Comments on Pittsburgh Renaissance

After more than sixty years of local boasting about “renaissance” and proclamations of Pittsburgh as a “comeback city,” the concept of the Pittsburgh renaissance merits serious reconsideration by younger scholars. It is time for urbanists to reject the chamber-of-commerce palaver about renaissance and to face the fact that the “renaissance” is more of a public relations slogan than a serious statement of objective reality. Pittsburgh has not escaped many of the problems plaguing the older, deindustrializing hubs of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States. Pittsburgh’s development has not been an exception to the rule; it has paralleled the development of other cities which generally have been perceived as declining.

Thus, the difference between the widely acknowledged urban basket case of Detroit and the supposed renaissance city of Pittsburgh is much less striking than Pittsburgh’s perennial boosters would have one believe. Both cities have lost a majority of their populations since 1950, and if one considers metropolitan areas as a whole, Pittsburgh’s metro area, unlike virtually all other American metropolitan areas, has gained almost no population. Pittsburgh’s metro area grew only 6 percent in population between 1950 and 2010 compared to 42 percent for such bastions of deindustrialization as metropolitan Detroit or metropolitan Cleveland.

Like Detroit, Pittsburgh has suffered fiscal crisis. During the early 1970s, Mayor Peter Flaherty felt compelled to slash city payrolls, imposing draconian budget cuts on a municipality seeking to reduce its costs. Then in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Pittsburgh suffered virtual bankruptcy. In 2003, an independent auditor reported that Pittsburgh had “negative net assets that raise substantial doubts about its ability to continue as a going concern,” a quote that sounds akin to more recent pronouncements regarding bankrupt Detroit. Each of the three major bond rating firms assigned Pittsburgh’s debt “junk bond” status. At that time no other major city bore that dubious distinction. The city laid off more than four hundred employees and closed all the public swimming pools and recreation centers. ¹ Broke and unable to provide basic services, Pittsburgh had to seek refuge under Pennsylvania’s Municipal Financial Recovery Act (Act 47 of 1987). It became a fiscal ward of the state, ceding control of its finances to a state-appointed financial recovery coordinator.

Having yielded to the guardianship of the state, the City of Pittsburgh’s finances improved. Yet at the beginning of 2014, the School District of Pittsburgh faced a budget crisis, with the state auditor general conducting an audit to determine how to avoid financial collapse. ² Conforming to a pattern commonplace among older hubs in the Northeast and Midwest, Pittsburgh public schools were underperforming and rapidly losing students. Enrollment dropped 25 percent between 2005 and 2013, and despite neighborhood protests the number of public schools declined from ninety-one to fifty-four during the decade prior to 2013. ³ Given the district’s dismal financial prospects, more school closings were predicted.

Sixty years after the onset of supposed renaissance, housing abandonment and depopulation plagued the poorest Pittsburgh neighborhoods as well as adjacent once-industrial suburban municipalities. For example, the population of Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood plummeted from thirty-four thousand to nine thousand during the second half of the twentieth century. ⁴ At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, one study found that almost 44 percent of the land in the Homewood area was vacant as were 30 percent of the houses. ⁵

I cite these facts not to “trash” Pittsburgh and its metropolitan area but to place it accurately in the context of urban America. It has suffered, and to a degree still suffers, the same problems that have confronted Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. It has coped with those problems and adapted. Yet it is not an exceptional case, a shining beacon in contrast to the otherwise bleak cityscape of the rustbelt. It is not the diametric opposite of Detroit but a city which has shared the Motor City’s problems. Pittsburgh’s new reliance on employment in educational and medical institutions is not an unusual or extraordinary phenomenon. Such reliance is a commonplace fact of contemporary urban America. In many American cities, large and small, hospitals and schools and universities rank as the largest employers. Present-day Pittsburgh relies on an eds-meds economic base just as does such smaller once-industrial cities as Muncie, Indiana, or such larger post-industrial hubs as Cleveland. It is not a “renaissance” city but a survivor city that has coped, adapted, and is still seeking answers as to how to adjust to a twenty-first century world.

The term “renaissance” is, then, a sales pitch that probably should be expunged from serious discussions of the Pittsburgh experience. Perhaps Pittsburgh’s greatest achievement has been in the field of public relations. From the 1950s, it has advertised itself not simply as a survivor but as a success, securing repeatedly such titles as America’s “most livable city.” Hard-headed scholars might want to consider why the “most livable city” has over the past sixty-five years attracted fewer new residents than any other metropolis in America. Urbanists are fans of cities and are all too ready to applaud every encouraging sign from modest urban gardening efforts to mega downtown projects. Pittsburgh has seemingly benefited from this bias, though one may question whether reluctance to face all the facts is actually beneficial.

The younger scholars in this symposium have turned a skeptical eye to the “renaissance,” questioning its origins and consequences. Repeatedly they challenge boosterish posturing and emphasize the mixed message of Pittsburgh’s revitalization juggernaut. Underlying the rebuilding process was a rapprochement between business and labor, Republicans and Democrats, reinforced by a Cold War anti-Communist rhetoric. The battle against smoke and flooding were perhaps more significant than slum clearance or futuristic utopian schemes for rebuilding Pittsburgh. Such schemes when implemented destroyed Pittsburgh’s most prominent black neighborhood and supplanted it with parking lots, vacant expanses awaiting development, and a much-ballyhooed Civic Arena whose retractable dome was more of a gimmick than an asset. By the 1970s Pittsburgh’s voters had grown tired and critical of the renaissance rhetoric as evident in the retrenchment of the Flaherty administration. Moreover, the emerging eds-meds economy proved an asset with limited dividends. Whereas profit-making steel mills paid taxes, the supposedly nonprofit hospital and university behemoths reaped huge revenues without contributing what many deemed a fair share to the public coffers of the city and school district.

All these accounts offer a revealing picture of a striving but oft-troubled city. With an admirably questioning spirit these young scholars are putting the history of Pittsburgh between 1945 and 2010 in a proper perspective. The most livable city was certainly not equally livable for all its residents, nor did it provide an answer to all of America’s urban problems. In this symposium, the fantasy of renaissance faces the reality of Pittsburgh.