Newsweek Article on Pittsburgh and G20 (York, Howard: low income, 2009, school)

[raynist]

Lessons for Detroit From Pittsburgh’s Rebirth | Newsweek Voices - Howard Fineman | Newsweek.com

[nuwaver99]

Thanks for the link raynist. It was a good read. Maybe Pittsburgh can now be looked upon as the ultimate college town instead of the Steel City if people want to always tell us what we do not have compared to New York, Chicago and LA. I guess our student to resident ratio would one of the highest in the nation for a major city when talking city proper.

[BrianTH]

I've been calling Pittsburgh an overgrown college town for a while now. Of course most college towns don't have their own major-league sports franchises, a world-class symphony, and so on.

I guess our student to resident ratio would one of the highest in the nation for a major city when talking city proper.

You are right--according to this, at 15.5% university students per 2006 Census estimates, the City of Pittsburgh was #2 among the central cities in the top 40 regions, after Providence.

SchoolEnrollmentRegionsandCities2006_200_image001. gif (image)

Of course in the interests of consistency, I should note this is a case where the City being relatively small in geographic area as compared to the entire metro area helps in the rankings.

By the way, the article associated with that chart explains how the relatively large percentage of students contributes to the City seeming to have relatively low income, as does the relatively large percentage of senior citizens. Of course this barbell-shaped age distribution should be temporary (the bulge among senior citizens is a legacy of the steel era).