CHAPTER 8
Long viewed as a gritty industrial powerhouse that maintained its reputation as a Rust Belt disaster after the collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s, Pittsburgh became a beacon for postindustrial recovery in the twenty-first century. Praised by a Brookings Institution report of 2017 for its position “as a center of world-class research institutions, technology-intense manufacturing, and high-skill workers,” the city appeared to offer a model for second-tier cities seeking to compete in the global economy. Numerous other institutions voiced support for the city’s path to recovery,1 one that followed two self-proclaimed “renaissances,” each directed and driven by private-sector interventions countering a New Deal legacy of public responsibility for social welfare. Once a critic of the city where he started his academic career, Richard Florida became one of Pittsburgh’s greatest supporters, praising its ability to attract and retain the “creative class” he claimed was essential to raise a city’s fortunes. “If Pittsburgh, with all of its assets and its emerging human creativity, somehow can’t make it in the creative age, I fear the future does not bode well for other older industrial communities and established cities, and the lamentable new class segregation among cities will continue to worsen,” he declared.2 Amazon included Pittsburgh among its finalists as a location for its second headquarters, confirming booster claims that the city offered all the advantages of a knowledge-based postindustrial economy. Yet even as Brookings’s metropolitan policy director Bruce Katz announced the research center’s 2017 study under the title “Why the Future Looks Like Pittsburgh,” critics noted the report’s admission that “despite its significant assets, Pittsburgh’s technological strengths have not yet translated into broad-based economic opportunity or growth.”3
The Brookings assessment sounded a familiar theme in Pittsburgh’s modern history. A prime instigator in the modern process of urban renewal, Pittsburgh’s business community, working initially under a cooperative umbrella, the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, demonstrated in the 1950s the power of public-private partnerships to reshape the local political economy, as banker Richard King Mellon teamed up with longtime Democratic mayor David Lawrence to leverage private capital in the cause of revitalizing the downtown and refashioning the city’s image by adopting environmental reforms to eliminate the smoke and other industrial pollutants that had for so long diminished the city’s quality of living. Seeking from the outset to attract the kind of younger, white-collar professional workers that Florida later hailed as the ideal for every city, urban renewal in Pittsburgh set out to remake public spaces while boosting private enterprise, even at a cost to maintaining the city’s industrial prowess. To accomplish its goals this growth coalition, as historian Tracy Neumann identifies it, extended its powers to remake the downtown to the nearby lower Hill neighborhood, an area once a magnet to immigrants that had attracted increasing numbers of African Americans during the Great Migration to the point that it became known as a center for Black culture. Under powers granted through the National Housing Act of 1949, the city leveled some 1,300 structures and displaced nearly 8,000 residents to make way for a new civic center. Those who lost their homes crowded other, transitional neighborhoods, heightening the outward movement of the city’s middle class.4 Redevelopment further extended to the city’s East Side, displacing yet another 3,800 residents and prompting angry protests.
The election of a mayor independent of the dominant city political organization, Pete Flaherty, in the year after the 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination, broke the hold of downtown boosters and turned attention back to the city’s more troubled neighborhoods. But Flaherty both nourished the prospects of building on the first renaissance by continuing to build up the downtown and worked through his fiscal conservatism to accumulate funds that could be used by his successor, Richard Caliguiri, to initiate a “second renaissance.” Aided by a six-year, $323 million capital budget, which he described as a “blueprint for Pittsburgh’s revival,” Caliguiri broadened the Allegheny Conference to include more foundations and neighborhood community development corporations, while at the same time returning government focus to promoting a postindustrial economy. Backed by a highly skilled public relations campaign, Pittsburgh aimed to attract and retain a “creative class” before such labels came into existence. Such efforts provoked opposition from several new organizations representing blue-collar workers and their allies, but they failed to counter the trajectory set by Pittsburgh’s leadership. The result was the kind of success Caliguiri and his successors aimed for downtown, without, however, extending its benefits to the rest of the city.
Donald Trump’s declaration conveyed on the occasion of his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris environmental accord in June 2017, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” was pierced with irony. Not only had Pittsburgh voters overwhelmingly rejected his candidacy in the 2016 presidential election, the city owed its revitalization, not once but twice, to an embrace of measures devoted to curbing the bad effects of industry to make Pittsburgh an environmentally desirable place to live as well as work. Indeed, boosters of a postindustrial city were all too aware of the physical effects, if not always sensitive to the human costs, of factory-polluted air and water, how workers suffered catastrophic accidents on the job, and how their families were often piled into poorly heated, ventilated, and constructed homes whose high rents relative to their salary kept them living in poverty. The film The City, an early documentary produced especially for the World’s Fair of 1939 in New York City, put all the horrors of what its narrator Lewis Mumford called “insensate industrialism” on display. “Smoke makes prosperity, no matter if you choke on it,” he intoned over pictures of Pittsburgh’s dreary worker housing encased by smoke.5
Richard King Mellon was reportedly obsessed enough with removing smoke from the city in order to facilitate Pittsburgh’s emergence as a center for intellectual innovation that he was willing to leave the gritty industrial work to the cluster of mill towns that dotted the adjacent Mon Valley. What really counted in the new era was ensuring that the city facilitate the circulation of capital within and outside the region. A newly empowered planning association agreed, rejecting the industrial organization of space and the workforce in an effort to attract service, finance, and light industry to the city.6 As their vision for the city materialized over a half-century, mixed-use commercial and residential development replaced steel sites on the city’s south and north sides. The once heavily industrialized area at the confluence of the three rivers that had defined the city’s place in national commerce was cleared to give way to Point Park, an expansive jewel intended to complement high-rise office buildings downtown. And everywhere adjacent to a downtown that came to be known, appropriately, as the “Golden Triangle” came under pressure to serve the vision of a “livable” and environmentally safe area to live and play as well as work.
Pittsburgh’s early renewal efforts generated wide-scale praise, none less than from Jeanne Lowe’s 1967 book Cities in a Race with Time. No city, she claimed, had changed its physical nature more since the 1940s than Pittsburgh, noting that “the environment seemed so transformed it was hard to believe that this was Pittsburgh, the city that just a few years before had been so sunk in dirt and decay.” Crediting the coalition formed at the initiative of Richard Mellon for the city’s transformation, Lowe lauded the rise of the new downtown and accompanying Point Park. “Yet in spite of all the visible, taxable redevelopment,” she reported, “the city’s slums still festered, virtually untouched by the Renaissance. Some of the oldest and worst slums spread like a dark blot down the side of the Hill, overlooking the ‘new’ Pittsburgh. It was obvious that this area must be cleared and redeveloped, too.”7
That “miserable slum,” as Lowe branded it, was home to a good portion of Pittsburgh’s Black community. Historically located close to industry but far from its benefits, Pittsburgh’s Black population of 27,000 by World War II found employment in the dominant streel industry, but in jobs with the highest risk and the lowest security. Wartime demand for steel combined with federal assurances of access to such jobs swelled the Black population to 82,000, or 9.3 percent, with many of the newcomers settling in the city’s South Side where much of the housing was substandard. Spurred by the Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier’s “Double V” campaign demanding victory over prejudice at home as well as victory abroad, Pittsburgh’s Black organizations regretted obstacles to further hiring of Black men and women during the war and the dismissal of so many who had been hired once the war ended.8
Throughout the years between the two world wars, the conglomeration of five neighborhoods known as the Hill District adjacent to the downtown thrived as a center of Black commerce and entertainment as well as residence. Clubs such as the Hurricane Lounge and the Crawford Grill featured nationally renowned jazz musicians and vocalists in addition to nurturing local talent. A rich node of Black business as well as culture, the area served as the site for Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson’s primary body of work.9 Once a magnet for immigrant settlement because of its cheap and accessible housing, the Hill by the mid-twentieth century was readily identified by outsiders as a slum marked by high levels of tuberculosis, crime, delinquency, and murder. Older housing, complemented by public housing complexes built before and during the war, further compromised the fabric of the community. As Renaissance I, as it came to be called, honed in on rebuilding the downtown, clearing the Lower Hill became a top priority.10
Map 3. Pittsburgh Select Neighborhoods
Passed over initially for the less densely populated and more affluent Highland Park neighborhood for construction of a facility for the Civic Light Opera, the Lower Hill became the object of redevelopment for that purpose after residents of Highland Park in 1949 beat back efforts to locate it there. Targeted was a ninety-five-acre site where the city planning commission envisioned a combined convention hall and sports arena accompanied by new residential apartments. State legislation in 1953 enabled creation of the Public Auditorium Authority of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. The Edgar J. Kaufmann Charitable Trust contributed $1 million toward the construction of the $22 million arena, which opened in 1961. Planners envisioned a Center for the Arts where the new Civic Arena had risen, forming a proper link between the Golden Triangle and the university community of Oakland to create a “cultural acropolis” that would forever dispel the city’s image as a milltown. “The lower Hill district … was an area of dense slums with the worst housing in the city,” Mayor Lawrence declared. “Now it’s gone. That the community was willing to spend so much for recreation and amusement is as sharp a break with its past as pure air and clean rivers.”11
Plans for accompanying buildings floundered, however. As planners pressed to extend redevelopment further into the Hill neighborhood, resistance stiffened to the point that further activity stopped dead.12 Two years after it became the prime occupant of the Civic Center, the Civic Light Opera moved out due to poor acoustics. Although the Pittsburgh Penguins became the building’s primary tenant in their first season in the National Hockey League in 1967, none of the envisioned accompanying cultural facilities materialized. Instead, the Civic Arena was left an isolated destination at the center of a massive parking lot.13 Despite claims that arena contracts had included nondiscrimination provisions, only a handful of African Americans gained employment there. “Hidden in the shadows of the city’s Renaissance are the slums and ghettoes of Negroes,” the Pittsburgh Courier charged. “Negroes have not benefitted from the resurgence fostered by the city fathers. They have been ignored and overlooked in the planning of their neighborhoods, their communities, their health and welfare.” Years later, when the Hill population had fallen from some 53,000 to fewer than 10,000 people, research psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove could report the lasting effects of collective trauma to the area’s “emotional ecosystem,” a condition she labeled “root shock” and described as the direct result of urban renewal.14
Even Jeanne Lowe recognized the problems of relocating those displaced from redevelopment. As is so often depicted in her account, city business leaders came to the rescue by creating a new civic organization—in this case, ACTION-Housing Inc. (Allegheny Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods)—to tackle the problem. In bringing together members of the Allegheny Council with the leaders of the city’s housing advocacy organization, a new board was formed and an initiative launched to accommodate those displaced from the Hill with incomes too high for public assistance but too low to meet the costs of market-rate housing in a new cooperative venture.15 Gone from the Hill in the meantime were the cultural destinations that for years had boosted the visibility as well as the fortunes of the city’s Black community, and despite vigorous protests against the loss of so much heritage, to say nothing of the community that lay in tatters, the reach of redevelopment did not stop at the Hill.
Figure 26. A view of the Hill District neighborhood and the new Civic Arena that displaced thousands for its construction, with the downtown in the background. Harry Coughanour Jr. © 1967. Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center.
In East Liberty, planners had intended another makeover of a struggling section of the city. Fearing the loss of customers to the suburbs, they introduced a pedestrian mall to the central shopping district defined by Penn Circle, a ring road accompanied by enough parking to compete with suburban shopping malls. The car-free shopping concept, inspired by Victor Gruen’s 1956 plan for downtown Fort Worth, was being considered in other declining cities, such as New Haven. Instead of attracting customers, however, the new configuration in Pittsburgh knocked out much of the surrounding 254-acre district and had the effect of encouraging drivers to avoid the area entirely. The result, in light of demolitions that removed 1,200 homes and relocated 3,800 people from the area, was rapid decline. As garden apartments and three new high-rise public housing towers filled out the 125 acres cleared by demolition, area income declined and the process of decay further accelerated.
Figure 27. The Penn Center Mall in East Liberty, an effort to revive a struggling commercial section of Pittsburgh three-fourths the size of downtown, by eliminating through traffic and providing uniform design of commercial storefronts. At 254 acres, the project was the largest urban renewal project ever attempted in Pittsburgh, resulting in the demolition of 1,200 homes and the relocation of 3,800 people. Detre Library and Archives, Heinz History Center.
Urban renewal was not embraced uncritically in the city, and as redevelopment efforts extended into other neighborhoods, residents pushed back. In the Allegheny section of the North Side, an area dominated by Victorian homes in a solidly middle-class community, a preservation movement emerged with lasting effect in the city. In Homewood, a predominantly Black community adjacent to East Liberty, community organization had the effect of turning back renewal plans as well. Pete Flaherty’s election in 1970 appeared to confirm the power of neighborhood activists to give their immediate needs priority. Budgetary pressures, however, pushed Flaherty back to supporting development downtown in ways that helped his successor launch Renaissance II.
When University of Pittsburgh historian Roy Lubove assessed the city’s first renaissance, he was critical of the ways state and local government subsidized businesses, dismissing the tilt to private enterprise as “a reverse welfare state.”16 His assessment of Renaissance II adopted an entirely different tone. Reflecting the wide-scale praise of the city nationally as well as locally, Lubove commended the city’s corporate leadership for transforming the city’s economy “into a diversified professional, service, research, information processing, and advanced technology economy graced by an improved quality of life.” Bringing neighborhood-based community development organizations into the governing coalition, he believed, helped the city avoid the antagonisms that urban renewal had brought the city earlier and spread the benefits of postindustrial recovery more broadly. “In the post-steel era,” he concluded, “Pittsburgh has moved constructively toward economic diversification and neighborhood and cultural revitalization. This has laid the foundation for a prosperous post-steel city, though nothing is guaranteed.”17
Lubove’s celebration may have been ahead of its time, but the themes he struck were well represented as the city entered the twenty-first century. As so often happened, it was the New York Times that brought the city’s recovery to national attention under a 2010 headline, “Slumbering Pittsburgh Neighborhood Reawakens.” Noting the loss or vastly diminished presence of corporations in the city, including U.S. Air (founded as Allegheny Airlines), Heinz, U.S. Steel, and Gulf Oil, a subsequent Times report assured readers nonetheless that Pittsburgh’s alternative path was a promising one, noting that in “the course of reducing its reliance on industry and big corporations, Pittsburgh has become one of the more envied stories of urban revival in the Rust Belt. The proportion of Pittsburgh’s work force in manufacturing is now actually lower than the national average … but so is its unemployment rate, at 7.2 percent.”18
According to the contemporary narrative, the Hill area was among the foremost beneficiaries of the transition. As the Hill Community Development Corporation declared in 2018, “It’s happening on the Hill—the Hill District, that is! A swirling renaissance of renewal, rehabilitation, renovation and revitalization with the fervor of a revival is occurring in the most remarkable community in the nation’s most livable city. What once was, is now again—a historic hub is hopping with crackle of rebirth.”19 Getting there was not easy, however, and not everyone in the area assumed the same optimistic tone.
The Hill’s prospects first appeared to brighten in the 1990s, with the redevelopment of the area around Crawford Square. To revitalize what it considered a transitional area between the Golden Triangle and the Hill, the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) contracted with St. Louis–based McCormick Brown Associates to construct a new mixed-income housing development on eighteen acres adjacent to the square. Under a master plan drawn up by locally based Urban Design Associates with considerable community input, 461 new housing units were constructed largely according to New Urbanist principles, though without the usual back-alley access due to the site’s location on a hillside. Half the 375 rental units were subsidized, and though the developers feared a lack of demand for market-rate sales, business proved robust. Taking advantage of access to the downtown, Black professionals grabbed up many units, prompting some concerns about gentrification, not the least when the sale price of one of the new homes reached $300,000. The project nonetheless garnered considerable praise, including from the New York Times, which ran a story the same year under the title “Revival for a Black Enclave.”20 When the Pittsburgh Penguins pressed for a new arena nearby several years later, the market for new housing had already been demonstrated. At that point the prospect of redevelopment appeared more ominous.
When the Penguins threatened in 2007 to shift the franchise to Kansas City, Missouri, if public authorities did not provide the financial support needed to replace the Mellon Arena, as the old Civic Center had been renamed, community activists stepped in. Vowing “not to give away the Lower Hill again,” they determined that any new development would have to benefit the community as well as the prized hockey franchise. Building from a series of community meetings, area activists fashioned a community benefits campaign under the name One Hill Coalition, an umbrella that ultimately included close to a hundred separate organizations based in or supporting Hill residents. Their platform, Blueprint for a Livable Hill, emerged from priorities established by community vote. When the city and county in January 2008 released a master plan for redeveloping the Lower Hill and it was approved by the URA, without accommodating the coalition’s public demands, activists threatened to disrupt a Penguins playoff game. The protest never materialized, but boosted by a court decision overruling the URA’s approval of the master plan, also drawn up by Urban Design Associates, One Hill finally secured a benefits agreement in August. With city and county officials intervening, One Hill agreed to drop its court suit and support the Penguins’ exclusive right to redevelop the twenty-eight-acre site. In return, the agreement provided the Hill District $8.3 million in monetary contributions to community development projects, including $1 million for a full-service grocery store, and local hiring and living wage requirements at the new arena and companion hotel. Forty-seven of the coalition members voted to ratify the agreement, though some voiced criticism that much of what had been promised was already in the works and the monetary benefits to the community were too modest given the high level of subsidy to the Penguins and their anticipated profits. A number of requests included in the Blueprint for a Livable Hill were not included.21
The new PPG Paints Arena opened in August 2010, and the Mellon Arena was demolished in 2012. To accommodate plans for the cleared site for new development the state contributed nearly $12 million. Further funds were secured to create a park bridging the highway that had cut the Hill off from downtown in the 1960s, tapping the same Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) funds New Haven had drawn upon to advance its Downtown Crossing plan. With community input, the new Pittsburgh design honored the history of achievement in the area.22 Under the original agreement, the city retained ownership of the land, which the Penguins were to purchase as development progressed, using $15 million in credits to do so. When the full development of the Mellon Arena site extended beyond the ten-year deadline and the city was obliged to return to the developer the full amount of unexpended tax credits, the parties struck a new deal. In exchange for the transfer of some eighteen acres and an extension of the deadline for the Penguins, the city secured the right for its parking authority to construct a high-rise parking facility and to retain a portion of the revenues, all of which had been going to the Penguins. As a concession to the Hill District, the agreement specified that 20 percent of any new housing built on the cleared site would have to be affordable, specified as 60 percent of median income, a level that was beyond the reach of many Hill residents. Not exactly a great deal for the city either, the agreement prompted further organizing efforts to reap better benefits for the Hill community. In all, subsidies to the Penguins totaled some $245 million.23
Even as redevelopment proceeded in the Lower Hill, East Liberty was undergoing its own transformation. Boosted by the location first of a Home Depot outlet, followed by Whole Foods, and ultimately a Google office in an abandoned Nabisco warehouse, the area’s commercial core sprang to life in the early part of the twenty-first century. “Boomtown is not an overstatement for what’s happening in the city’s East End right now,” the Pittsburgh Business Times declared. Commentators credited a planning process that was more inclusive than the 1960s renewal that had set the community back so substantially, citing particularly the active role of the nonprofit East Liberty Development Inc. The planning process was spirited and noisy according to the executive director of the URA, Rob Stepney, but “we had an inspired shared vision.” The result, he claimed, was that “East Liberty went from blighted and ‘keep off the grass’ to the definition of what millennials are looking for.” Focusing particularly on the commercial and residential complex being redeveloped as Bakery Square, the Business Times reported proudly that 70 percent of the residents at the new complex came from outside of Pennsylvania.24
Such declarations highlighted the dilemma of privately driven redevelopment. The developer of Bakery Square, Walnut Capital, promised on its website, “We will develop space that builds community, revitalizes neighborhoods, and is environmentally friendly.” Describing its founding partner Gregg Perelman as an innovator “in a city that is becoming synonymous with urban rebirth,” the company heralded its twenty-year record of investing thousands of dollars to support education, community development, and union jobs. At the same time, in what could well have been a template for destinations designed for Florida’s creative class, the company described Bakery Square as a food mecca where “you literally have everything you need right at your fingertips.” “Work, live and play all in one place!” the company declared. “This neighborhood is a truly walkable community, with bike paths going straight into the heart of Shadyside and acres of trails to enjoy in the adjacent Mellon Park. Public transportation and Healthy Ride Bike Share are readily accessible, and complimentary shuttle service to and from CMU and Pitt, getting you where you want to go.”25 Using not just the language of self-promotion, Walnut Capital’s claims for the area echoed in Lonely Planet’s selection of the area as one of the nation’s hottest neighborhoods: “the sleeper hit your hipster sensibilities have been craving.”26 Yet as high-end apartments and chain stores replaced small businesses and subsidized apartments, longtime residents like Nila Payton questioned the direction of recovery. A hospital employee who reported she had been fighting for living wages and union rights for years, she asked the question publicly: “Improvements for whom?”27 Not for the residents of subsidized apartments, it was clear, as the saga of the nearby Penn Plaza housing complex revealed.
In July 2015 the owner of Penn Plaza, LG Realty Advisors, which had been managing the complex for decades, issued ninety-day eviction notices to the two buildings’ two hundred residents, most of them elderly or poor. Planned in place of the subsidized apartment complex was a mixed-use development, including a Whole Foods store and market-rate housing. City intervention secured a delay in eviction and brought help in relocating tenants. Companion efforts to generate a housing trust fund devoted to preserving and extending affordable housing options faltered, however, as agreement could not be reached on where funding would come from. Realtors resisted a proposal to raise the realty transfer tax from 4 percent to 5 percent, a change proponents claimed could generate $10 million a year. The impasse prompted the national housing advocacy journal Shelterforce to comment, “Pittsburgh was laid bare and cut open for all to see during these two years. Immediately visible is a housing market tantamount to organ failure: a city with 55,000 housing units cannot absorb Penn Plaza’s 200 evicted tenants, even with the herculean effort of countless people working around the clock.” Given the controversy at the site, Whole Foods withdrew its commitment to locate there, prompting the developers to sue the city for damages. Following a mediation process during the summer of 2017, the city finally reached an agreement with the developer. Because Penn Plaza was within the bounds of a transit revitalization investment district, the developer was authorized to use revenues from associated tax breaks as long as half those funds, an estimated $3 million, were directed into separate accounts for affordable housing and park improvements. In a subsequent public meeting required under the agreement, attorneys for the owner estimated that the developer’s tax contribution would support 251 replacement units of affordable housing within a mile of the Penn Plaza site, a figure that proved unsatisfactory to many in the audience, including Helen Gerhardt, chair of the City-County Fair Housing Task Force. The issue extended well beyond Penn Plaza, Gerhardt asserted. “It’s about years of decisions.… Millions of dollars of public subsidy that have gone into developments like this, and no affordable housing.”28
The implications of the Penn Plaza debacle were hard to ignore, and as controversy raged, the city named a task force on affordable housing in an effort to deal with an issue that clearly extended beyond East Liberty. Its report, issued in May 2016, embraced the city’s revitalization, driven especially by the influx of younger residents, but determined to “harness the thriving, growing economy in a manner that is responsible and creative to spur more affordability in our marketplace.” As policy solutions, the task force recommended the inclusion of affordable housing on all developments of twenty-five units or greater receiving public benefits; increased use of low-income tax units; and a number of measures intended to protect tenants and owners in existing homes, including controls over reassessment spikes, just eviction protections, and notification requirements for tenants of developments receiving direct public subsidy. Most central to the recommendations was a proposed housing trust fund, with the initial goal of raising $10 million annually to assist families at 30 percent to 80 percent below median household income. Such initiatives were fully contextualized within a long history of housing discrimination, displacement caused by urban renewal, and federal policies advantaging the suburbs over the city. “The milieu of these historic and contemporary forces,” the report’s authors asserted, “forces a profound balancing act across the country but in Pittsburgh specifically: to grow a tax base capable of sustaining a contemporary city, while simultaneously preserving the mixed-income, mixed-age communities that have been foundational to Pittsburgh, and addressing a legacy of disinvestment.”29
The task force report followed on the heels of news that 143 of 348 subsidized households in the Crawford Square redevelopment area faced conversion to market-rate charges with the expiration of existing covenants. Mayor Bill Peduto, who had been elected first in 2013 on a promise to make Pittsburgh the Rust Belt’s first progressive city, stepped in to secure $6 million in direct funding and a number of housing vouchers to keep the units affordable.30 The city council subsequently embraced the task force recommendation to create the proposed Housing Opportunity Fund, but members disagreed initially how best to finance it. Activists supporting both the task force and its recommendations, including a coalition of unions, faith, and environmental organizations working under the Pittsburgh United umbrella, favored a 1 percent increase in the realty transfer tax, imposed as part of the closing costs of home purchases. In December 2017, the city council finally approved the fund at the proposed level of $10 million annually under the stricture that the money come from new net resources and that it not be used to substitute for or supplant existing resources. Initial funding was to come, finally, from a graduated hike in the realty transfer tax over several years. In 2016 the Affordable Housing Task Force estimated a gap of some 20,000 affordable housing units in the city. As of early 2020, the program had assisted 316 affordable apartments and only 12 for-sale homes.31 The city council’s ultimate resolution was a logical, if contested, means of capturing the market dynamic to compensate those threatened by its success. Such actions boosted confidence that rising prosperity would benefit every resident. Still, such resolutions could only go so far in achieving goals that facilitated capital investment while still addressing social needs, as subsequent development plans for the arena site demonstrated.
As part of an evolving community-building process, Lower Hill residents—including members of the Hill Consensus Group; the Hill House Association, a service agency that traced its roots back to the settlement movement of the early twentieth century; and the city parks department—developed their own plan for the Hill. Titled “A Village in the Woods,” the concept evolved from a series of ecologically driven exercises to connect the Lower Hill with the rivers embracing the city. Stating its intention to “re-frame the identity of the Hill as a paragon of urban beauty: a prospective leader in preservation, restoration and value-added uses of its natural landscape,” the plan was modest in scale and sensitive to ways the existing contours of the land could be utilized to form natural pathways connecting different modes of activity. Conceived as it was on the assumption that such land had been degraded over many years, the plan projected land uses that could evolve as low cost and low value and argued that plantings rather than building construction offered the best path to revitalization.32 But because the area was so close to downtown and fell within the Penguins’ target for development, such plans were not to be. Instead, the hockey franchise announced with great fanfare and robust support from city hall a highly intensive development plan that included a number of high-rise buildings and commercial structures.
Not shying away from the traumatic effect that wholesale clearance had had on the Lower Hill in the 1960s, the twenty-eight-acre plan, presented by the prominent Danish firm the Bjarke Ingels Group in January 2016, did everything it could to stress public spaces devoted to recreation and relaxation. “The site, with its slopes and views, is perfectly suited for bringing an experience of the native landscape to this urban condition,” claimed Jamie Maslyn, partner at West 8, the landscape design partner on the project with offices in Rotterdam, New York, and Belgium. Calling nonetheless for 1,200 new housing units and one million square feet of commercial space, the proposal envisioned buildings at a scale comparable to the Golden Triangle. Praised in city hall, the plan evoked regret among a number of Hill residents who saw better value in smaller-scale projects like the opening of August Wilson Park nearby.33
The saga of the arena site was not yet over, however, following the decision in November 2015 by U.S Steel, suffering a sharp decline in the industry, to back out of its commitment to build a new five-story headquarters on the site. The city adopted a new master plan for the area the following year, but with construction still stalled in 2018, the Penguins named a new development team for the area’s residential component, the minority developer Intergen Real Estate Group. Headed by two Hill residents, Intergen replaced McCormack Baron Salazar, the prominent St. Louis–based company tapped in 2013 to construct 935 new units of housing. The Penguins made the shift after being turned down for state housing credits and were forced to fall back on the deal they originally negotiated with Hill leaders, one that called for 20 percent of the units to be affordable over eight years to households earning 60 percent to 80 percent of the area median income.34 An updated master plan released in April 2019 included 810,000 square feet of office space; 190,000 square feet of retail shops; 50,000 square feet for entertainment; a 220-room hotel; and a total of 1,420 housing units. Echoing the earlier plan for the site, the new proposal included a terraced four-acre park. With $25 million in tax revenues from the project promised for the Greater Hill District Reinvestment Fund, a community development organization founded in 2015, Intergen’s inclusion in the project and further provisions for hiring minority, women, and disadvantaged business enterprises, the plan’s acceptance on the Hill was ensured, even if it only modestly realized earlier hopes for additional inclusionary measures.35
Neighborhoods witnessing reinvestment tried to realize more, but to do so they had to turn to additional measures, as Lawrenceville, once a working-class neighborhood northeast of the Upper Hill, attempted in the early part of the twenty-first century. Described in the 2010s as one of the city’s hottest real estate areas, Lawrenceville’s boom owed something to the relocation of Children’s Hospital to the area in 2009 but even more to the wave of investment in older in-town neighborhoods. Between 2010 and 2017 median home sales in the area increased from $94,586 to $237,000. Rents rose accordingly, prompting one reporter to exclaim that having been riddled with blight, vacancy, and crime in the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood “has almost nothing left that’s affordable for the middle class, either to rent or buy.”36 Alarmed by what it called a housing crisis, the Lawrenceville Corporation, founded in 2000 in an effort to stimulate new investment, shifted to the effort to manage it. Together with Lawrenceville United, formed a year later, in its words, “as a resident-driven non-profit organization that works to improve and protect the quality of life for all Lawrenceville residents,” it launched the city’s first land trust in 2017. Buying up some dozen vacant properties over the first years of the trust’s existence, the community organization was able to raise enough money from foundations as well as public sources to sell homes priced between $125,000 and $140,000 with restrictions on resale so as to maintain the investments as affordable over time.37 Because the number of properties they were able to convert was small, the Lawrenceville partners readily embraced an experiment, backed by the mayor, to apply strict inclusionary zoning standards to the literally hundreds of new developments in the area. If the program worked, residents and city officials hoped, a new code could be extended to the city as a whole.38
In Uptown, activists tried yet another tactic when UPMC Mercy, part of the city’s largest employer,39 announced its intention to build a new vision and rehabilitation center within a complex where the original use intended for the site had been a power plant. While hospital officials sought approval to alter the master plan for the site, workers at the hospital who had been organizing unsuccessfully since 2011 to unionize saw an opportunity to secure some benefits in return. Even as UPMC touted its new investment as a prime addition to the nearby innovation zone, some two dozen residents and activists pressed members of the planning commission at its April meeting to require a community benefits agreement as a condition of its approval for the change in use. To many people’s surprise, the commission voted unanimously to do just that.40 Subsequent community meetings organized by Service Employees International Union and Pittsburgh United resulted in a list of concessions, including resident access to the hospital at in-network rates and funding for affordable housing, as well as a $15 minimum wage and the right to unionize. At the same time, the area’s representative in the city council, R. Daniel Levalle, seeking to resolve the issue, entered into private negotiations with hospital officials, who stoutly resisted many of the demands, describing them as a form of extortion. Levalle succeeded in part by securing a more narrowly tailored response from UPMC, which he refused to call a community benefits agreement: a specialty clinic for addiction treatment, expanded number of beds available for treating people experiencing homelessness, hosting several job fairs, and building green space into the hospital’s designs. The proposal was made public only hours ahead of the city council meeting on July 17, prompting enough members to withhold support after hearing more than four hours of testimony from area residents, who continued to demand more from UPMC.41 Over the next two weeks, however, both the county executive and Mayor Peduto, fearing that without the new facility Mercy could fail, came to the proposal’s defense, and it passed council, just months before the deadline established by the master plan. Notably, Peduto went out of his way to criticize the intervention of the unions, who had to accept much less than they had asked for, even if they succeeded in securing a number of tangible benefits for the nearby community. At the groundbreaking ceremony in March 2019, Allegheny County executive Rich Fitzgerald said that the facility is “going to transform” the Uptown neighborhood. “We saw what UPMC and the transformation that happened 10 years ago when Children’s Hospital rose up out of the ground in the Bloomfield, Lawrenceville, Garfield area of the city,” said Fitzgerald. “It has been a magnet for talented people, for companies, for industry, for growth, for improvement in a neighborhood that was not doing very well back then.”42
The Lawrenceville and Uptown experiments offered several possible paths to balanced development, though ones developers still resisted. In a completely different manner, momentum built in another working-class neighborhood for a contrasting solution: attracting enough “creatives” to seed a neighborhood’s revival. The area in question was Garfield, bordered by the revitalization of East Liberty and Lawrenceville yet stubbornly blighted by vacant lots and burned-out houses. The visionary in this case was architect and developer Eve Picker, who promoted what she called the 6 percent solution. Inspired by studies that a work population with just 6 percent creative workers could tip the scales toward a thriving neighborhood, Picker created a “6 percent toolbox” to guide redevelopment, which she saw as seeding a neighborhood with artists and other “creatives.” In founding Small Change, which she described as a real estate crowdfunding platform, Picker sought to match developers to investors, “providing investment opportunities for everyone who cares about cities and wants to make change.” Employing civic engagement efforts like those carried out in many distressed cities where local residents are asked to cite their preferences by posting sticky notes on charts, Piker claimed to have gained consensus on both sides of the class divide that area residents wanted the same things, including “an authentic place,” creativity and culture, and things to do, places to eat, and places to shop.43 Like her counterparts in Lawrenceville, Picker sought to buy up abandoned properties held by the city, where as many as three hundred were available according to her account. Unlike Lawrenceville United, however, her goal to keep housing affordable was to place tiny homes on those sites. In March 2016 she had her first success, finding a buyer for a 350-square-foot dwelling for $109,500.44 The local community development corporation, which cooperated with Picker in her effort, had its own plans to experiment with small houses, referred to as axillary dwelling units, at about 1,000 square feet. Neither effort was likely to notably improve housing conditions in the area, and yet even the presence of one small house in 2016 stirred fears of gentrification.45
Well before the latest “Pittsburgh Renaissance,” new levels of cooperation between Pittsburgh’s two most prominent universities, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, had brought enough new material benefits to their Oakland location to affirm its destiny as envisioned by planners in the 1960s as a cultural acropolis. The 2017 Brookings report on the city identified the university precinct as only 1.7 square miles but as “an innovation district” responsible for one-third of the entire state of Pennsylvania’s university research output. A magnet to new start-ups as well as the source of ideas behind them, universities held the potential to revitalize an entire region, Brookings asserted. And yet, the report noted, “Without a robust platform at all skill levels the city’s significant research and technical strengths will fuel only a small portion of the region’s economy and leave many workers and families behind.” To achieve success, it suggested the creation of a single business development organization to market the district, work with developers, address master planning needs, and facilitate connections between institutions.46 Within months, just such an organization, InnovatePGH, formed. Described as “a next-generation public-private partnership created to accelerate Pittsburgh’s status as a global innovation city,” it built from the alliance of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh to include, among other organizations, the venerable Allegheny Conference on Community Development, the force behind the first Pittsburgh renaissance. Citing the Brookings report in the introduction to its website, InnovatePGH staked out its role in advancing industry cluster strengths in manufacturing, life sciences, and automation.47
Such actions are the necessary stuff to boost what Brookings’s Bruce Katz and Reinvestment Fund founder Jeremy Nowak have called the new “convergence economy.” Pointing to the Oakland innovation district where Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh are located, they identified an ideal form of placemaking, “where the economic, physical, and networking assets of a place collide in ways that inspire idea generation, foster collaboration, and spur a sense of invention and entrepreneurship.” To be competitive in the global economy, they argued in their 2017 book The New Localism, other cities would do well to follow Pittsburgh’s example.48 The story of the collaborations that have led to world leadership in robotics in particular and a number of ancillary businesses has potential for being inclusive through STEM jobs available to workers without a four-year degree, they asserted, and yet they provided virtually no detail for how connections could be formed between the city’s marginalized population and the constellation of opportunities generated by the new economy. That role was belatedly taken up politically by Mayor Peduto, in partnership with the Heinz Endowments, with the formation of P4 Pittsburgh—People, Planet, Place and Performance—in December 2015.
Noting the undesirable effects of deploying new technologies on inequality, employment, and gentrification, P4 announced its goal for Pittsburgh “to become not just economically successful, but also inclusive and just.” Focusing on a sliver of land directly adjacent to Oakland known as Uptown, where some one thousand relatively poor residents were located, organizers created an Ecoinnovation District, devoted to merging best environmental practice with social justice. Under a new performance points system authorized for the district by the Department of City Planning, developers would be awarded a height bonus for inclusion of amenities drawn from a list identified through public input. Those might include affordable housing, management of stormwater with green infrastructure, inclusion of historic design elements, and restoration of older buildings. Among developers taking advantage of the new rules was Walnut Capital, following its success with Bakery Square in East Liberty.49
While the P4 initiative sounded all the right notes for inclusion, not all critics were satisfied. Drawing inspiration from the Bay Area–based PolicyLink’s 2015 Equity Summit in Los Angeles, the Pittsburgh-based UrbanKind Institute surveyed area residents who attended the summit on the issues raised. Referring specifically to P4’s own launch that fall, a number of respondents described its effort as “greenwashing” of more bad development and investment. Aimed at attracting a new demographic to the city, it did nothing, they claimed, “to challenge the practices and policies that created the inequity, injustice, and exclusion that led to the deterioration of so many African-American communities.” Stressing the need for access to jobs, the report recommended a full menu of initiatives built around workforce development and asset building.50
Advocates of a more inclusive form of development took the opportunity, in reply, to point to the redevelopment of the city’s last operating steel company site, on a sliver of land along the Monongahela River directly adjacent to the working-class neighborhood of Hazelwood, whose fortunes had risen and then fallen with the fate of steel production in the area. Reaching a population height of some 12,000 people at the peak of coke manufacturing, by 1998, when LTV, the successor company to Hazelwood Coke, closed, the population fell to 6,000 after earlier failed efforts to spur community-based redevelopment.51 By the time a consortium of foundations bought the site for remediation and redevelopment in 2002, neighborhood median income was half that of the city median. Fifty-six percent of area parcels were vacant, and more than a quarter of residents—54 percent white and 39 percent African American—were living in poverty. Most of the few remaining businesses that had once crowded the area’s Second Street commercial corridor were barely holding on. The Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the McCune Foundation, and the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation joined with the Regional Industrial Development Corporation, as managing partner, to instigate a community-based process to transform the tract. Under the direction of the Almono project—so named to recognize the three rivers defining Pittsburgh, the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio—the planned development for the rebranded Hazelwood Green site involved a long process of environmental remediation, conversion of old structures for new use, and replatting the land to integrate streets with the existing neighborhood grid. Supported with $80 million in tax increment financing, among other sources, the project recruited an impressive array of innovative industries, starting with the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, a $250 million national research hub for expediting the ascent of U.S. manufacturing with robots and algorithms. Joining the institute on the site in quick succession were Carnegie Mellon’s Manufacturing Factors Initiative, a consortium of 220 universities, manufacturers, governments, and nonprofits, and Uber’s Advanced Technologies, which added a track to the southern tip of the site to test driverless cars. Expected to generate 4,500 to 6,000 jobs and provide some 3,000 new homes, the project, in the words of a Heinz magazine report, “fit well with the vision of creating a center for innovation and a catalyst of sustainable community development to raise the competitiveness of the region and the prospects of Hazelwood and its residents, while avoiding the environmental insults of the past.”52
Figure 28. Plan for Hazelwood Green. Conceived as a bridge between Pittsburgh’s burgeoning high-tech sector and a neighborhood devastated by the closure of the city’s last steel site, this mixed-use development, made possible largely through philanthropic investment, reflected both the hopes and fears associated with contemporary revitalization. C Depiction, LLC, 2018.
Given the nature and size of the project, Hazelwood residents naturally feared its possible gentrifying effects, not the least after unconfirmed reports that the city had included the site in its bid to lure Amazon’s second headquarters to the city.53 Almono staff sought to counter such fears by conducting as many as a hundred neighborhood meetings and directing funds for neighborhood initiatives to the Hazelwood Initiative, the neighborhood’s community development corporation, and Pittsburgh Rebuild Together, for housing rehabilitation. A neighborhood-based plan, guided by the Greater Hazelwood Community Collaborative and completed in 2019, only the second approved in the city, stressed reinvestment in small business and affordable housing. Among the housing strategies was building six hundred new units over the next five to ten years, two hundred for residents to own and the remainder rentals, some of which could be supported by the city’s new Housing Opportunity Fund.54 The planning process received strong support especially from Rob Stepney, who had assumed the role of director of community and economic development at the Heinz Endowments in 2012 after serving as director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority for five years. With foundations driving the process, the usual profit motive played a smaller role in determining the ultimate shape of the project and its multiplier effects. Managed until 2019 by a veteran community environmentalist and former executive director of the Green Building Alliance in Pittsburgh, Rebecca Flora, and embraced by P4, the Hazelwood Initiative, like the city’s Ecoinnovation District, garnered national attention, helping boost Pittsburgh’s reputation for innovation. At the same time, however, the lack of any formal community benefits agreement left the outcome of the effort subject largely to good will and mutual understanding. While some companies offered job training, Uber notably did not hire locally, and it was clear that commerce along Second Street had improved only marginally.
For its part in supporting an ecologically ambitious and economically inclusive growth strategy, the city formed a “unified fund” designated to pay for such priorities as universal preschool, affordable housing, and lead-free water pipes and targeted to reach $3 billion over the next dozen years. Central to the effort was recognition of the shock to the city system of sustained inequalities, and to address that issue directly, the city issued in 2017 a comprehensive resiliency strategy, OnePGH, aimed at making the transition from managing economic decline to managing growth and prosperity to become a city of inclusive innovation. As part of its commitment, the city determined to issue an annual assessment of equity measures.55 Introducing the first annual “Equity Indicators” report in August 2018, Mayor Pedulo described the evaluation process as part of a tradition of critical self-evaluation going back to the Progressive era’s Pittsburgh Survey. “One hundred ten years later,” he wrote in the report’s introduction, “amidst great advancements in society, we are experiencing the same systemic inequalities that existed during the turn of the 20th century.” The indicators, he reported, would be used to monitor equity through the city’s Bureau of Neighborhood Empowerment and Division of Sustainability and Resilience. Working with the same evaluation system developed for Oakland, California, by the City University of New York’s Institute for State and Local Government, the final report prepared by the Rand Corporation gave Pittsburgh an overall score of 55 on a scale of 100, with significantly lower subscores for areas central to social well-being, including income and poverty (42), housing affordability and stability (28), and policing and criminal justice (42). While employment came in at 56, childhood health and well-being rated the lowest score among twenty indicators, at 24, clearly leaving much still to be achieved to move the city toward full equity. A year later, the equity score, compiled through a new office of equity created by Mayor Peduto, remained the same. Although some indicators had improved, in spite of a number of initiatives to address racial wealth disparity, household income among Blacks dropped from $26,853 in 2016 to $22,010 in 2017 even as it increased for whites from $54,178 to $55,671. Most disconcerting, the report showed that while Pittsburgh’s white residents remained on par with those in other cities, the city’s Black residents, especially women, were in a much worse situation than in other cities.56 Clearly, such information only reminded observers how much yet needed to be done to capture the gains of capital investment for human accommodation across the full spectrum of city residents. As University of Pittsburgh law professor Jerry Dickenson wrote, responding to the city’s equity indicators, “A moral reckoning is upon us. We must reorient the lens for which we gaze at Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is not the nation’s most livable city. It is America’s apartheid city. The future success of any metropolis depends on a moral vision that its residents feel they can identify with and attach themselves to. It is obvious, then, that our collective moral imperative is to end Pittsburgh’s apartheid and to become a world-class city of racial equality.”57