Everyone knows that healthy cities feature vibrant downtown districts humming with residential hustle and retail bustle. From the “Renaissance” initiated in late 1940s to Mayor Tom Murphy’s never-realized $500 million public/private vision for the Forbes-Fifth corridor, Pittsburgh’s municipal leaders have spent the better part of a century and an enormous chunk of public revenue pursuing a “revitalized” urban core.
Mayor-elect Bob O’Connor is no stranger to that conventional wisdom, although he seems willing to tweak it a bit. Abandoning the notion that a strong retail component will draw residents—taking a lesson, perhaps, from the multi-million-dollar beating the city took on the Lazarus project—he recently opined that the opposite is true: “Retail follows people. So, when people live, work and visit here, that's when the retail will be successful.” So now the Lazarus building becomes luxury condos.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Perhaps it is time to stop guessing which is the cart and which is the horse—does retail draw residential or does residential draw retail?—and start asking whether Pittsburgh, or any other city, for that matter, really needs a thriving “downtown” that resembles the one O’Connor and his predecessors envision.
One of the problems, I think, is defining what “downtown” is. My wife never set foot in Pittsburgh until we moved to Swissvale this past summer, and she considers a trip into Shadyside or Oakland to be going “into the city.” Which in technical terms is correct, I suppose. Most other people probably do not consider this “downtown,” but I think there is real value in a broader analysis. That is, is there any reason whatsoever—other than nostalgia for some vague notion of bygone “urban” vitality—to prefer high-end condos and retail in the Forbes-Fifth corridor rather than in, say, Shadyside?
I mean, Shadyside is in the city. It’s part of Pittsburgh. So why privilege development for a few blocks “downtown” through tax breaks, incentives—or even cheerleading—when it appears to be happening organically elsewhere in the city? The Trib points this out in a recent story on the Lazarus development:
Giant Eagle Inc. said through a spokesperson it has not been contacted regarding the Millcraft project. Giant Eagle is expanding its store in Shadyside, including building 54 condominiums on top of the store. Spokesman Dick Roberts said the store will be tailored to the residents, with an expanded cafe and prepared foods sections likely.
I think this is all related to the backwards notion that the way to save Pittsburgh is to improve the city’s image, rather than taking care of whatever “image problem” might exist by improving the city. “Let’s build something nice and shiny downtown,” the theory goes, “and the people ill come in hordes.” Well, planners have been building shiny and new things downtown for fifty years. It has been so long, in fact, that what was once shiny and new has become, in a lot of cases, crusty and outdated. And the hordes remain unconvinced.
Is that because the things Pittsburgh built weren’t nice enough? I doubt it. Take a look around. Ever been to downtown Washington, DC? That’s a pretty young, “creative class” kind of city. Lots of services and professional type employment rather than industry. And guess what: No one lives “downtown.” Ever been down by the White House after closing time? The streets are dead. Capitol Hill has a lot of residents, but even those are set back a bit east of the actual landmarks. Between the Capitol and 1600 Pennsylvania, not so much. A lot of people live in Northern Virginia, of course. In the District, the humming neighborhoods are Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Georgetown, etc. All analogous, in their own ways, to Shadyside, Bloomfield, Squirrel Hill, etc.
Ever been in Manhattan’s financial district after hours? Snore…
I was even in San Francisco recently. In the “financial district” downtown. And there was not a hell of a lot going on in my immediate vicinity at night. Really. In San Francisco.
So is this an indication that American cities are dying? Well, no. Check out the recent Brookings Institution report AntiRust referenced a while back. It makes a case for residential development downtown, I think, but also offers an intriguing history of “downtowns” across America:
The recent movement of households into downtowns signifies a dramatic change in the land use patterns of these areas. Downtowns traditionally contained offices, large warehouses, and the occasional factory. Downtown living was usually restricted to hotels, clubs with sleeping facilities, flophouses, and jails. By the 1920s, downtowns reached their economic peak and then began to change. Many downtown business functions began migrating to “uptowns” or “midtowns” within cities and, later, to “edge city” and “edgeless” city locations outside of town.
So when exactly was the Golden Era that today’s development gurus are trying to recapture? No one talks about “vitalizing” downtown, after all. They promise to “re”-vitalize it. To return Pittsburgh to its former glory. That certainly would not be the dark days prior to the Renaissance, when the unfettered Robber Barons of Big Steel filled the air with soot. And one would assume it was prior to the collapse of Big Steel, when displaced steel workers started leaving the cities in droves.
When was it, then, that Pittsburgh had that magical ratio of downtown dwellers that qualified the city as “vital”? How about 1970? The city had just fallen out of America’s Top 20 most populous, but it still had more than a half-million residents. Some lucrative union jobs were still here to be had, the beloved Steelers were in the process of building a dynasty, and the fruits of Pittsburgh’s earliest, highly touted redevelopment efforts were still fresh, shiny and new.
According to the Brookings report, titled “Who Lives Downtown,” approximately 9,500 people lived in “downtown” Pittsburgh at that time. A little math reveals that to have been just under 2 percent of the city’s population. How does that compare to 2000, when the most recent data was available? At that time there were 8,216 people living downtown—a few ticks OVER two percent of the population. Granted, quite a few of these were prisoners, but the fact remains: the notion that there was once a glorious era in which an extremely high percentage of Pittsburgh residents lived downtown appears to be false. Any hopes of “recapturing” any such era seem, therefore, a bit misguided, don’t they.
In this case the city does appear to be angling for more in the way of private money, which is a good thing. And I encourage private developers to risk whatever moneyh they have as they see fit. Still, I think it’s worth asking, since no one appears to be: Why, exactly, is it important to develop downtown?
I suspect that there are some very obvious responses to this. I am certainly not presuming that no answers exist. Again, I just think that in this case it might make sense to challenge what everyone accepts as a given. To think about why we might prefer lofts in the Fifth-Forbes area to lofts in Shadyside.
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