There are no such examples on the Monongahela River.)

For the most part, elevation dictates which areas are nice and which areas aren't so nice, and this goes for both the city of Pittsburgh and outlying areas. The higher the elevation, the nicer an area tends to be, and the lower the elevation, the less nice an area tends to be.
These old mill towns are both suburbs and not, or maybe I should say neither suburb nor independent city. Take Beaver Falls. It's about 30miles from the Point. Yet even back in the 1930s, my father commuted from BF to Carnegie Tech (now CMU) to night school until he saved up enough money to go full time and live on campus. Also back in the 1930s, one of his aunts could not find a teaching job in BF, so she worked in Pittsburgh (Manchester) and lived in a boarding house during the week and came "home" to the family farm on the weekends. Growing up there, we did most of our shopping in town, but it was not unheard of to go to Pittsburgh for a special shopping event. It goes without saying that we went to baseball and football games in the burg.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Caladium View Post
It's odd to think that property right on a river and within 10 miles of the downtown of a city that's actually doing pretty well wouldn't be doing better. I wonder if this town made some fateful decisions a few decades ago when other suburban areas were reinventing themselves.
Even when I was a student nurse 40 some years ago, Braddock was a depressed area with lots of low-income residents. I did my student public health nursing clinical rotation there.
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Old 05-18-2011, 09:30 PM
 
1,164 posts, read 2,049,730 times
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Here's a mayor of a town that could have been Braddock. It was once an industrial powerhouse, but most industry left and residents left with it. But, like Braddock, the city is inside a metropolitan area. This mayor, unlike mayors in most of Western PA, knows that people can commute to work, so he doesn't talk about jobs; instead he does something foreign to most mayors here - he talks about improving the quality of life in his city to attract new residents. Things like making it look pretty, building bike trails, etc. Innovative.
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Old 05-18-2011, 10:40 PM
 
43,011 posts, read 107,645,904 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MathmanMathman View Post
What are the prospects for the Braddock steel mill staying open? If it were to close, I suggest turning that brownfield into an expansion of Kennywood. I mean, they could build a cool pedestrian bridge across the Mon and make a huge expansion of Kennywood on the other riverbank. That might be more appealing to encourage a redevelopment of Braddock.
It doesn't help Braddock to have a working mill in the town. People don't want to live near a steel mill. It's noisy.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmyev View Post
Here's a mayor of a town that could have been Braddock. It was once an industrial powerhouse, but most industry left and residents left with it. But, like Braddock, the city is inside a metropolitan area. This mayor, unlike mayors in most of Western PA, knows that people can commute to work, so he doesn't talk about jobs; instead he does something foreign to most mayors here - he talks about improving the quality of life in his city to attract new residents. Things like making it look pretty, building bike trails, etc. Innovative.
The Mayor does talk about those types of improvements too. It just doesn't get as much press.

I agree that getting jobs into the town isn't important for attracting residents since people can easily commute to jobs anywhere in the county; however, the Mayor is realistic to acknowledge that businesses are the only real source of tax revenue the town can expect in the near future because the population isn't going to increase fast enough.
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Old 05-19-2011, 06:19 AM
 
296 posts, read 558,141 times
Reputation: 126
Quote:
Originally Posted by jimmyev View Post
Here's a mayor of a town that could have been Braddock. It was once an industrial powerhouse, but most industry left and residents left with it. But, like Braddock, the city is inside a metropolitan area. This mayor, unlike mayors in most of Western PA, knows that people can commute to work, so he doesn't talk about jobs; instead he does something foreign to most mayors here - he talks about improving the quality of life in his city to attract new residents. Things like making it look pretty, building bike trails, etc. Innovative.
That's because everyone knows that in order for you to have a thriving town of 2,000, you have to have your own full-service hospital and jeans commercials.
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