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Old 05-02-2008, 03:45 PM
 
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Pittsburgh: Livable or Leavable?

The shortcomings in city-ranking indexes
Bill Steigerwald | May 3, 2007


Last week Places Rated Almanac shocked the country and ticked off the tourist-and-convention bureaus in dozens of losing cities by declaring metropolitan Pittsburgh the most livable city in the United States.
Local boosters and most of the equally joyous local media in this economically stagnant, over-taxed and poorly-governed region greeted the “news” like it was a scientific certainty—or like Pittsburgh had been awarded a new Toyota plant. It’s not the first time the PR-savvy folks at “Places Rated Almanac” have crowned the former “Steel City” most livable city. It also happened in 1985, just as the region’s manufacturing economy was being crushed by the collapsing steel industry like a rusty old car.
Choosing Pittsburgh in 1985 was so shocking, the New York Times couldn’t believe it. It parachuted a reporter into Pittsburgh who wrote that "With its breathtaking skyline, its scenic waterfront, its cozily vibrant downtown, its rich mixture of cultural amenities, its warm neighborhoods and its scrubbed-clean skies, it no longer is the smoky, smelly, gritty mill town of yesteryear."
It was a nice plug for the “Smoky City,” though in ’85 it hadn’t actually been smoky for more than 30 yesteryears. Meanwhile, as the Pittsburghers basked in the glory of living in America’s most livable city, the region’s manufacturing economy was falling off a cliff. In 1985 alone, 38,000 mostly young job-seekers moved away. By 2000, more than 140,000 had left.
Since 1985, despite bleeding people and slowly converting to a sluggish service economy based on health care and organ transplants, the region has always been ranked among the almanac’s Top 20 most livable cities. That’s mainly because the ranking system favors the area’s many priceless assets, which include an abnormally low crime rate, a populace of regular-guy, smart-ass Michael Keaton-types (Keaton's a native), great old city neighborhoods and big suburban homes so cheap they’d make a Washingtonian weep. Pittsburgh also has top universities like Carnegie-Mellon and Pitt, major league sports teams, and a beautiful green landscape of hills, hollows and wide rivers. Sure, pay scales are low and the populace can be a little bigoted, too Democrat, and too working class. The two unofficial regional religions—unionism and Steelerism—can be annoying. And pop culturally, it's at least 5 years behind L.A. But Pittsburgh is a good city to raise a family in, grow old in and die in.
“Places Rated Almanac” bases a city’s over-all rank on nine categories, on each of which the Pittsburgh region consistently hits doubles and triples but no home runs: recreation, education, transportation, ambiance, health care, crime, economy, housing, and climate.
“Ambiance” includes historic districts and cultural and artistic assets, and Pittsburgh is amply blessed with them. Its best (i.e. lowest) score was in recreation (21st in the country). Its moderate four-season climate score was worst, but not bad—135th best out of 379 cities.
Being picked most-livable over great cities like San Francisco, Boston, and even overrated Portland, Oregon, is always nice. But the more you know about what’s really wrong with this once great and still very fine city, the less you trust “Places Rated Almanac” knows what it’s doing.
Maybe its data crunchers secretly grade on the curve for Rust Belt cities ruined by the arrogance, greed, and stupidity of political and corporate power brokers. Or maybe they slipped the city some extra points for having the country’s youngest mayor, for winning five Super Bowls, or for pioneering the deindustrialization of North America 60 years ago.
The almanac didn’t subtract livability points for the City of Pittsburgh’s high tax rates, decades of moronic management, and the millions in subsidies handed to the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins for their new playpens, as well as to national retailers whose outlets that then went belly up.
Pittsburgh is in a death spiral. It’s bankrupt. Its school district spends $16,000 a year per kid. Its parking tax is the highest on Earth: 50 percent. City police and firefighters irresponsibly pad their numbers, salaries, and pensions—and openly trade their mayoral votes for sweetheart contracts. Meanwhile, local school and property taxes are among the highest in the country. So are public bus and taxi fares. And, oh yeah, highways are congested, in bad shape, and under-built.
Yes, Pittsburgh is highly livable. But it’s also dying. The region has the doomed demographics of Western Europe. It has fewer foreign-born immigrants and a higher percentage of white people than any major American city. In 1960, when the country had 175 million people, there were 2.4 million people in the metro Pittsburgh region, 1.6 million in Allegheny County and 604,000 in the city of Pittsburgh. Today, with 300 million Americans, the comparable numbers are 2.3 million metro, 1.2 million county and – incredibly – just 315,000 souls left in a city built to handle 1 million.
No matter how flawed or unscientific the almanac’s title of most-livable is, beating out 378 cities was great for the morale and civic pride of Pittsburgh, whose thriving civic booster sector will live off the good PR for a decade. Unfortunately, however, a recent U.S. Census Bureau study reported some disappointing news. Since 2000 Pittsburgh has lost more people—almost 60,000—than any other metropolis in the country except for poor New Orleans. But New Orleans’ depopulation disaster doesn’t count. It was caused by a once-in-a-lifetime act of God and the ineptitude of the Army Corps of Engineers. So unless 50,000 immigrants invade Pittsburgh real soon, it looks like “America’s Most Livable City” will soon become “America’s Most Leave-able City.”
Bill Steigerwald is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
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Old 05-02-2008, 05:33 PM
 
Location: Los Angeles Area
3,306 posts, read 4,138,708 times
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I think anybody that has lived in Pittsburgh and is modestly honest with themselves knows that there was something seriously wrong with this ranking.

When I moved to Pittsburgh I had never been off the west coast (traveled out of the country, but never to other ares of the US). Me and my wife drove across the country and after Texas we started to notice big differences in demographics. No more Mexicans or immigrants in general. The trend continued all the way to Pittsburgh. Anyhow, I grew up in the LA area so having immigrants around was simply natural to me and I never thought of how important they were for the economic success of the region, but once I moved to Pittsburgh it started to become more clear. The correlation between immigrants and a successful local economy is very strong, I can't think of any area that is doing well that doesn't have a big immigrant population. There seems to be a simple formula in fact, free up the area for business and attract immigrants (both US born and otherwise).

Pittsburgh fails really bad on both issues though. Doing business in Pittsburgh is horrible in so many ways. And for whatever reason the city does not attract immigrants at all. Me and my wife would get all excited when we saw a Mexican in Pittsburgh, it was such an odd occurrence! I'm not exactly sure why the area doesn't attract people though, I think partly the local people are a bit xenophobic. My wife looks Mexican (she is really biracial, not Hispanic at all) and people simply don't know what to make of her. Pittsburgh does have one source of attracting immigrants though - CMU. But it fails badly at keeping them in the area (although with US students as well).

Anyhow, I liked Pittsburgh enough that I would've stayed there if the city gave me some sort of incentive to do so. But it seems they are more interested in giving away tax dollars to the corrupt and well-connected. That and spending money on horrible advertisements to make people feel good about Pittsburgh (they are so so cheesy! "Tell'em your from Pittsburgh!").
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Old 05-02-2008, 06:50 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,915,508 times
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Well, that article makes a basic logical mistake. It notes problems with Pittsburgh, which is fine, but doesn't do a rigorous assessment of whether those problems somehow distinguish Pittsburgh from all other cities.

For example, a rigorous study of tax rates would show that the total tax burden in Pittsburgh is about average among major cities, and well below cities like NY, Boston, or SF (as an aside, people often get thrown off by the high property tax rates, but given the low property prices, in the end the property taxes actually paid end up around average). Similarly, in most cities you will find plenty of people complaining about the local government and public service workers. And as far as congestion is concerned, Pittsburgh actually has relatively low commute times. As for population, it is a complex subject, but the continuing loss of population is consistent with a ripple effect from the disproportionate loss of young people from 1970 to about 1990. The pattern has changed since then, however, and there is good reason to believe the population will stabilize fully once the last of the steel era retirees move or pass away.

So I find it somewhat ironic that the author complains about this "unscientific" study, but counters it only with a rather "unscientific" set of complaints. But that is journalism these days.
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Old 05-02-2008, 07:01 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,915,508 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Humanoid View Post
The correlation between immigrants and a successful local economy is very strong.
This is actually a very complex subject. It turns out that different classes of immigrants have different economic impacts on a region, and also different classes of immigrants are attracted to different regions. The upshot is that immigration per se is neither good nor bad for a region, and ideally what a region should want is to be a place attracting a mix of immigrants weighted toward the more high-value sorts of immigrants.

And that I think should be Pittsburgh's goal. As you note, it already does a decent job of attracting high-value immigrants to the universities, and the hospitals can serve the same function. The key will be to get more of those people to then stay permanently.
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Old 05-02-2008, 07:08 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,355,293 times
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Quote:
As for population, it is a complex subject, but the continuing loss of population is consistent with a ripple effect from the disproportionate loss of young people from 1970 to about 1990. The pattern has changed since then, however, and there is good reason to believe the population will stabilize fully once the last of the steel era retirees move or pass away.
That is going to be a very long time. The steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s. The exodus was mainly among people under 40 (at the time), that is, born around 1945 or later. Those that stayed are now in their early 60s and older. It will be a long time before the last of them dies, probably 30 years. And if there were more jobs in Pittsburgh, young people would be moving there, just like they are moving to Denver, Seattle and other cities.
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Old 05-02-2008, 07:43 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana View Post
That is going to be a very long time. The steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s. The exodus was mainly among people under 40 (at the time), that is, born around 1945 or later. Those that stayed are now in their early 60s and older. It will be a long time before the last of them dies, probably 30 years.
Sure, but over time they will have a diminishing impact on the overall statistics as they pass or move away. Indeed, the literal last person will of course have no noticeable effect on the statistics at all.

Quote:
And if there were more jobs in Pittsburgh, young people would be moving there, just like they are moving to Denver, Seattle and other cities.
Based on the latest information I have seen, the population of young people in the city itself is indeed increasing, even while it is decreasing in the rest of Allegheny County. See here:

Null Space: correction

I think this is consistent with the point we have discussed before, which is that I believe Pittsburgh is transitioning to a smaller but healthier city. As it completes that transition, however, not all parts of the region are likely to come along (indeed, we may even end up with the functional equivalent of ghost towns).
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Old 05-02-2008, 07:57 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,355,293 times
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Well, yes, the last person will have no statistical impact at all. But my point is, there are a lot of people who have at least 10-20 years left to live. Time will tell.

Quote:
(indeed, we may even end up with the functional equivalent of ghost towns).
Been to Beaver Falls lately? That's what it reminds me of, though there are people living there, about half of its population of 1940 in its heyday, and about 2/3 of the population of my youth there.
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Old 05-02-2008, 08:18 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana View Post
Well, yes, the last person will have no statistical impact at all. But my point is, there are a lot of people who have at least 10-20 years left to live. Time will tell.
Sure, and if I was an actuary I could probably give you a pretty good estimate of how that population will decline over the next 30 years. But I think we agree there won't be some magical point in the near future at which they will cross some line and become irrelevant. Rather, this cohort will just be gradually diminishing in statistical importance over time.

Quote:
Been to Beaver Falls lately? That's what it reminds me of, though there are people living there, about half of its population of 1940 in its heyday, and about 2/3 of the population of my youth there.
Unfortunately, towns as far away from the city as Beaver Falls are indeed probably the most vulnerable to eventually reaching the point where they simply cannot be sustained even at their current smaller size.
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Old 05-03-2008, 02:12 AM
 
Location: Los Angeles Area
3,306 posts, read 4,138,708 times
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Quote:
For example, a rigorous study of tax rates would show that the total tax burden in Pittsburgh is about average among major cities,
Pittsburgh taxes are pretty bad, its not so much that they a dramatically higher when you look at total tax vs total income or some similar metric. They are bad in that they tax the poor and middle-class heavily and tax the rich very little. For example, in California a family of 4 making 70k a year will only pay around 1.3~2% on the 70k (varies depending on the number of deductions, no more than around 2% though). The same family in Pittsburgh would pay 6% on the 70k must some nonsense fees for working in the city. If the family owned a house worth 210k they would own $2,100 property tax in California with a raise of at most 1% a year. In Pittsburgh they would owe around $5,500 and the city can...almost randomly raise the rate at any point.

Now, if you're taking millions a year you will get taxed less in Pittsburgh than you would in California. And California has pretty heavy taxes, yet Pittsburgh is WAY worse for your average family! Washington has no income tax and sales tax no more than Pittsburgh (and property tax that is actually less).

Anyhow, knowing the total tax rate in some sense isn't very interesting. What is interesting is knowing who makes out most with state tax laws and how the laws create various incentives (or disincentives) for the people in the area. Tax wise Pittsburgh is not good for many, only rich non-business folk. Average individuals get screwed and so do corporations.

PA can do two simple things to improve matters. Create a tax system that benefits the middle-class not the politically well-connected and get ride of city level taxes and raise the state tax for all residents.

Quote:
he population of young people in the city itself is indeed increasing
But what sort of young people? I can only guess from my observation. It seems Pittsburgh is trying to be like Portland a bit. Portland is seeing a lot of growth with 20 somethings, but they aren't the sort of 20 somethings that are creating business etc. They are the sort of 20 somethings that work at target and smoke pot with their free time. But maybe Pittsburgh is doing better and attracting people with the "right stuff", but is anybody measuring it? Not all young folks are economically equivalent.
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Old 05-03-2008, 02:20 AM
 
Location: Pittsburgh, USA
3,131 posts, read 9,346,749 times
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That's last year's news, not last week.
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