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.
Certainly if you just look at numbers you could walk away thinking that. I think the case for Pittsburgh starts with the fact that it started facing stagnation and decline a full two decades before the other cities. The decentralization of the steel industries there actually started happening in the early 40s during WW2.
When I look at the steeper hill PGH has had to climb, and the fact that it posted metro gains for the first time in over 6 decades; It tells me the framework that has been laid to transition it into a modern environment with a sustainable population is more than just hype. Really for all of those metro's that had been facing those decades of decline. The coming years will be interesting to see if they are able to sustain those positive trends.
Pun not intended, I assume.
One of the things I think many people don't appreciate about Pittsburgh is its topography. People swoon over the hills of San Francisco, yet Pittsburgh can match San Fran hill for hill. All it's missing are huge bodies of water surrounding it on three sides.
And the most spectacular highway entrance to any US city is the one into downtown Pittsburgh from the south, on I-279. You plunge into the Fort Pitt Tunnel, then pop out of it onto a bridge with the Golden Triangle dead ahead of you, point first. This may be one of the few positives to flow from our decision to run the freeways through the cities rather than around them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ClevelandBrown
Come on. That two decades is not an accurate statement. Don't put that out here like its a fact. No different than any of your typical rust belt cities/metros. ... Pittsburgh just whiter so population decreased sooner (due to lower birth rates).
With that, I've always been one who has touted Pittsburgh as being a great city. it also has to this day its share of blight, even within the city (Hill District)... It just happens where most of the blight is outside city limits in those depressed/just starting to recover "suburbs". Pittsburgh is shielded in the fact it doesn't have to drag areas like Rankin, Braddock, McKeesport (dozens of other small run down industrial towns along the rivers) along with its city numbers, when a lot of them in the core.
People dog places like Columbus for being 200 square miles like its not urban compared to 50 square miles of Pittsburgh. What about them other 150 square miles? It works both ways (though Pittsburgh does kill it when talking just within 50)
The difference lies in how those other 150 square miles are developed.
I've been slogging through a Strong Towns study of my native Kansas City, Mo., that argues that the city's decision to follow the very-low-density, freeway-oriented path to growth after World War II has been a disaster for the city and its finances. The study points out that from 1910, when the city made its last pre-WW2 annexation, until 1946, the year before it began a roughly 35-year-long spree of gobbling up hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans around it by annexing the south-side suburb of Marlborough, the city added some 200,000 residents without adding a single square inch of land. Its population of roughly 434,000 that year was only about 1,000 less than its 1990 trough of 435,000 — but those 435,000 residents in 1990 lived on more than five times as much land — 316 square miles as opposed to 60.
What does that last stat tell you about what the Kansas City of 1940 must have looked like compared to the one of today?
I don't know whether I posted this comment in this thread or another, but somewhere here, I recently wrote that the zenith of Kansas City's evolution into a great American city came in the 1930s, when several notable civic buildings (Municipal Auditorium, City Hall, Jackson County Court House) and institutions (Nelson-Atkins Museum, University of Kansas City [now UMKC]) opened. (The start of work on the Country Club Plaza in 1921 and the opening of the Kansas City Museum of History and Science in 1940, right after Boss Tom Pendergast was laid low, bracket this period. I've also maintained that everything that makes Kansas City cool today can be traced to the Pendergast era.)
Up until the last two decades, all of Kansas City's growth has occurred on the fringe as the core of the old pre-WW2 city hollowed out. I took a photo of downtown Kansas City from the southeast in 2014 that ran with a sidebar to a feature I wrote for Next City about the Power & Light District in 2015 that I couldn't have taken when I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s because I would have been standing inside someone's house. Everything in the foreground save for one forlorn stone city building was grass — an old historically Black residential neighborhood had reverted to prairie.
A resurgence in the core, led by a huge increase in the downtown resident population, has contributed to Kansas City recording its largest population ever (by about 1,000 over its 1970 peak of 507,330) in this Census, but the fringe-oriented growth model remains dominant. And the central point Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn makes about that sort of development is: It doesn't generate the tax revenue needed for its own upkeep. The overarching point being made in that "Growing into Decline" case study is that the sprawling, autocentric development style almost all American cities have pursued since World War II is financially unsustainable, and Kansas City, which has more freeway lane-miles per capita than any other US city, can serve as a poster child for this point.
Columbus has grown since 1960 in the same fashion that Kansas City has: by sprawling at the edges rather than densifying as Kansas City did in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. (And even though the city's population density was comparable to that of Chicago or Philadelphia today, even that denser KC of 1940 was overwhelmingly a city of single-family homes on their own lots. Viewed from the air, however, the houses were built in very close proximity to one another, much as they are in California suburbs today.)
That's the reason why Columbus gets dinged and Pittsburgh doesn't. In fact, your very last sentence hints at this difference.
Come on. That two decades is not an accurate statement. Don't put that out here like its a fact. No different than any of your typical rust belt cities/metros. ... Pittsburgh just whiter so population decreased sooner (due to lower birth rates).
Have you looked at the numbers? It's something that reflects in the data. Perhaps saying "2 decades" is gives a bit of an exaggeration, It's more like 13-15 years. The PGH metro area started officially losing population in the early 1960s. It's first official losses were in the 1970 census, this was after a couple decades of slowing growth. Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland didn't start having population declines until the mid 70's and their first official losses came in the 1980 census. Prior to that even though the cities had started to struggle, their metro growth was still fairly robust. This is an economic decline. The "lower birth rate" decline you're talking about wasn't really documented until the 1990's, and is different than the white flight the core cities were experiencing. Pittsburgh's early declines were definitely more than the story of attrition that is used for it's more recent declines. I am pretty confident in my statements.
Quote:
With that, I've always been one who has touted Pittsburgh as being a great city. it also has to this day its share of blight, even within the city (Hill District)... It just happens where most of the blight is outside city limits in those depressed/just starting to recover "suburbs". Pittsburgh is shielded in the fact it doesn't have to drag areas like Rankin, Braddock, McKeesport (dozens of other small run down industrial towns along the rivers) along with its city numbers, when a lot of them in the core.
People dog places like Columbus for being 200 square miles like its not urban compared to 50 square miles of Pittsburgh. What about them other 150 square miles? It works both ways (though Pittsburgh does kill it when talking just within 50)
I agree with this. I actually think all core cities should cover the majority of their urban footprint. If Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffallo were allowed to annex their fleeing tax bases back, their stories over the last 70 years would look very different. The US system of suburban areas incorporating as cities to fight back against the core city is not a good one in my opinion. The cities who were land locked by other incorporated entities were walled in while their resident base, tax base, and wealth were syphoned off, and those other entities didn't care what it did to their regions as a whole. Detroit is probably the best example of that.
The Syracuse slight decline is from the more rural Madison and Oswego counties, both of which also have a decent college presence. So, I don't know if towards the end of the decade, the population was impacted by the loss of college students in those counties. I only say that as college students were counted at "their usual residence" on April 1st, 2020. You could maybe add Cayuga County, which used to be in the MSA until 2010, but it also declined in population.
The Syracuse slight decline is from the more rural Madison and Oswego counties, both of which also have a decent college presence. So, I don't know if towards the end of the decade, the population was impacted by the loss of college students in those counties. I only say that as college students were counted at "their usual residence" on April 1st, 2020. You could maybe add Cayuga County, which used to be in the MSA until 2010, but it also declined in population.
There's a few other college areas that appear to have uncharacteristic losses as well that I've observed. It would be interesting to do a side by side comparison of a few.
Good to confirm. I knew it was one of those (2000-2010), but I wasn’t 100% sure about the 1990s.
Do you have the numbers/breakdown?
Historical population (metro Atlanta
Census Pop. %±
1900 419,375 —
1910 522,442 24.6%
1920 622,283 19.1%
1930 715,391 15.0%
1940 820,579 14.7%
1950 997,666 21.6%
1960 1,312,474 31.6%
1970 1,763,626 34.4%
1980 2,233,324 26.6%
1990 2,959,950 32.5%
2000 4,112,198 38.9%
2010 5,286,728 28.6%
2020 6,020,864 15.8% (can't remember the exact percentage but it was somewhere around 15%-16%
Growth in Atlanta has definitely slowed, this is the slowest percentage growth it's seen since the 1930-1940s really. You have to go back to the 1970s-1980s to see a numerical increase this small.
Last edited by MichiganderTexan; 08-16-2021 at 06:47 AM..
What’s the difference in old south vs new south?
More or less cities that were larger and peaked during the manufacturing/industrial age, vs cities that were aggressive at attracting new business during the 70s/80s/90s. Old south cities tend to share built form and some growth struggles that northern industrial cities had to a lesser degree. "New South" cities have grown much faster in the modern age. There are a few cities on those lists that I would shift over if I had to do it again but at this point it's off topic and semantical to get into a debate about where they belong.
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.
