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I'm sorry. I had a really awful day today, and I'm truly tiring of reading "the city is broke; the city is broke; the city is broke" on here and on social media as an excuse for EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH PITTSBURGH. I just feel like banging my head against a brick wall because it's the worst excuse ever.
You know what other cities do? They raise taxes to provide funding to provide their denizens with a better quality-of-life. Why not Pittsburgh?
Why should I have to dole out $700 to fix my car after striking a dark and barely visible pothole at night because the city didn't have $10 (or however cheap two shovel-fulls of cold patch plus associated labor is) to FIX THE POTHOLE?!
Why should people who are physically-disabled be unable to safely cross Bigelow Boulevard at the Bloomfield Bridge to access the Bloomfield Shur-Save, Rite-Aid, restaurants, laundromats, etc. from their homes in Polish Hill, North Oakland, or the Upper Hill District? Furthermore, why isn't Bigelow Boulevard (or MANY other streets for that matter) a "complete" street with sidewalks?
Why don't we have designated litter crews hired to clean up our deplorably-unkempt neighborhoods? Do you realize how much psychological damage unsightly litter can have upon tourists, visitors, new residents, and, yes, even prospective entrepreneurs who may be narrowing down a pool of potential cities for a new firm that will provide jobs?
I'm tired of being told that potholes can't be patched in this city or crosswalks can't be repainted because retired city worker Joe Schmoe from Bloomfield is 76 and still collecting a HUGE pension from the city (or PAT, or PWSA, or PPS, or whatever other quasi-political entities that are also fiscally-troubled in this city) because union promises were made in the 1960s when those employees started at a time when Pittsburghers NEVER foresaw such an impending rapid decline in the percentage of the population belonging to the workforce. Now MY generation has to be shortchanged because THOSE city leaders didn't have the foresight to require city employees to have a 401k instead of a pension?!
Money makes the world go round. The majority of things are done or not done because of money. Fact of life. The city truly doesn’t have the money, it is not an excuse but a fact. A cold hard, numbers driven, math based fact.
The things you say are wrong with Pittsburgh do not personally impact me, but I would be willing to pay more to help fix them. I am a strong supporter of doing what is best for US, not for ME, and am willing to pay for.
As an aside, 401ks were not developed until the early 80s so they were not an option when these pensions were set up for the city employees. Joe Schmoe really had no other options.
I'm no longer house-hunting in the East End, Jay. I know the East End is destined to be reserved for only the affluent in the coming years, and I've come to terms with that. I'm no longer house-hunting, period, as I don't know if I want to stay here long-term when I see the quality-of-life here deteriorating as we're promoting population growth WITHOUT making necessary accompanying INFRASTRUCTURAL improvements---more trains, a wider I-376, more apartments, etc.---because Pittsburghers don't want to pay for them. That's just made the city a MORE expensive place to live since I moved here while having to deal with more crowded streets and sidewalks and higher rent.
Widening I-376 would hurt the city. If it helped anywhere, it would be the suburbs that it runs through. Anyway, that would be a PennDOT initiative, using federal money; city government wouldn't make it happen, and would be right in opposing it because it would hurt existing city neighborhoods. See Mon-Fayette Expressway, which will never be built in city limits.
Your generalizations about East End residents, their smartphones, etc., are consistently bizarre.
And, I thought you were against subsidized housing? Why do you want government to build apartments?
Infrastructure improvements are being made around here- Rte 28 is being improved currently-improvements in other areas of transportation are also being mad.
I376 really can't be practically made any wider- it funnels into a tunnel that is just 2 lanes in each direction and much of the rest of the highway is elevated on bridges on both sides of the Squirrel tunnels. Similar problems west of the city. It would be truly prohibitive to widen this particular highway.
As far as new apartments, some have already been built in East Liberty, the Hill District, South Side and elsewhere. And there is plenty of land cleared for further development when contractors are ready to build- both "brownfields" as well as the sites of former projects like St. Clair Village which had their dates with the wrecking ball.
Pittsburgh has expensive parts, but much of the city is still pretty reasonable.
1.) Route 28 still won't be as it should be when it's finished. Right now the "new and improved" Route 28 northbound/outbound STILL bottlenecks terribly because it narrows down to ONE lane near Sharpsburg, as the right-hand lane becomes an exit only lane to the Highland Park Bridge. That merging "choke point" is never going away. Similarly, Route 28 southbound/inbound STILL bottlenecks at the point in O'Hara Township where the right-hand lane becomes an exit for Fox Chapel Road just before the left-hand lane becomes an exit for the Highland Park Bridge. If you want to exit from Route 28 southbound/inbound and get across the 40th Street Bridge into Lawrenceville you need to IMMEDIATELY cut across two lanes of traffic to get into a left-hand turn lane from the offramp. That's "better" how? There's still ZERO onramp merge space trying to get onto Route 28 northbound/outbound at Millvale. I haven't been on the road in a few weeks, but last I checked there was a STOP SIGN there. A stop sign on a highway onramp is an "improvement"? I just think for all of the years Route 28 has been a construction nightmare, and for the millions upon millions invested there shouldn't still be so many issues to contend with due to poor design.
2.) If we're NOT going to widen I-376 to three lanes in each direction, and if we're also NOT going to invest in a new "T" line linking Monroeville to the Airport via the East End, Oakland, and Downtown, then what will happen to congestion on I-376 as the city continues to grow in the coming years? Heck, I've been on I-376 inbound during the AM rush when it backs up to Churchill at times, and I've been on I-376 inbound (from the west) in the AM rush when it backs up to Robinson Township. Are we honestly going to be looking at stop-and-go traffic extending from the Squirrel Hill Tunnel back to Monroeville and from the Fort Pitt Tunnels back to the Airport in 10 years as being "acceptable" for an area that is supposed to have an excellent quality-of-life? I've been on I-376 OUTBOUND (towards the East) at times where it backs up traffic onto the outbound Boulevard of the Allies in Uptown. Will that soon back up traffic all the way into Downtown?
3.) Right now Pittsburgh is having these major traffic issues with a HIGHLY CENTRALIZED EMPLOYMENT CLUSTER between Downtown and Oakland. What happens when office rent rises to the point where some major employers DO start to think a new construction campus setting in Findlay Township or Monroeville is more attractive from a purely fiscal standpoint? This may already be happening with U.S. Steel. PNC and UPMC are both unlikely to leave Downtown/Oakland. What about a variety of "mid-size" companies? Will they stomach higher rent in the coming years or hoof it to the 'burbs? 50% of the current Downtown workforce currently commutes via transit. Take 10,000 jobs out of Downtown and Oakland in the coming decade and supplant them into the suburbs somewhere accessible via I-376 (yet also poorly-serviced by transit). That's taking 5,000 vehicles that were taxing I-376 daily to reach those jobs in Downtown and Oakland and DOUBLING that to 10,000 vehicles daily associated with those jobs, as now EVERYONE at those jobs NEEDS to drive to work via I-376. Adding in those 5,000 new cars daily on I-376 along with expected continued demand on I-376 from new growth, and we may very well be looking at an I-376 a decade from now that is not only woefully congested but also fully obsolete---costing BILLIONS to ameliorate. Do we make tough financial sacrifices NOW to remedy this, or do we pass this ever-increasing cost onto our posterity?
4.) Pittsburgh's economy and population were GROWING during the Great Recession. This meant that developers eager to supply new housing were unable to secure financing for their projects due to banks being too "spooked" by the grim NATIONAL economic climate to lend, scuttling their intentions. Even with the thousands of new units under construction or in final planning stages in the Strip District, East Liberty, South Side Flats, Downtown, Bloomfield, and Lawrenceville in particular, the city still needs MORE to help play "catch-up" for several years of economic growth in which new housing starts were nearly non-existent, meaning people were moving here for jobs and couldn't find places to live, jacking up the rent for EVERYONE---long-timers and newbies alike.
5.) I want "Pittsburgh can't afford this..." eliminated from everyone's vocabulary. It's downright mind-numbing. If PRIOR generations hadn't had that same mentality, then perhaps costs wouldn't have skyrocketed from mere MILLIONS to tens or even HUNDREDS of millions to remedy some of TODAY'S woes that were predicted back then? Do we want to continue that legacy of kicking the can down the road to the next generation, hoping we'll be long dead before they realize that prior generations continuously allowed mole hills to grow into mountains to elude fiscal commitment?
3.) Right now Pittsburgh is having these major traffic issues with a HIGHLY CENTRALIZED EMPLOYMENT CLUSTER between Downtown and Oakland. What happens when office rent rises to the point where some major employers DO start to think a new construction campus setting in Findlay Township or Monroeville is more attractive from a purely fiscal standpoint? This may already be happening with U.S. Steel. PNC and UPMC are both unlikely to leave Downtown/Oakland. What about a variety of "mid-size" companies? Will they stomach higher rent in the coming years or hoof it to the 'burbs?
I don't think this is that terrible, and is certainly more consistent with what we did in the past during Pittsburgh's previous "boom" periods.
Many of Pittsburgh's previous employment centers were situated outside of town or Oakland- the steel mills, Westinghouse, the plants out on Neville Island- all major employment areas located outside the center of the city. The region's economic strategy has always included a significant amount of suburban development. The Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC) has participated in a lot of outlying projects both within the city limits and outside.
A lot of people don't care to come all the way to town to work, particularly if they live pretty far out.
I don't know what percentage overall of the working population in Greater Pittsburgh works in town or Oakland, I'd bet its still far less than half.
Widening I-376 would hurt the city. If it helped anywhere, it would be the suburbs that it runs through. Anyway, that would be a PennDOT initiative, using federal money; city government wouldn't make it happen, and would be right in opposing it because it would hurt existing city neighborhoods. See Mon-Fayette Expressway, which will never be built in city limits.
Your generalizations about East End residents, their smartphones, etc., are consistently bizarre.
And, I thought you were against subsidized housing? Why do you want government to build apartments?
I don't recall saying I was against subsidized housing (you may have me confused with anti-subsidized housing member h_curtis on that one).
Like it or not the ONLY privately-financed residential projects we're seeing these days are catering to the very affluent---attorneys, neurophysicists, CMU administrators, Google mid-level managers, surgeons, bank executives, etc.---who won't flinch at paying $1,700/month (plus utilities) for a cramped new construction 1-BR unit in the Strip, Downtown, East Liberty, South Side, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Lawrenceville, or increasingly the Mexican War Streets, Mt. Washington, Polish Hill, and more (Brookline, Friendship, and Bloomfield have both been seeing a rent uptick in recent years, too), because that's pocket change for them. If we're going to make more housing more affordable for the city's true working-class/middle-class---the RN single mothers; the police officer; the bar manager; the sanitation worker; the secretary; the taxi drivers; etc. then that's IMPOSSIBLE to do WITHOUT public subsidization. Everyone NEEDS to live somewhere. It need not be a 3-BR/2.5-BA high-end condo in Shadyside, of course; however, if we continue to let the rapidly increasing median rent in the city go unanswered, then in another generation it's not out of the question that Pittsburgh's city limits may compete with places like San Francisco or Manhattan in terms of pricing their "working-class" OUT into the 'burbs. I pay $700/month for a place that's falling apart. Something "nice" in my neighborhood is now going for the $900/month+ range---and ever-climbing. That was unheard of even as recently as when I moved here in 2010 and was told my then-$550/month rent was "a tad high for the neighborhood" by long-timers. If Polish Hill can go from $500/month being the "norm" for a 1-BR unit to nearly double that being the "new norm" in just a few years, then who's to say that also won't happen to Brighton Heights, Beechview, Troy Hill, and the rest of the currently "affordable" neighborhoods within the next 5-10 years? Then what? That's where increasing the availability of publicly-subsidized housing comes into play so that RN, taxi driver, or EMT doesn't have to decide between renting in a very unsafe neighborhood that will probably STILL be a very unsafe neighborhood in 2025 (i.e. Homewood, Beltzhoover, Middle Hill) OR a hike outside the city---and away from necessary transit lines to their urban workplaces.
I'm mocked on here quite a bit for this "East End Housing Crisis" nonsense. I know I'm embellishing. I know I'm dramatizing. Guess what? I don't care if it garners me so much hatred as long as it gets attention. If my neighborhood that people didn't even know about in 2010 and where people were paying $500/month in rent for a 1-BR nearly doubled in rent/popularity in just a few years, then who's to say that's also NOT going to happen to every other safe neighborhood with decent bones over the NEXT 5-10 years? Will that happen? Maybe yes. Maybe no. A conspiracy theorist may even infer that Polish Hill going from nothing to trendy actually coincides with when I moved here and started talking about it on here. Does City-Data truly have a much broader "reach" than some give it credit for? If it DOES, though, shouldn't we be planning NOW for what to do with the people who AREN'T "monied"? Are we just going to ship the working-class into new housing projects in Fox Chapel, courtesy of the Allegheny County Housing Authority, so the city doesn't have to deal with them? Goodjules, where do the working-class people of San Francisco live, because that's the road we're eventually heading down in the long-term if we don't start looking at the rising trends now and wondering when they'll start to crest, if ever.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PghYinzer
Money makes the world go round. The majority of things are done or not done because of money. Fact of life. The city truly doesn’t have the money, it is not an excuse but a fact. A cold hard, numbers driven, math based fact.
The things you say are wrong with Pittsburgh do not personally impact me, but I would be willing to pay more to help fix them. I am a strong supporter of doing what is best for US, not for ME, and am willing to pay for.
As an aside, 401ks were not developed until the early 80s so they were not an option when these pensions were set up for the city employees. Joe Schmoe really had no other options.
Europe and Canada seem to have no issues with providing a FAR superior transit infrastructure than anywhere in our country, which is too focused on incessant wars over fossil fuels (but that's for a separate rant).
As far as being "selfish" I'm not physically-disabled. When I used to work in Central Oakland I'd sometimes walk down Bigelow Boulevard from Polish Hill and would have to cross Bigelow at the Bloomfield Bridge via a pedestrian overpass that was graffiti-tagged with the little "guy in wheelchair" disabled symbol on the steps and the word "EQUAL" beneath it. Only THEN did it dawn on me, an able-bodied young male, that there certainly IS no way for someone in a motorized wheelchair to access Bloomfield, which is the commercial district for Polish Hill, Upper North Oakland, and the Upper Hill District, from the adjacent areas near this pedestrian overpass UNLESS they ventured into the right-of-way of traffic (very dangerous). Seeing that graffiti (albeit helpful graffiti) has haunted me for a while, and it is one of a zillion examples of how far trashed this city has allowed its infrastructure to become due to GENERATIONS of neglect and "kicking the can down the curb..."
I'll be honest, PghYinzer. It's made me angry. Very angry. I get angry when the very same people I see daily who think nothing of paying to utilize our business (luxury service); have a brand new Prius and BMW SUV in their driveway; have a $300,000+ home; answer their doors wearing attire displaying designer labels while yapping into their Smartphones and not even saying "Hello"; etc. are the same ones OPPOSED to marginally higher taxes to make our city a better place. We have a civic duty as denizens of Pittsburgh to help others when we can, especially those who can't always help themselves. In terms of the pedestrian overpass over Bigelow vs. what to do about those who are in wheelchairs/scooters? I don't know what the answer is. I know it will cost money. I know the city has no money. I know the only way the city can get more money is to increase revenues. I know the easiest way to generate more revenue to put into the city's coffers so they can start to fix these zillions of issues that were passed down to OUR generation over the years is to raise taxes. I know that raising taxes is unpopular.
I have NO IDEA how I would approach city council and/or the local media or whomever and make a SUCCESSFUL plea for council to introduce legislation to raise taxes AND for the majority of Pittsburghers to BACK such an increase. The library tax a few years ago passed by a landslide, but it was a VERY tiny tax and almost every Pittsburgher has at one point in time used a library or know someone who has and saw the value in SAVING them. A HEFTIER new tax to fix crumbling bridges, pave streets, patch potholes, install new sidewalks on streets that aren't "complete streets", add new bike lanes, make intersections physically-disabled-friendly, etc.?! I don't see how that would fly. In the interim all I can do is complain about how prior generations didn't fix these things 60, 40, 20, or even 10 years ago when the cost for many of these items was LESS than it is today---and how our current generation doesn't seem to want to pay TODAY to fix these things that will cost twice as much to fix in another 20 years.
As an aside, 401ks were not developed until the early 80s so they were not an option when these pensions were set up for the city employees. Joe Schmoe really had no other options.
Fair enough, I suppose. I didn't know this. With that being said as soon as 401(k)s were "invented", so to speak, prior city leaders should have begun to negotiate with union leaders in the 1980s to transition ALL new hires from pensions to 401(k)s. Someone hired by the city at age 18 in 1985 would be approaching 48 in 2015, which means in 2015 every city employee UNDER age 48 would NOT burden the city via a pension deficit at all, which means this "pension crisis" that is currently strangling our budget would go away on its own over time and wouldn't have us in quite as dire straits as we're in today (as, of course, not everyone who'd be hired in 1985 under that new policy would have been 18 at the time---many would be in their 30s upon hire and retiring soon with ZERO pension liability imposed upon the city).
I know..."coulda, woulda, shoulda". It still stinks that this city has had such lackluster elected leadership for so long. I'm very hopeful our new mayor will do better.
Sorry. Horrid day today. I'm just feeling helpless. I can't fix anything in the city. The city doesn't want to fix anything. A LOT needs fixed. I can't fix anything in my own life. It's like nothing can get fixed, and it's starting to get to me---a lot.
I need to refresh my perspective on Pittsburgh. I moved here expecting mediocrity, based upon the negative impressions expatriates in Metro DC had given me about the place, and I wound up being pleasantly surprised that it was, in fact, much better than just mediocre. It was above-average. Now I want MORE than a tad above mediocrity. I want this place to be something amazing, superb, wonderful, and special. I want this place to fart rainbows and puppies, the way many in Northern Virginia felt that area did. I want us to be "America's Most Livable City" again. Given the current climate of everyone just shrugging shoulders and saying "Meh. Nothing can be done..." about the city's generations-long problems I'm losing faith in it ever regaining that title. Rising rents, worsening traffic, epidemic litter, a joke of a transit system, and crumbling infrastructure aren't going to garner us any accolades anytime soon.
We shouldn't have to raise taxes or create organizations to clean up after people. Individuals are responsible for their own cleanliness and hygiene. Makes me wonder what the inside of their homes look like.
I'm mocked on here quite a bit for this "East End Housing Crisis" nonsense. I know I'm embellishing. I know I'm dramatizing. Guess what? I don't care if it garners me so much hatred as long as it gets attention. If my neighborhood that people didn't even know about in 2010 and where people were paying $500/month in rent for a 1-BR nearly doubled in rent/popularity in just a few years, then who's to say that's also NOT going to happen to every other safe neighborhood with decent bones over the NEXT 5-10 years? Will that happen? Maybe yes. Maybe no.
The problem will solve itself, I don't see where large tax increases and building housing projects for the middle class is going to be necessary.
The answer to the problem of the "East End Housing Crisis" is alluded to in your previous post.
Employers who don't have to be in the city will move out to the Findlays and Cranberrys to set up shop. Not only will their own costs be less, but it will make it easier for their workers to find reasonably priced housing. People that have to go to Findlay to work aren't going to want to live in Bloomfield and make that commute every day. Lower rent places in the western end of the county or in Beaver and Washington will look more inviting to those working over there.
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I just think for all of the years Route 28 has been a construction nightmare, and for the millions upon millions invested there shouldn't still be so many issues to contend with due to poor design. 
Goodjules, where do the working-class people of San Francisco live, because that's the road we're eventually heading down in the long-term if we don't start looking at the rising trends now and wondering when they'll start to crest, if ever. 
