AntiRust

The Scourge of Redevelopment: A Small Town History

Gosh. What was it about the 1960s? Here's an article in my hometown newspaper about an 1859 hotel that stood as the center of Ridgway's cultural activities for more than a century. Here's a photo:

Download photo.jpg

And here's the last two paragraphs of the story (emphasis added):

With 125 rooms, the Hyde hotel boasted an unequaled view of the town center. Over time, the hotel evolved to become a natural gathering place for community celebrations and business meetings and was soon a hub of the community. Hyde sold the hotel only a few years after building it, leaving succeeding owners to leave their own indelible mark on it. In 1890, a section of the hotel was turned to face Broad Street, and only a year later another section was destroyed by fire. In 1912, then owner Milton Wood updated the entire building adding an elevator, new water and heat systems, a phone in every room and new entrances facing Main and North Broad Streets.

The Hyde Hotel was leveled in 1965 to provide room for a national hotel chain that never arrived. Today the corner where it once stood is the site of National City Bank.

Hmmm... 1965. About the time the Hill District bit the dust to make way for the Civic Arena, no? What were people thinking? Maybe the Hyde Hotel was a little rough around the edges. Still, doesn't it seem like somebody would have questioned the wisdom of knocking it down to make way for, what, a Motel Six? Maybe there were good reasons. I don't know.

Questioning conventional wisdom. Was there ever a golden age for that?

More on old people and landfills. And prisons. And naked guys.

So a reader takes me to task for disparaging solid waste landfills (scroll down for the comment). It is a thoughtful response, and I appreciate it. So allow me to expand on the original post.

I did not intend to imply that landfills are scientifically unsound, or that they are unnecessary. That is clearly not the case. People throw stuff away, and it needs to go somewhere. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the people who design and operate these facilities.

The original post was more a dig at the current state of Pennsylvania's economy. Check out this this Post-Gazette story about a private prison near Clearfield. It goes quite nicely with the state prison recently built near Marienville in Forest County.

I am not saying that prisons are unnecessary or poorly run. What I am saying is that the state has a problem when two of its most important growth industries are prisons and landfills, and one of its most important exports is young people looking for work.

And you have to wonder when people who build such things continue to see land in your neighborhood as a prime location. They get the sense that no one is going to use it for anything else. Or that people in the region are so hard up that they will take the jobs involved, even when everyone knows they hardly ever deliver as many as they promise. Especially in the case of prisons. The one in the Post-Gazette article promised 350 jobs and actually brought 200. That's a big difference. Eric Schlosser, author of the blockbuster "Fast Food Nation," did a devastating study of the prison industry for The Atlantic Monthly called "The Prison Industrial Complex." Let's just say it doesn't bode well for the rural Pennsylvania economy.

Prisons and landfills are different in a lot of respects. But I don't think that it's a good sign when people keep building them in your neighborhood, or when they are the employers of last resort.

On the other hand, some interesting cultural clashes can provide comic relief. Here's the end of that Post-Gazette article:

Though Mr. Maines has suffered through two years of construction dust and grime, he is a fan of the prison and what it brings to Clearfield County.

"A lot of people whined who don't even live around here," Mr. Maines said. "But they're hiring people and they're spending money here, so I don't know what the problem is."

While some expressed concern for their safety in the event of an escape, Mr. Maines said that was not a problem for him.

"If they break out, they're not going to stay around," he said. "Give them the car keys and 20 bucks and tell them to send them back when they're done."

Before the prison's construction, the rural area outside Mr. Maines' home was isolated and few visitors stopped by. Consequently, Mr. Maines, who works late hours in a bowling alley, was in the habit of sitting naked on his front porch in warm weather to have his morning coffee. He doesn't plan to change the routine for the new neighbors, though his porch faces the main road to the prison.

"It's their problem because I'm not going to change," he said. "They can just look the other way."

Pennsylvania: Old People and Landfills.

So the last few elderly people left in this Japanese village have agreed to sell their property to a landfill company. They are taking what possessions they can salvage. Including their dead ancestors. Horrifying, no?

In other news, Pennsylvania consistently ranks as one of the oldest states in the nation as its young people--obviously unaware of the success of Pittburgh's Renaissance over the past six decades--continue to leave.

And in still other news, this activist group says that Pennsylvania is the number one importer of solid waste.

I'm just saying.

Renaissance III is upon us. Pack your bags.

Seeing that this is Jane Jacobs Day at AntiRust, everyone ought to follow the link to this article--one of a series--that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It says a lot about what happens when the government gets involved in redevelopment. Too bad it appeared in the paper six years ago. Here's a taste:

Four decades after promising to give East Liberty "one of the finest residential and shopping complexes in the United States," Bob Pease is back in the neighborhood he tried to save from ruin, talking about how some of his plans went awry.

"You can see what happened to that," said Pease, 75, who was director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority in the late 1950s and 1960s. "It ought to be torn down."

Circling the business district on a one-way loop, Pease pulls his car into parking lot after parking lot, pointing to the places where store owners promised to build back-door entrances but never did. He drives down Negley Run Boulevard, a road he widened, and points to deserted grass patches that failed to lure wealthy shoppers from Point Breeze and Fox Chapel. Pease passes trash-choked Broad Street, where the vacant Bell-Stern Furniture store, a bar and a fitness center sit amid litter. On Penn Avenue, he passes the East Mall Apartments, a 17-story, low-income housing complex that is a host to drug dealers, crime and vandalism.

"Right or wrong?" said Pease, looking at the high-rise. "I don't know."

After the URA demolished 1,200 homes, reduced the size of the shopping district by 1 million square feet and closed the middle of East Liberty to automobiles, the neighborhood lost hundreds of small businesses, according to one report. In the four decades that followed, it lost more than 4,500 people.

Pease's URA got most of the blame. "They ruined East Liberty," said Floyd Coles, 75, who has lived in the neighborhood most of his life.

It may be easy to lay blame for what happened. But Pease's story -- and that of urban renewal -- defies easy explanation. To pin East Liberty's demise on one person or one agency is to ignore the influence of the federal government, the growth of suburbs and a post-war faith in institutions and planning.

What East Liberty illustrates is how sprawling urban renewal projects rarely live up to their promises and how delicate the line is that separates good intentions from unintended consequences.

"It seemed like a perfect plan," said Dave Craig, 75, who was city solicitor in the 1960s. "It just didn't work the way we planned. I feel, in a measure, guilty."

By the way, the major defense offered later on in the article amounts to, "Well, we'll never know what would have happened if we HADN'T done the redevelopment."

Exactly.

But we do know what did happen.

Hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) spent. Half the people abandoned the city. Poor minority citizens disproportionately impacted, giving the whole enterprise a racist tinge. And downtown is such a calamitous failure that we have decided to turn to a casino for salvation.

I mean, the free market isn't perfect. But in what way could it have been worse?

More Jane Jacobs and Pittsburgh

The Tribune-Review ran a good obit yesterday with some interesting connections to the Pittsburgh experience. Here's an important bit for those who continue to insist that the city's Renaissance was a spectacular success worth recreating:

In 1969, in "The Economies of Cities," Jacobs noted that because Pittsburgh had overspecialized in steel-making and manufacturing, its economy had actually begun to stagnate as early as 1910. She said that after World War II, Pittsburgh's civic and corporate leaders should have been trying to incubate new industries to replace steel instead of trying to protect the economic and social status quo.

She wrote that the city's dwindling capital had been wasted on "immensely expensive urban-renewal and highway programs that have not helped the economy at all." By 1967, Jacobs wrote, Pittsburgh's economy was in worse shape than it had been in 1947.

That is, Pittsburgh should be talking about undoing the Renaissance experience, not redoing it. That should have a huge impact on who does the doing. And who doesn't.

Update: Ready for even more? The Tribune-Review's Bill Steigerwald interviewed Jacobs for Reason magazine in 2001. Pittsburgh comes up.

R.I.P. Jane Jacobs. And Sorry About Pittsburgh.

Slate currently has an excellent tribute to the late Jane Jacobs, the great iconoclast who eviscerated urban-planning projects like Renaissance I and II and single-handedly changed the face of American cities. The Slate article at times would seem to support the idea that Pittsburgh's new approach to urban planning is in the Jacobs tradition:

But the current revival of many American downtowns, the converted lofts, the restored historic districts, and the residential real-estate booms in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco attest to the essential correctness of her vision.

But would Jacobs really approve? Looking at Pittsburgh's new planning schemes, it seems like we have, perhaps, forgotten her message. Here's a look at another bit from the article, emphasis added:

During the 1960s, a time when the reigning orthodoxy was urban renewal, which generally took the form of urban demolition, she championed a more evolutionary, humanist, and small-scale approach to city planning.

Though neither a designer nor an urban economist, Jacobs wrote what is undoubtedly the most influential book on city planning of the second half of the 20^th century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The first sentence is characteristically direct: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Jacobs criticized what she considered the utopian and misguided theories of Modernism, and she also rejected the other chief urban theories that had influenced 20^th century planning: the monumental City Beautiful and the countrified Garden City movement. She was not nitpicking. This was a frontal attack on the idea that cities could be designed at all.

But isn't that exactly what Pittsburgh is doing as the people at the top of the power structure design our city's "newest neighborhood"?

Claiming Jacobs as a libertarian can be difficult business (see comments here), but I have to think that her dismissal of grand planning schemes would put the URA in a questionable light. Because after all, why is it that city leaders snapped up all that property downtown? Because they insist that top-down is the ONLY way to change a city. It's a master-plan or nothing.

Sorry, Ms. Jacobs.

Sorry Senator Santorum: There's STILL no such thing as a free arena

The Post-Gazette's Bill Toland has done excellent work on the casino beat. And the paper's Casino Journal blog, which Toland runs, is an excellent idea. So I was disappointed to see the Journal's post about Senator Rick Santorum's support for using casino revenue to build a hockey arena. Here's what it reported Santorum as having written in a letter:

"As I've stated publicly in the past, I believe the gaming license is a public license and therefore some portion of the revenues derived from the award of the license should be used for public purposes. The opportunity for our region to build a new arena and redevelop a struggling area of Pittsburgh with some of these funds remains a top priority for many civic leaders."

Now here's how Toland and company responded:

Difficult stance. Next he'll be coming out in favor of teddy bears and ice cream.

That is, using public money for a hockey arena is OBVIOUSLY a good thing. Who could be against it? I mean, it's free money, right? Ha! We've suckered these casino people into building us an arena. FOR FREE! That has basically been the Post-Gazette editorial board's argument all along. Here is that board writing about one of its own editorials a few days back:

[T]he Post-Gazette carried another editorial, on March 12, that endorsed the Isle of Capri plan as the best for Pittsburgh, based on location, development of the Hill District and construction of a new arena without public dollars.

Anyone notice a difference here? Santorum says we ought to build an arena with this money because it's public money. The Post-Gazette says we ought to build an arena with this money because it is private money. So which is it?

Santorum is closer to being correct. This is PUBLIC money. The Isle of Capri does not give a damn how the city wants it to spend the $290 million. If the city came to them and said, "Hey, Isle of Capri, instead of that arena, how about you give us $290 million worth police officers instead," does anyone suspect that that company would reject it? Why would they care either way? Or $290 million in teachers?

Or get this: How about just $290 million?

The fact of the matter is, the City of Pittsburgh is giving something up to get this arena. And that, of course, is whatever else it could have gotten the Isle of Capri to hand over. And it would have been a lot. We know it's at least $290 million. It's Econ 101. Opportunity cost. Someone ought to get a textbook and mail copies to a few people.

Toland is a sharp guy. And I know he does a lot of stuff tongue in cheek. But spending $290 million on a pet project for a professional sports team that provides dubious economic benefits to the city does seem to be at least a bit more controversial than endorsing teddy bears.

Now if SOMEBODY would take the city and the PG to task for continuing to argue that this arena scheme is ANYTHING like private investment, I'd be much obliged.

As an addendum: Isn't it worth noting that Santorum views it as public money and supports spending it on the arena anyway?

Is Optimism in Order? We Shall See...

So there is a new blogger in town. One who goes by "Proud Pittsburgh". He appears to be extremely optimistic about the city's new development plans. The good Dr. Madison at Pittsblog pointed to the blog first. And Jonathan Potts followed up. Like Potts, I will try to let that optimism wash over me. But first a critical look.

One of the blog's recent posts is titled "Pittsburgh's Commercial Construction Up 95 Percent in First Quarter." Good, factual information. But some interesting commentary rounds out the entry. In bold: "Renaissance III has begun!" Well, not to sound like a broken record, but I certainly hope that's not the case. The first two Rennaissances were such resounding failures that half the city's population left and downtown fell apart. Remember downtown? The one that so desperately needs revitalized today?

But the post prior to that one really got me thinking. It's titled "Industry Is Our Industry." It argues that hard work and the like are part of Pittsburgh's cultural "DNA," and that this force can be applied to health and education in the same way it was applied to steel.

Now quick: Think back to fifth grade grammar class. What do you notice about the last sentence of the previous paragraph? Yep. It's in the passive voice. Sorry to bore you with that, but I think it's important. Because who, exactly, is going to utilize the "DNA" that served Big Steel so well? "Proud Pittsburgh" thinks a lot of people are. And he refers to them as "we."

Pittsburgh's industrious nature is in the cities DNA. Achievement is our birthright.

We have earned our place in the American and World history books, and it is our work ethic and desire to achieve that has put us there. It is that exact same work ethic that is driving people at UPMC to develop a diabetes vaccine. It is an extraordinary work ethic that drives the people at CMU to develop robots that will save the lives of our soldiers , and the people at Bayer to develop new materials for the 21st century.

I firmly believe that these industrious people will one day see their names in the same history books as Andrew Carnegie, Jonas Salk, and George Westinghouse.

God, I hope so. But let me point out a serious problem with this analysis. How do we date the "death" of Big Steel? Yeah, I know, ET Works is still going. But when was it that people went beyond thinking "holy crap" and actually saying it? Let's pick a moment. Maybe the closure of Homestead? Seems fair. Well, this might be hard to believe, but...

That was more than 20 years ago.

Two decades plus. Wow.

Think about that. Take a worker in his real prime. A guy who had developed real skills but still had his strength. A guy who was, say, 35-40 when Homestead closed. well, that guy is now between 56 and 61 years old.

Now think of a guy who is in that prime age now. He was between 14 an 19 years old when the mill closed. That is, he never had a chance to work there.

That's not to say that the young guy whose father toiled at the mill did not learn a lot about hard work. The problem resides in the fact that a whole bunch of those young guys moved away. To find work.

And THAT is the ultimate legacy of Renaissance I and II. Whatever good they did, they did not keep those hardworking people here. And when those people left they took a big chunk of Pittburgh's legacy with them.

So where does that "DNA" really reside? Is it in the bricks and mortar of places like Homestead? I hope not, because Renaissance I and II tore them down. Is it in neighborhoods like the Hill District and East Liberty? Ditto.

So what to do? Sit around and bitch? It might sound like that's what I am doing. But (I hope) it's not. I just think it is critically important to point out what worked and what didn't. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of this new Renaissance "Proud Pittsburgh" is so excited about is actually aimed at undoing the disastrous effects of the first two.

And until the institutions who initiated those disasters recognize that history of failure, I see little reason to put any trust in their promises for the future.

But like I said--and like Mr. Potts said before me--I hope I am wrong. We'll see. In the meantime, I'll read Proud Pittsburgh and see if I can lighten up a little.

Unless he says something about a smoking ban.

Grrr....

Controversial Riverfront Development: It's Not Just for Big Cities Anymore

So there is a huge controversy brewing over riverfront development. And it has nothing to do with Pittsburgh.

Check out this story from my hometown newspaper.

All the points of contention are the same as the ones facing Pittsburgh. It's a struggling industrial area now home to a group of folks committed to the notion that tourism is the best route to economic salvation. Now they want to go after a government grant to do a study on riverfront development. A grant the locals would have to match. The story has the details of a council meeting that appears to have gotten nasty:

Tony Piccirillo cited concerns the study may interfere with or divert funding from flood control projects, and Dussia shared an item in an unsigned piece of correspondence, titled “Wild about the Wilds,” he said he found offensive, which read “In 1997, Ridgway was completely clueless how to help themselves.”

The item went on, “And ten years later, they believe there is nothing they can't accomplish by working together.”

Lauricella said she agreed with the sentiment of the item.

Dussia also noted that the scope of the study would include contemplation of redeveloping borough property along the river as a point of public access or park space, which he said would nullify they borough's investment into buildings used by work crews.

Lauricella responded to the concerns, both voiced in the meeting and criticisms she inferred she has heard outside in recent weeks, by saying the study would have no impact on flood control projects, and that she no longer owns property referred to as the “Lauricella property” in previous study documents, which she said is owned by her ex-husband.

What makes this even more interesting is that the local bigwig sawmill owner recently announced his intention to snap up a huge property right along the the Clarion River. It is adjacent to his mill. But also home to a huge factory that used to make brakes until it closed a few years back. I worked there one summer and made an astronomical amount of money.

So is he expanding the mill? Doing something else with the factory? Knocking it down to do something with the riverfront development?

Hmmmm...

At any rate, there appears to be a lot of intrigue here. Doesn't that always seem to be the case when publicly subsidized development is in the offing? Now why might that be?

Downtown Cheerleading is Hard Work

What to make of this muddled editorial from the Post-Gazette this morning? Here's a piece of the last paragraph:

Thanks to believers in Pittsburgh in the public and private sector, the neighborhood is growing and going upscale, and that can only buoy the Golden Triangle's lifeblood and nightlife.

And from the paragraph right before that:

The more people who live Downtown, the greater the demand for businesses like gourmet groceries and entertainment venues. (Now, if only someone could build condominiums in the $80,000 to $120,000 range for the middle-class folks.)

So let me get this straight. The best thing about the project is that it will take the area upscale. The only problem the PG editorial board sees, though, is the fact that it is, well, upscale.

And as someone who is more like to live in an $80,000 residence rather than an "upscale" condo, let me tell you this: I can't afford to shop at the kind of "upscale, European-style gourmet market-delicatessen" that the paper applauds in this editorial. I would need a Giant Eagle. A huge one. maybe 50,000 square feet. How many people do you figure it would take to support such a thing? Just asking. And there are a lot of similar points to be made. People who make $50,000 a year live a different lifestyle than people who live in condominiums that cost ten times that amount. Besides, if it's hard to justify subsidizing upscale downtown living, wouldn't it be even harder to justify subsidizing middle- class living there, too? I mean, the Pittsburgh area already has 90 neighborhoods, or whatever the number is these days. So why add another one?

Then there's this:

Following the collapse six years ago of the city's single-developer, master renovation plan, small entrepreneurs, big business, a private university and city government are carving out manageable chunks of the Golden Triangle to raze, build and transform. In doing so, they're creating a patchwork of commercial and residential projects that, piece by piece, will bring a desperately needed social and economic liveliness to Downtown, maybe even after dark and on weekends.

So what's good is diversity. Smallness. Manageable chunks. A patchwork. And what's the best way to support that? Well:

Last week Mayor Bob O'Connor announced the hiring of Urban Design Associates architect Don Carter to develop a master plan for Downtown's retail corridor in five weeks time that will consider the best use of existing lots, green space, lighting, parking and try to ensure that current and future developments will mesh well.

So the best part about it is that it will be a diverse patchwork. A diverse patchwork that's master-planned so it looks the same.

And then there's this weird shot at local culture:

Soon enough, it won't be the same old Dahntahn.

I'm not as sensitive as some people regarding the accent. But what, exactly, does this mean? Who is it working against? Who is it working for? And why?

Last, and I think most importantly, I still don't understand the reasoning here. Let me replay a short section:

In doing so, they're creating a patchwork of commercial and residential projects that, piece by piece, will bring a desperately needed social and economic liveliness to Downtown, maybe even after dark and on weekends.

Desperately needed by whom? Why is this necessary? I mean, it must be obvious. Right? So could someone please explain it to me? It seems to me that this rises--or I suppose sinks--to the level of a pretty pronounced social bias. The Post-Gazette supports this kind of project to revitalize downtown because... well, the paper's editors like downtown more than they like suburbs. Or even other parts of the city like Shadyside. Other than that, is there a single, rational case to be made for preferring "upscale living" in this zip code instead of another? And is it strong enough to justify the massive subsidies required here?

Please. Someone explain it to me.