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I hate to say it, but I agree with you here. San Francisco is probably the most gentrified city in the U.S., and the last few really bad neighborhoods have just gotten redeveloped within the past decade.
But it didn't take a century.
Serious gentrification has been sweeping through SF for about 25-30 years now. As is typical, that process has moved neighborhood by neighborhood, rather than all places moving gradually at the same pace. But when it has become a neighborhood's turn to gentrify, the process has worked fairly quickly--again, that is typical.
Pittsburgh is much closer to the beginning of that process than SF, but it HAS begun that process. And the pace is likely going to accelerate in coming years, given what we are seeing in various population and economic trends. That doesn't mean a place like Homewood is going to change tomorrow, but it does mean that it won't necessarily take a century for gentrification to start in Homewood, and when it starts in earnest it won't necessarily take decades for radical change to occur.
Well, after 5 decades of ingrained poverty and violence, it's not going to change overnight.
Overnight? No. In the next couple years? Also no.
But the process could start within, say, 10-20 years. And once it starts in earnest, rapid change will likely happen within years, not decades.
Again, this isn't theoretical: many other "inner city" neighborhoods in the United States had experienced similarly high levels socioeconomic distress for many decades before they started gentrifying. But once the gentrification process starts, that long history of distress isn't an automatic impediment to rapid change, as has been proven many times.
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If any of these are such great places to live, why aren't you living there?
Well, as noted I do live in Wilkinsburg.
But the more obvious answer to your question is that saying change could come rapidly to a place in the conceivable future is not the same thing as saying that such change has already occurred.
Homewood and Larimer aren't as high on the list, but just being in the East End could be enough to push gentrification efforts over the long term.
I think the Busway is also an often-overlooked factor in discussing fundamental development prospects. Indeed, these neighborhoods originally developed around stops on the Pennsylvania RR, a route which the Busway now traces.
From this post and the latest crime map of the Pitts
As an aside, I think one needs to take some of Uptown Kid's more colorful descriptions with a grain of salt. In particular, it is one thing for some gang to nominally claim some territory, another thing for it actually to dominate that territory.
In any event, though, crime patterns are one of the things that can very, very rapidly change as a result of gentrification.
I wonder about the not-so-bad non-trendy areas like Morningside or Stanton Heights. They definitely don't have a wasteland reputation (at least not that I have heard), but also tend to be overlooked as places to live in or visit for newcomers.
Mainly because they are residential, suburban-style neighborhoods which, while safe, have bad local schools. I could see Morningside appealing to gentrifiers - it has a tiny commercial area which could revive, and the housing stock isn't like Highland Park, but is still pretty good. It has a nice urban residential feel, even though it's detached housing. Stanton Heights in contrast is far more suburban in character. I just don't see that sort of neighborhood being greatly appealing any time soon.
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Originally Posted by LIRefugee
I'd put Greenfield in that category as well.
Greenfield had a mini-bubble around five years ago, IIRC. One of the last affordable neighborhoods with a good school feeder pattern.
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Originally Posted by BrianTH
It isn't "academic mumbo jumbo", it is a simple observation of what has happened in many other cities in the last few decades. What made Pittsburgh different in those decades is that the steel bust led to unusual dynamics of population loss and disinvestment that forestalled such developments happening here at the same pace.
Pittsburgh's situation isn't unusual though. Populations still shrunk last decade in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Louisville, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, etc. It's really a phenomena of virtually all cities in the Northeast and Midwest, with only oddball cultural centers which get a lot of immigration (New York, Boston), and midwestern cities with a lot of suburbs within their limits (Indianapolis, Columbus) bucking the trend.
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Originally Posted by BrianTH
But it didn't take a century.
Serious gentrification has been sweeping through SF for about 25-30 years now. As is typical, that process has moved neighborhood by neighborhood, rather than all places moving gradually at the same pace. But when it has become a neighborhood's turn to gentrify, the process has worked fairly quickly--again, that is typical.
It's typical in places with high property values, because rents force all the artists/hipsters/urban pioneers on the bleeding edge between the ghetto and the unaffordable. I just don't see Pittsburgh, even if we are returning to growth, getting to that point for decades yet. We're cheap enough we'll never see anything like Williamsburg.
Pittsburgh's situation isn't unusual though. Populations still shrunk last decade in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Louisville, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, etc. It's really a phenomena of virtually all cities in the Northeast and Midwest, with only oddball cultural centers which get a lot of immigration (New York, Boston), and midwestern cities with a lot of suburbs within their limits (Indianapolis, Columbus) bucking the trend.
The shape is somewhat similar in those cities as they all experienced similar forces (deindustrialization, surbanization, white flight, and so forth). But the severity of Pittsburgh's population decline is really pretty unique (although Detroit is now going through something similar).
Just some quick data, here is Chicago's population change by Census, starting 1940:
Before we move on, it is worth noting that with declining people per household, particularly in core urban areas, a small population decline in the same geographic territory does not necessarily mean a decline in the number of occupied housing units in that territory.
Again, that is a broadly similar shape, but the severity of the losses in Pittsburgh, particularly cumulatively, is very different.
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It's typical in places with high property values, because rents force all the artists/hipsters/urban pioneers on the bleeding edge between the ghetto and the unaffordable. I just don't see Pittsburgh, even if we are returning to growth, getting to that point for decades yet. We're cheap enough we'll never see anything like Williamsburg.
In some respects we are already at that point. We are still RELATIVELY affordable as compared to the cities which have been going through this process for decades, but on the other hand we have been experiencing unusually high housing appreciation rates in some core neighborhoods for around a decade or more--there was a brief leveling during the housing bust, but signs are that the appreciation is back and if anything accelerating.
I think if you asked the real artist/hipster/urban-pioneer types, they would in fact report that their target neighborhoods have shifted as a result. Places like the South Side and good chunks of the North Side and Lawrenceville are no longer super-cheap options. In my area, Regent Square proper is fairly pricey, and Park Place is coming along, so such people are being pushed further east.
Again, I think all this is consistent with the earliest days of gentrification in the big coastal cities as well. Things may never move quite as fast here, but on the other hand that is hard to say because we may be entering our period of peak core area gentrification right when a bunch of other forces favoring such developments are coming into alignment.
Again, that is a broadly similar shape, but the severity of the losses in Pittsburgh, particularly cumulatively, is very different.
You picked out two cities with smaller declines - in part because both have a growing Latino community, something Pittsburgh lacks. But not only Detroit, but Saint Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Cincinnati, have all seen similar declines of at least 5% per decade (and often double-digit declines) consistently since the 1960s. You could also include smaller cities in here which are similar in nature - Gary, Youngstown, Flint, Camden, etc. The term "rust belt" didn't come from nowhere.
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Originally Posted by BrianTH
I think if you asked the real artist/hipster/urban-pioneer types, they would in fact report that their target neighborhoods have shifted as a result. Places like the South Side and good chunks of the North Side and Lawrenceville are no longer super-cheap options. In my area, Regent Square proper is fairly pricey, and Park Place is coming along, so such people are being pushed further east.
Of course there are shifting desires. But my point was more that there are a huge range of desires. When my friends from college moved to New York, virtually everyone wanted to live in Williamsburg or Park Slope. Later they were priced out of both. When I lived in DC, Adams-Morgan had become unaffordable, and all the hipsters were migrating to Columbia Heights and the U-Street Corridor, despite both being rather unsafe. We've never seen this sort of en-masse turnover here, a you can tell, since businesses catering to the young and artsy are found all over the place.
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Originally Posted by BrianTH
Again, I think all this is consistent with the earliest days of gentrification in the big coastal cities as well. Things may never move quite as fast here, but on the other hand that is hard to say because we may be entering our period of peak core area gentrification right when a bunch of other forces favoring such developments are coming into alignment.
I am pretty optimistic about the future of Pittsburgh. But I think the shift will be a minor thing. Instead of a handful of stable neighborhoods and one or two emerging ones per decade, we might see some of the declining neighborhoods stabilize, and some of the stable ones start to grow. But there's still going to be parts of the city just treading water, and other portions which will be headed on a steep decline. I don't think the suburban-style portions of the city have too bright of a future in the next 10-20 years, and I think it will be a long time coming before Pittsburgh's urban demand is enough to push the cycle of poverty universally out to the first-ring suburbs.
But not only Detroit, but Saint Louis, Cleveland, Buffalo, Cincinnati, have all seen similar declines of at least 5% per decade (and often double-digit declines) consistently since the 1960s.
So "unique" was probably an overstatement on my part. Here is a handy list:
Sorting by population loss from peak, Pittsburgh does in fact rank behind Detroit and St Louis, and a few other smaller cities.
Still, it is way high on that list, and I don't think it is fair to say that "virtually all cities in the Northeast and Midwest" experienced the same severity of decline, minus a few "oddballs".
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Of course there are shifting desires.
Not shifting desires--I'm talking about relevant people being priced out of neighborhoods they once could have afforded. Again, you are looking at DC and NYC after several rounds of this happening already over the course of several decades. But the process has in fact started in Pittsburgh too.
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We've never seen this sort of en-masse turnover here, a you can tell, since businesses catering to the young and artsy are found all over the place.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here, but I think it might be the second stage effect where first a neighborhood retail mix changes to accommodate the young/artsy crowd, then it changes again to accommodate an older/wealthier crowd.
I actually think we have seen that a bit in neighborhoods like Shadyside and Squirrel Hill, which are on the short list of Pittsburgh neighborhoods that have progressed that far along in the process. I'd also keep my eye on Lawrenceville--already some of the restaurants and such are marketing pretty upscale, certainly above what you would expect in a real "fringe" area. Same deal with East Liberty, which may be moving so fast it actually mostly skips the first stage.
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I am pretty optimistic about the future of Pittsburgh. But I think the shift will be a minor thing.
We'll see, I guess. I think the change from a shrinking population to a growing population, particularly with the population growth being fueled by younger, better-educated, higher-income migrants, is going to result in more than minor dynamic shifts.
In fact, most of our historically "stable" neighborhoods are really at capacity--vacancies are low and infill options are limited. So you actually can't accommodate more people into the City without expanding population growth--not just stability, but actual population growth--to outside of those boundaries. And many of these new people will have incomes to support significant investment.
Sorting by population loss from peak, Pittsburgh does in fact rank behind Detroit and St Louis, and a few other smaller cities.
This is more of an aside than a direct response to this thread. I have never been to Detroit (though I've been to the airport many, many times), but I recently drove through Saint Louis for the first time in a decade and ventured beyond downtown for the first time ever. I was driving to the airport, entering the the city from I-70 downtown from Illinois. After leaving the downtown area, I was astounded to find many once-beautiful brick homes existing in a state of decay so profound that it made Hazelwood look vibrant. Large swaths of buildings were missing windows, or missing plywood to cover up the windows, and some were missing entire walls so you could see into the individual rooms from the highway. I'd rather sleep in the Penn-Lincoln Hotel than most of those buildings, and they demonstrated that Saint Louis had suffered a population decline more precipitous than Pittsburgh, as the data shows.
Detroit is in an entirely different league, but I haven't seen it with my own eyes yet.
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