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07-09-2023, 07:59 AM
CHASE DIFELICIANTONIO
Sep. 6, 2023
Updated: Sep. 6, 2023 2:28 p.m.
Pittsburgh once was what some people think San Francisco is today — a city of hollowed-out neighborhoods, rising crime and rapidly proliferating urban decay.
The collapse of the Pennsylvania city’s famed steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s slashed its population in half, emptied downtown office buildings and necessitated a new economic focus.
San Francisco’s current situation is far less severe, and the two cities are vastly different in many ways. But the City by the Bay is still reeling from pandemic-borne changes — notably escalating inequality, unchecked open-air drug markets and the absence of many daily workers that once fueled the city’s economic engine, leaving office towers and transit relatively empty and stoking speculation about the city’s potential demise.
......
we traveled to Pittsburgh to see how it has emerged from its own decades-long struggle with urban necrosis. We found an affordable city driven by high tech and higher education, empty offices converted to housing and a once-collapsed economy largely revived and retooled with a focus on the future, while population loss has left some neighborhoods with permanent scars.
Pittsburgh’s path from the nadir of urban decay to born-again boom town is a reminder of what a city’s failure and renewal really looks like, and of how long it can take for a city to die and be reborn.
So what can Pennsylvania’s Steel City teach the West Coast center of innovation? Maybe that American cities can choose to change, or die.
......
Key to revitalizing the neighborhood were determined citizens acquiring cheap, or free, real estate and starting businesses there, risks be damned.
......
In the 1990s, some owners would offer him buildings free of charge. Some are now worth upward of $1 million each. Eventually, the cheap real estate and rents attracted artists, and the area began to take on a character distinct from its working-class past, a process that took about 30 years to complete.
......
some neighborhoods hollowed out by the collapse of the steel industry are still struggling and lack basic services.
Some have still not come back.
......
“The population is not coming back,” Noszka says flatly. Her efforts in the 1990s in Lawrenceville were key to rebuilding that neighborhood over the course of a decade. Her current undertaking could take as long. Or longer.
Perhaps Desmone put it best: “Pittsburgh is not growing. But it is changing.”
So, too, is San Francisco.
City residents in their late 20s decreased 21% between April 2020 and June 2022, while 30- to 34-year-olds living in the city fell by 16% as remote work made it possible to move away but retain a Bay Area salary during the pandemic. Those two groups totaled around 40,000 people total for a city whose population flirted with the 900,000 mark in early 2020.
......
The lesson of Pittsburgh’s story is that there are rarely quick fixes, and that it can take decades before a city — or a neighborhood, or even a block — begins to turn around. If it happens at all.
......
“People have to have patience.”
A lot more at: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s...138960.php
Sep. 6, 2023
Updated: Sep. 6, 2023 2:28 p.m.
Pittsburgh once was what some people think San Francisco is today — a city of hollowed-out neighborhoods, rising crime and rapidly proliferating urban decay.
The collapse of the Pennsylvania city’s famed steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s slashed its population in half, emptied downtown office buildings and necessitated a new economic focus.
San Francisco’s current situation is far less severe, and the two cities are vastly different in many ways. But the City by the Bay is still reeling from pandemic-borne changes — notably escalating inequality, unchecked open-air drug markets and the absence of many daily workers that once fueled the city’s economic engine, leaving office towers and transit relatively empty and stoking speculation about the city’s potential demise.
......
we traveled to Pittsburgh to see how it has emerged from its own decades-long struggle with urban necrosis. We found an affordable city driven by high tech and higher education, empty offices converted to housing and a once-collapsed economy largely revived and retooled with a focus on the future, while population loss has left some neighborhoods with permanent scars.
Pittsburgh’s path from the nadir of urban decay to born-again boom town is a reminder of what a city’s failure and renewal really looks like, and of how long it can take for a city to die and be reborn.
So what can Pennsylvania’s Steel City teach the West Coast center of innovation? Maybe that American cities can choose to change, or die.
......
Key to revitalizing the neighborhood were determined citizens acquiring cheap, or free, real estate and starting businesses there, risks be damned.
......
In the 1990s, some owners would offer him buildings free of charge. Some are now worth upward of $1 million each. Eventually, the cheap real estate and rents attracted artists, and the area began to take on a character distinct from its working-class past, a process that took about 30 years to complete.
......
some neighborhoods hollowed out by the collapse of the steel industry are still struggling and lack basic services.
Some have still not come back.
......
“The population is not coming back,” Noszka says flatly. Her efforts in the 1990s in Lawrenceville were key to rebuilding that neighborhood over the course of a decade. Her current undertaking could take as long. Or longer.
Perhaps Desmone put it best: “Pittsburgh is not growing. But it is changing.”
So, too, is San Francisco.
City residents in their late 20s decreased 21% between April 2020 and June 2022, while 30- to 34-year-olds living in the city fell by 16% as remote work made it possible to move away but retain a Bay Area salary during the pandemic. Those two groups totaled around 40,000 people total for a city whose population flirted with the 900,000 mark in early 2020.
......
The lesson of Pittsburgh’s story is that there are rarely quick fixes, and that it can take decades before a city — or a neighborhood, or even a block — begins to turn around. If it happens at all.
......
“People have to have patience.”
A lot more at: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s...138960.php
