Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
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".
100% has to do with the Universities located in the city. CMU and Pitt are powerhouses.
Also, like you said, it lost more in the metro area than the other regions. Pittsburgh has a lot of manufacturing towns surrounding it that are still downtrodden and terrible places, and may never return to their former manufacturing glory days.
It seems like Pittsurgh and Buffalo are very similar in this regard...both have faster declining metro areas with slower declining cities. I think Pittsburgh and Buffalo both have stable, affluent areas in their cores, so their populations did not decline as much. Detroit and Cleveland in contrast have very unstable cores with relatively few stable areas so their city populations fell faster. Buffalo and Pittsburgh have fast declining inner ring suburbs, and actually so do Cleveland and Detroit. The difference is in the outer ring and exurban areas. Exurban Cleveland and Detroit have boomed, lessening the decline of the overall metro. Buffalo and Pittsburgh in contrast still have growing outer areas; they just don't grow as fast.
Everybody is going to talk about the universities in Pittsburgh, but that's not even the biggest reason why. The biggest reason why is because of the distribution of heavy industry. The cities of Detroit and Cleveland suffered a lot of blight and abandonment because most of the heavy industry in each region was located in the cities themselves, while most of the heavy industry in the Pittsburgh region was located outside the city.
When suburbanization kicked into high gear, those who had the means moved away from the heavy industry in the cities of Detroit and Cleveland, leaving very large sections of each city in bad shape, while simultaneously creating continuous belts of established, wealthy suburbs. On the other hand, there was never large-scale abandonment in the city of Pittsburgh because there wasn't nearly as much heavy industry to move away from, and, thus, the urban fabric remained much more intact, even if some of it needed a paint job and a pressure wash. The real blight and abandonment in the Pittsburgh region can be found in many of the outlying cities and boroughs up and down the river, such as Homestead, Rankin, Braddock, Duquesne, McKeesport and Clairton. Indeed, many of the oldest post-war suburbs in the Pittsburgh region are near those towns. Examples include Forest Hills, Braddock Hills, North Versailles and West Mifflin. Ultimately, Pittsburgh didn't develop a belt of wealthy suburbs (until very recently) because much of the wealth stayed in the city.
The universities are not the most important difference, but there is still a difference. In Pittsburgh are two Highest Research Activity universities and one Higher Research Activity University, and they're all located very close together. A line drawn from the middle of the Duquesne University campus through the University of Pittsburgh campus to the middle of the Carnegie Mellon University campus is only two and a half miles long. By comparison, Cleveland has one Highest Research Activity University and one Higher Research Activity University, and a line drawn from the middle of the Cleveland State University campus to the middle of the Case Western Reserve University campus is three and a half miles long through some of the worst neighborhoods in the city. And though Wayne State University in Detroit is a Highest Research Activity university, it's the only research university in the city, and its influence is proportionally diminished by the size of Detroit compared to Pittsburgh.
Ironically, the “Rust Belt” metro that people may not realize hasn’t lost population in an official census is Rochester NY. While the city is about 60%-2/3 of its peak population, it has actually grown in population for every official census.
As for Pittsburgh, a lot of the mill towns mentioned and some others(Aliquippa, Monessen, Donora, Ambridge, etc) served as smaller industrial center versus having said areas concentrated in parts of the center city. Lackawanna in the Buffalo area is similar in this regard, as it was built around and named after a steel plant/company.
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".
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.
Pittsburgh region suffered worse than Cleveland and Detroit.... I am kinda questioning the validity of the question in this thread.
Yes the region suffered more but the City maintained a greater portion of its population. If Pittsburgh had lost a proportional amount to its metro area as Cleveland it would have been down to ~250,000, it lost fewer city residents while its metro lost nearly 2x the residents.
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.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
