Reason Magazine - Staff

Pittsburgh: Livable or Leavable?

info@reason.com (Bill Steigerwald) — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:30:00 EDT

Last week Places Rated Almanac shocked the country and ticked off the tourist-and-convention bureaus in dozens of losing cities by declaring metropolitan Pittsburgh the most livable city in the United States.

Local boosters and most of the equally joyous local media in this economically stagnant, over-taxed and poorly-governed region greeted the “news” like it was a scientific certainty—or like Pittsburgh had been awarded a new Toyota plant. It’s not the first time the PR-savvy folks at “Places Rated Almanac” have crowned the former “Steel City” most livable city. It also happened in 1985, just as the region’s manufacturing economy was being crushed by the collapsing steel industry like a rusty old car.

Choosing Pittsburgh in 1985 was so shocking, the New York Times couldn’t believe it. It parachuted a reporter into Pittsburgh who wrote that "With its breathtaking skyline, its scenic waterfront, its cozily vibrant downtown, its rich mixture of cultural amenities, its warm neighborhoods and its scrubbed-clean skies, it no longer is the smoky, smelly, gritty mill town of yesteryear."

It was a nice plug for the “Smoky City,” though in ’85 it hadn’t actually been smoky for more than 30 yesteryears. Meanwhile, as the Pittsburghers basked in the glory of living in America’s most livable city, the region’s manufacturing economy was falling off a cliff. In 1985 alone, 38,000 mostly young job-seekers moved away. By 2000, more than 140,000 had left.

Since 1985, despite bleeding people and slowly converting to a sluggish service economy based on health care and organ transplants, the region has always been ranked among the almanac’s Top 20 most livable cities. That’s mainly because the ranking system favors the area’s many priceless assets, which include an abnormally low crime rate, a populace of regular-guy, smart-ass Michael Keaton-types (Keaton's a native), great old city neighborhoods and big suburban homes so cheap they’d make a Washingtonian weep. Pittsburgh also has top universities like Carnegie-Mellon and Pitt, major league sports teams, and a beautiful green landscape of hills, hollows and wide rivers. Sure, pay scales are low and the populace can be a little bigoted, too Democrat, and too working class. The two unofficial regional religions—unionism and Steelerism—can be annoying. And pop culturally, it's at least 5 years behind L.A. But Pittsburgh is a good city to raise a family in, grow old in and die in.

“Places Rated Almanac” bases a city’s over-all rank on nine categories, on each of which the Pittsburgh region consistently hits doubles and triples but no home runs: recreation, education, transportation, ambiance, health care, crime, economy, housing, and climate.

“Ambiance” includes historic districts and cultural and artistic assets, and Pittsburgh is amply blessed with them. Its best (i.e. lowest) score was in recreation (21st in the country). Its moderate four-season climate score was worst, but not bad—135th best out of 379 cities.

Being picked most-livable over great cities like San Francisco, Boston, and even overrated Portland, Oregon, is always nice. But the more you know about what’s really wrong with this once great and still very fine city, the less you trust “Places Rated Almanac” knows what it’s doing.

Maybe its data crunchers secretly grade on the curve for Rust Belt cities ruined by the arrogance, greed, and stupidity of political and corporate power brokers. Or maybe they slipped the city some extra points for having the country’s youngest mayor, for winning five Super Bowls, or for pioneering the deindustrialization of North America 60 years ago.

The almanac didn’t subtract livability points for the City of Pittsburgh’s high tax rates, decades of moronic management, and the millions in subsidies handed to the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins for their new playpens, as well as to national retailers whose outlets that then went belly up.

Pittsburgh is in a death spiral. It’s bankrupt. Its school district spends $16,000 a year per kid. Its parking tax is the highest on Earth: 50 percent. City police and firefighters irresponsibly pad their numbers, salaries, and pensions—and openly trade their mayoral votes for sweetheart contracts. Meanwhile, local school and property taxes are among the highest in the country. So are public bus and taxi fares. And, oh yeah, highways are congested, in bad shape, and under-built.

Yes, Pittsburgh is highly livable. But it’s also dying. The region has the doomed demographics of Western Europe. It has fewer foreign-born immigrants and a higher percentage of white people than any major American city. In 1960, when the country had 175 million people, there were 2.4 million people in the metro Pittsburgh region, 1.6 million in Allegheny County and 604,000 in the city of Pittsburgh. Today, with 300 million Americans, the comparable numbers are 2.3 million metro, 1.2 million county and – incredibly – just 315,000 souls left in a city built to handle 1 million.

No matter how flawed or unscientific the almanac’s title of most-livable is, beating out 378 cities was great for the morale and civic pride of Pittsburgh, whose thriving civic booster sector will live off the good PR for a decade. Unfortunately, however, a recent U.S. Census Bureau study reported some disappointing news. Since 2000 Pittsburgh has lost more people—almost 60,000—than any other metropolis in the country except for poor New Orleans. But New Orleans’ depopulation disaster doesn’t count. It was caused by a once-in-a-lifetime act of God and the ineptitude of the Army Corps of Engineers. So unless 50,000 immigrants invade Pittsburgh real soon, it looks like “America’s Most Livable City” will soon become “America’s Most Leave-able City.”

Bill Steigerwald is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

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City Views

info@reason.com (Bill Steigerwald) — Fri, 01 Jun 2001 00:00:00 EDT

Today, Jane Jacobs is revered as North America's great expert on cities and the way they work. But 40 years ago, when her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities was first published, she was assaulting -- and shattering -- the fundamental tenets of urban planning.

That book was part literature, part journalism, and part sociology; it looked at cities from the sidewalks and street-corners up, not from the Ivory Tower down. Healthy cities, Jacobs argued, are organic, messy, spontaneous, and serendipitous. They thrive on economic, architectural, and human diversity, on dense populations and mixed land uses -- not on orderly redevelopment plans that replaced whole neighborhoods with concrete office parks and plazas in the name of slum clearance or city beautification.

Jacobs has no professional training and only a high school diploma. But in the years since Death and Life was published, her "radical" ideas about what makes cities livable have become popular -- in some quarters, near gospel. To some extent, this was driven by Jacobs' own civic activism, fighting to protect her New York neighborhood against the city planners' designs.

Jacobs' subsequent books have been just as revolutionary, if not always as widely read. The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) laid out new ideas about urban economics, stressing the importance of dynamic, open-ended growth. Systems of Survival (1992) delved into political philosophy, while last year's The Nature of Economies showed some of the ways economics follows the same principles that govern nature. She has also written a children's book and a book on Quebeçois separatism, and has edited the memoirs of her great-aunt, a schoolteacher in early 20th century Alaska.

Jacobs, who turns 85 this year, is as sharp as ever. She has lived in Toronto's bustling Annex neighborhood since 1968, when she and her late husband moved there from New York City so their sons wouldn't be drafted during the Vietnam War. She's a Canadian citizen, but she was born in the hard-coal town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Bill Steigerwald, an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, interviewed her in mid-March by phone.

Reason: What should a city be like?

Jane Jacobs: It should be like itself. Every city has differences, from its history, from its site, and so on. These are important. One of the most dismal things is when you go to a city and it's like 12 others you've seen. That's not interesting, and it's not really truthful.

Reason: Unlike American cities, Canadian cities have not been destroyed by the experts and the planners, have they?

Jacobs: Well, they've had some bad things happen to them. They had some terrible housing projects built in Toronto, although we learned later how to do it right.

That's mostly true about Canadian cities, but it's not all peaches and cream. It's really surprising how few creative, important cities Canada has for its size, its population, and its great human potential and attributes. There's a whole region of Canada, the Atlantic Provinces, that has a lot of pleasant little places but doesn't have one single really significant creative city. And the whole area is very poor as a consequence. It would be like a Third World country, that whole area, if it wasn't getting transfer payments and grants of various kinds from the rest of Canada.

Reason: But Canada didn't have the urban renewal problem that America did?

Jacobs: It had a little of it. It also had what Marshall McLuhan called "an early warning system." Urban renewal came to America earlier, so Canada had the advantage of seeing what the mistakes were and could be cautious. Canada had an urban renewal agency for a while, and it did just as badly as the one in the U.S. But it didn't last long, because as soon as the Canadian government saw what a mess it was making, how many fights it was causing, and how much opposition was arising, it just demolished the whole department.

That was the difference. All these troubles were becoming recognized in the U.S., but the government there didn't seem to be able to think, "This is a mistake. Out with it."

Reason: I know some businesspeople begged you to come to Pittsburgh and help fight a big City Hall redevelopment project that would have wiped out two city streets downtown. [See "Death by Wrecking Ball," June 2000.] The huge project has ended, so it's sort of a happy ending. But I'm wondering if, in a general sense, you think the people who control cities have learned the lessons of the '60s?

Jacobs: In that case, they certainly hadn't. That attitude -- that you can sacrifice small things, young things, and a diversity of things for some great big success -- is sad. That's the kind of attitude that killed Pittsburgh as an innovator.

Reason: And it comes from people who either have the power or the money or both to have their way?

Jacobs: Well, they have their way with the powers of eminent domain, government powers that were intended for things like schools and roads and public things, and are used instead for the benefit of private organizations and individuals.

That's one of the worst things about urban renewal. It introduced that idea that you could use those government powers to benefit private organizations. The courts never have given the kind of overview to this that they should. The time it went to the Supreme Court, back in the 1950s, the decision was that to make a place beautiful or more orderly or helpful, government could do what it pleased with eminent domain. That just left the door open. As one New York state official said at the time, "If Macy's wants to condemn Gimbel's, it can do it if Moses gives the word."

Reason: Robert Moses, the New York City planner and infamous power broker.

Jacobs: Yes. He's an extreme example, but in effect that's what the shift in eminent domain law did. But even before that, it was being done unofficially when what had grown big and successful was used to eat up, or wipe away, or starve what was not. You might as well have no birth rate and then wonder why there aren't people. If you don't have an entrepreneurial birth rate, you don't have new industries and new chances for other successes.

Reason: It seems virtually impossible for the biggest, clumsiest, most unenlightened government to squelch innovation and new growth. It might not come up in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh, but it will come up somewhere else, whether they like it or not.

Jacobs: Sure. Look at the big automobile companies in America and how they didn't make smaller cars, more economical ones that would run farther on gasoline. It took Japanese cars coming in, and German cars coming in. There was a market for them. But they were not being produced and designed by the big, rich, much more successful American companies. Then, when they saw what competition they had, the U.S. auto makers began to produce compact cars. But it sure was innovation from a long way off.

Reason: Do you think that the people who run American cities have learned what to do and what not to do?

Jacobs: I think some of them have learned a lot. There are quite a few cities that are more vigorous and more attractive than they were 10 or 20 years ago. A lot of good things are being done, but it's not universal.

Reason: Can you give me an example?

Jacobs: In Portland, a lot of good things are being done. Same with Seattle. San Francisco has done many attractive things.

Reason: What is it that you like about Portland?

Jacobs: People in Portland love Portland. That's the most important thing. They really like to see it improved. The waterfront is getting improved, and not with a lot of gimmicks, but with good, intelligent reuses of the old buildings. They're good at rehabilitation. As far as their parks are concerned, they've got some wonderful parks with water flows in them. It's fascinating. People enjoy it and paddle in it. They're unusual parks. The amount of space they take and what they deliver is just terrific.

They're pretty good on their transit too. It's not any one splashy thing. It's the ensemble that I think is so pleasant.

Reason: You are against regional planning and metropolitanism, yet isn't an important part of what's going on in Portland the pretty strong powers given to a regional planning authority?

Jacobs: I don't know. You're probably better informed than I am on that. I'm talking about the city of Portland itself.

Reason: The criticisms of Portland are these: By fixing boundaries and limiting growth by government fiat, they are guaranteeing that prices of housing will go up higher within the boundaries of Portland and that traffic will get worse. And this has happened.

Jacobs: Well, my goodness. Portland is not a dense city and never was. Whoever made that prediction, that densifying the city itself would have all those bad consequences, they don't know anything about it.

Reason: I lived in Los Angeles for 12 years. When I moved there in 1977, I just loved it immediately. It was so open and free and full of life and vitality. Not only the people, but there seemed to be a lot fewer rules and regulations about what you could do and couldn't do. Peter Hall says in Cities in Civilization that L.A. was built on freedom, and when I read that, I thought, "That makes sense to me."

Jacobs: Well, it does if you are able to drive a car and have enough money. But only in those cases.

Reason: Los Angeles wasn't too bad for money. My daughter is a lawyer and she had to leave San Francisco because she couldn't afford living there.

Jacobs: It's gotten so popular....

Reason: I remember interviewing the head of regional planning in Los Angeles. He shocked me, because I had grown up thinking Los Angeles was the best example of bad city planning. That it was sprawled all over the place, and it was just a mess, and nobody was in charge or anything. This was 1984, and this guy told me, "Now I have people coming from around the world to Los Angeles to see how we did it, how we established a city that had so many city centers -- and not just two or three big centers, but 18." The answer was that no one planned it, obviously. It just happened that way and there is not any way to arrange it to happen in this way.

Jacobs: That's what I say: Every city is different. But don't think that because Los Angeles can do that, and it turned out that way, that every city can be a Los Angeles.

Reason: Some people say cities are destined to become workplaces by day and entertainment centers by night and weekend. Do you think that's true?

Jacobs: To a certain extent. Cities have al-ways had a lot of leisure things that people use after work hours. But there are a lot of people who don't work during the day. Children have short working hours, you might say. There are seniors who don't have a lot of work during the day. I think it's important that there be recreational places during the day, too. Places where people can swim. Community centers. Places where they can bicycle.

Reason: In the city center area?

Jacobs: All over the city. The idea of this strict segregation of hours is fairly ridiculous. There are also more and more people who are working at night. Especially people who work at home.

Reason: A couple of years ago, Jesse Walker, an associate editor of REASON, wrote that your ideas are being seized by the sustainability crowd and are being abused. He wrote, "To the extent that they have digested Jacobs, they have romanticized her vision, bastardizing her empirical observations of how cities work into a formula they want to impose not just on cities but on suburbs and small towns as well."

Jacobs: I think there's a lot of truth to that. For example, the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect. In a real city or a real town, the lively heart always has two or more well-used pedestrian thoroughfares that meet. In traditional towns, often it's a triangular piece of land. Sometimes it's made into a park.

Reason: What kind of traditional towns?

Jacobs: You can see it in old Irish towns. You can also see it in towns in Illinois. The reason for it is that the action so often was where three well-traveled routes came together and made a Y. There are also T-intersections and also X-intersections. But they're always intersections that are well-traveled on foot. People speak about the local hangout, the corner bar. The important word there is corner.

Reason: Corner store, corner bar. They're illegal in most places today -- certainly in the suburbs.

Jacobs: Yes. The corner is important. It's of all different scales. For instance, big cities have a lot of main squares where the action is, and which will be the most valuable for stores and that kind of thing. They're often good places for a public building -- a landmark. But they're always where there's a crossing or a convergence. You can't stop a hub from developing in such a place. You can't make it develop if you don't have such a place. And I don't think the New Urbanists understand this kind of thing. They think you just put it where you want.

Reason: And that people will go there, as opposed to what's really happening -- that people are already going there? You're just giving them a place to stop and congregate?

Jacobs: That's right. It occurs naturally. Now it also has the advantage that it can expand or contract without destroying the rest of the place. Because the natural place for such a heart to expand is along those well-used thoroughfares.

Reason: What do the people who run cities have to do now to make their cities into more livable, more interesting places? Is it to remove some of the things they've done in the last 50 years, or just keep their hands off completely?

Jacobs: It's much less a matter of removing things than adding things, I think. For instance, here in Toronto there were two areas of the downtown that were dying. They were in very good locations but they were old industrial buildings that were becoming vacant. Manufacturing was moving out to where they had more room and where it wasn't as expensive. There were a lot of small developers who saw that these nice old buildings were just ideal for converting into apartments. They were lofts, mostly, and you know how popular they've become. But they were blocked from doing anything about it because of use zoning that said it should be industrial. So you can change that use zoning and allow residential.

Reason: But aren't you then just removing an impediment? Some people say zoning is the big problem.

Jacobs: Wait a minute, I haven't finished. It didn't help to change that use because, again, there were so many impediments that went with it. There were rules and regulations about dwellings -- especially parking places. And the ground coverage in these areas was high, and you couldn't make basements under these nice old buildings. You couldn't satisfy the parking requirements without fairly well destroying what was really nice about the areas and also making it just too expensive. So no matter what happened, they were blocked.

We had a very intelligent mayor at that time, and she listened to what they were saying. And she wanted to remove those impediments. She talked to everybody who had an interest in the area and they agreed that these buildings should be put to the additional use. But they were all so stymied in their thinking about, How do you make it practical?

Well, you're smart. You've already jumped to the conclusion of what makes it practical -- you remove the impediments. The mayor's hardest job was re-educating the planning department, but she did it. They added one new rule, and you might not like this. But it was a very important rule to add: None of the sound old buildings could be destroyed. That was to prevent environmental and aesthetic waste. Otherwise, except for the safety and fire codes, which apply to all the buildings, just about all the old regulations were removed.

Reason: And what happened?

Jacobs: It's magical, it's wondrous, how fast those areas have been blossoming and coming to life again.

It wasn't just removing impediments. It was a use that was missing in the mixture. It didn't replace all the working places. A lot of the working places hadn't disappeared yet, and new ones have come in and been allowed to be added. Also, there are other things that the people who now live there, in combination with the people who work there, can support. The main thing missing in the mixture was added. The same principle you can apply to languishing bedroom communities. What's missing there is workplaces. Here's why I don't like segregation into night things and day things: You don't get the additional things that the workers and the people living there support jointly.

Reason: Such as?

Jacobs: Parking is one of them. No parking lot was built for the big baseball stadium here in Toronto, the one with the retractable roof, because it was figured that there were enough parking places for workers that weren't being used while the games were on. So why build more parking places?

Reason: You would agree that that is a smart way to do it?

Jacobs: Yes. The same thing applies to eating places. People who want to eat out in the evening can use the same places as working people who eat at lunchtime.

Reason: People complain that suburbanites are too dependent on cars. Yet the newest suburbs -- the car suburbs, not the trolley suburbs -- are so heavily zoned and so carefully laid out. The uses are segregated so much -- you live here, you work there, you shop here, you play there, you go to school over here. If you didn't have a car, you couldn't possibly live in the suburbs -- because of the way they're laid out.

Jacobs: That's right. Your children couldn't get to school. And they couldn't get to their dancing lessons or whatever else they do. You're absolutely dependent on a car. It's very expensive for people, especially if they need a couple of cars. It's a terrific burden. It costs about -- somebody figured it out fairly recently -- it costs about $7,000 a year for one car. That's a lot of money, you know.

Reason: I'm a five-minute drive from all the shopping I need, but I couldn't walk it.

Jacobs: Sure, you want to defend the car in those cases. It's a lifeline. It's as important as your water tap.

Reason: You aren't anti-car, are you?

Jacobs: No. I do think that we need to have a lot more public transit. But you can't have public transit in the situation you're talking about.

Reason: You don't literally mean publicly owned transit?

Jacobs: No. All forms of transit. It can be taxis, privately run jitneys, whatever. Things that people don't have to own themselves and can pay a fare for.

Reason: You're not an enemy of free-market transportation.

Jacobs: No. I wish we had more of it. I wish we didn't have the notion that you had to have monopoly franchise transit. I wish it were competitive -- in the kinds of vehicles that it uses, in the fares that it charges, in the routes that it goes, in the times of day that it goes. I've seen this on poor little Caribbean islands. They have good jitney service, because it's dictated by the users.

I wish we could do more of that. But we have so much history against it, and so many institutional things already in place against it. The idea that you have to use great big behemoths of vehicles, when the service actually would be better in station-wagon size. It shows how unnatural and foolish monopolies are. The only thing that saves the situation is when illegal things begin to break the monopoly.

Reason: You've said it's a fallacy that jobs are coming out to the suburbs. What about the edge cities that Joel Garreau talks about? Hasn't it changed somewhat?

Jacobs: It has, but it's very uneven as to where the people live who go to that work. The old Garden City idea was that the jobs would be there in the suburbs, in the Garden City. That very seldom happened. For one thing, if you have two breadwinners or more in the same family, they aren't likely to work in the same place. People change their jobs in the course of their life. If they're confined geographically to just the selection there is in their little town, it's tough. It's one reason people move to cities or move to suburbs where they can commute into cities.

It's a fallacy to think that you can eliminate travel by putting people close to their work. In a few cases, they will be. But all the accounts I've ever seen, especially after a lapse of time, they aren't working and living in the same place.

Reason: I remember reading that the hub-and-spoke kind of movement of commuters is not as common in cities. People live in one suburb and work in another, not downtown.

Jacobs: That's right, they can work in another suburb. Exactly.

Reason: Is it a straw man to say that if you live in a suburb, you should work in that suburb? Is that what they really wanted people to do?

Jacobs: That's how they were justified, often, especially the ones that were considered model towns. You really can cut down the need to travel and the dependency on a car, or on public transit, in suburbs. But it's not by trying to hope, much less dictate, that people will work close to where they live. It's by their errands. There's an awful lot of unnecessary travel. If people want to get a quart of milk, they have to get in the car and get it. This is especially hard on children, too, who don't have freedom, even when they are old enough to go on foot to this place and that. It could easily be arranged that you could do almost all your errands on foot. But not so, if -- again the question of monopoly comes up -- you have to have these monopolies called shopping malls.

Reason: And they are monopolies that are protected by zoning in many cases, right?

Jacobs: Yes, and also at the behest of their developers.

Reason: The fix is in between the developers and the local government?

Jacobs: Yeah, and people have gotten afraid to have commerce get outside of these monopoly prisons.

Reason: Do you think suburbs will evolve into cities?

Jacobs: They'll evolve into something, but I don't know what you'll call them and I don't know exactly how they'll resolve. But they'll thicken up, get denser.

Reason: That solves a lot of problems, I guess.

Jacobs: Sure it does. And that's why those people are crazy when they said what would happen to Portland. It was an argument. They were trying to stop it and they said any kind of baloney.

Reason: There are suburbs in Pittsburgh where the people who run the township, the zoning officers, despise commerce. It's virtually 100 percent residential use -- big homes, mostly. And of course there are no granny flats, no corner stores, no duplexes. I don't know if people want to change that. People are happy to be living there. They are some of the wealthiest people in Pittsburgh.

Jacobs: Yes, but now consider what happens with the change of generations. Remember how people despised Victorian buildings earlier in this century? They were just ruthless with them. They were just thought to be automatically ugly and disgusting. Many wonderful, wonderful buildings were destroyed. Well, that was a big rejection of Victorianism. Not just the buildings. There was the feeling that it was stuffy, it was repressive.

There'll come a time when the standard suburbs that you're talking about -- even the wealthiest ones -- will change. Look at what has happened to very wealthy areas within cities where great mansions turned into funeral parlors, and so on. It'll happen. Just when, I don't know. I'm very suspicious of prophesizing, because life is full of surprises, but I think we are seeing the precursors of the very beginning of the change in the suburbs.

Reason: My parents are still in a 1950s suburban tract home. When we were growing up, we didn't want to live in an old house. Now you'd have to pay me to live in my parents' house, which is just a suburban box.

Jacobs: Exactly. And when this happens, people get absolutely ruthless with the old stuff. Too ruthless, I think, because I don't like waste, and I don't like thoughtlessness.

Reason: When the change comes, if it is an incremental, slowly evolving, uncontrolled sort of natural change, it's easy for society to accommodate that, isn't it?

Jacobs: Yes it is. But if all that zoning is kept, that can't happen.

Reason: This is why I'm one of the few people you've met who likes Houston, because it has no zoning.

Jacobs: It has no zoning. But all the same, it looks like all the places that do have zoning. Because the same developers and bankers who deal with places that do have zoning carry their same ideas when they finance or build something in Houston.

Reason: There are not enough Houstons to change the way things are built or developed?

Jacobs: Right. In fact, places where change does happen are where people face it and really start to overhaul and rethink these things. That's what holds back change -- when people don't overhaul and rethink. People are awfully scared of changes in zoning, because they think the neighborhood will go to the dogs and it will ruin their property values.

I mentioned before about this anatomy of the streets, and how if you have the streets that are good pedestrian thoroughfares as part of the anatomy of the heart, those are the logical places to convert from residences, say, to businesses. If the place is really an economic success, that's going to happen. That's not a bad thing to happen, the expansion of the commerce and the working places.

Reason: It's a good sign, right?

Jacobs: It's a very good sign. But you see, if it's in places where that hasn't been thought of, the commerce begins to intrude on the parts of the community that were just meant for residences. Sometimes these conversions are very charming, but usually not. They are ugly and they are like a smear that begins to spread. People look at it and say the neighborhood is going to the dogs. And they're scared of this. But actually, if you have these busy streets that have the kind of buildings on them that can easily be converted back and forth to different uses...the place doesn't go to the dogs.

Reason: The problem is when you lock yourself into one use and never allow it to change, or make it so impossible to change that it'll never happen.

Jacobs: Yes, or that it'll just be an ugly smear if it does happen. I don't think the New Urbanists are thinking of those things.

Reason: Have you been to any of these new towns they're building, like Disney's Celebration in Florida?

Jacobs: I've been to one outside Toronto.

Reason: What did you think?

Jacobs: I was disappointed. The town center is very much a constricted thing unto itself, located as if it were a shopping center. It doesn't have this anatomy. Instead of having parking lots around it, it has a good-sized park, but all the residential streets that impinge upon it are very residential and not at all part of the anatomy of the center.

Reason: The perfect towns we think of, the kind of towns that New Urbanists are trying to reproduce from on high, were developed 100 years ago all across America with very little official kind of planning. How is it people seemed to be more sensible about how towns were not made, but allowed to grow, 100 or 150 years ago, then lost it? What is the secret they knew then that we have forgotten? Or am I romanticizing?

Jacobs: No, that's a very interesting question. They weren't being as ruthless, for one thing. A lot of these towns were ruined, you know. You can see these just awful strip developments.

Reason: I don't know if you think of yourself in these terms, but when they list the 100 most important American intellectuals of this century, your name is on that list.

Jacobs: (Laughs.) It's a little early to say. Usually those things don't mean much until a couple centuries have passed.

Reason: What do you think you'll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?

Jacobs: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I've contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I've figured out what it is.

Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes. Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.

I've gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn't import less. And yet it has everything it had before.

Reason: It's not a zero-sum game. It's a bigger, growing pie.

Jacobs: That's the actual mechanism of it. The theory of it is what I explain in The Nature of Economies. I equate it to what happens with biomass, the sum total of all flora and fauna in an area. The energy, the material that's involved in this, doesn't just escape the community as an export. It continues being used in a community, just as in a rainforest the waste from certain organisms and various plants and animals gets used by other ones in the place.

Reason: It becomes denser and more diverse.

Jacobs: That's right, and it is linked with new development, because the new kinds of things that are being contrived are able to feed off of each other. The trouble is, people have always been trying to put development and expansion together as one thing. They're very closely related. They need each other. But they aren't the same thing and they aren't caused by the same thing. I think that's the most important thing I've worked out. And if I am thought of as a great thinker, that will be why.

Death by Wrecking Ball

info@reason.com (Bill Steigerwald) — Thu, 01 Jun 2000 00:00:00 EDT

Two years ago, the city of Pittsburgh sentenced Headgear, one of the coolest hat shops in the Eastern Time Zone, to death by wrecking ball. The store's owner, Charles Lee, never received official notice of the decree. He learned about it months later, the same way 124 other doomed businesspeople did: by looking at a map of Mayor Tom Murphy's proposed redevelopment plan in the morning paper.

To Pittsburgh's powerbrokers, Lee is just another insufficiently upscale retailer in the city's slowly dying shopping core. It doesn't matter that his store's category-killing excellence attracts customers from around the country. It doesn't matter that a hat shop has been at Headgear's address since Grover Cleveland was president. Lee and the building he leases are blocking City Hall's latest vision. Therefore, they must go.

Local officials call their plan "Market Place at Fifth and Forbes," after the two city streets it would destroy and then rebuild. They intend to tear down a gauntlet of pager shops, wig stores, discount drugstores, and homegrown retailers, and erect a $480-million-plus retail/entertainment center, with 40 high-end national retailers like J. Crew and Virgin Records, with classy restaurants, with chain nightclubs like the House of Blues, with a fancy 18-screen AMC movie theater, and with 1,000 underground parking spots. The aim is to attract suburbanites back downtown to shop and play. About $100 million of the money will come from taxpayers.

This is only the latest plan to redevelop what locals know as the Golden Triangle, the wedge of office towers and older buildings squeezed between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers right before they meet to form the Ohio. For 50 years, as the region's steel industry collapsed and the city's population fell by half, City Hall has been mounting such projects. Most, like this one, were passed under the cover of blight removal. Most, like this one, threatened to deploy the city's power of eminent domain. And most, like this one, took private property not for public use, as the U.S. Constitution prescribes, but for use by other private entities: developers, professional ball teams, corporate giants looking for a new skyscraper base.

Pittsburgh has no monopoly on what the posters on Charles Lee's windows call "eminent domain abuse." Detroit is using eminent domain law to replace a poor residential area with a more upscale neighborhood. In Indiana, 51 homes have been condemned so General Motors can build a factory to make Hummers. In Kansas City, Kansas, 150 families had to make way for a new race-car speedway. In East St. Louis, Illinois, a perfectly good auto-shredding plant may be destroyed so a nearby racetrack can enlarge its parking lot. In San Diego, property around the Padres' new ball yard is being seized from someone who wanted to build a hotel on it. Who's getting it now? A hotel company.

But Pittsburgh's planners seem to be in a class of their own. City Hall is on a $2 billion redevelopment rampage, and four eminent domain cases now loom. Pittsburgh is way too small to have so many cases, according to Dana Berliner of the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest law firm that intends to help local businesses fight the plan if City Hall makes good on its threat to use eminent domain. "Four cases is just ridiculous," Berliner says. "It shows how a willingness to trample on individual rights can completely wreak havoc on a single city."

Behind the plan stand Mayor Murphy and Deputy Mayor Tom Cox, who argue that it's the best way to improve the fortunes of Pittsburgh's demographically challenged retail shopping core. To complete the project by the target date of 2002, they say, the city has to act quickly, buying the existing area, razing the buildings, and selling the clear-cut neighborhood to a single big developer: Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties.

The Fifth and Forbes district is indeed shabby, aesthetically impaired, and at times uncivilized. But it is not a commercial slum: 95 percent of it is occupied, and its sidewalks bustle with activity during the day. Without romanticizing them, and without glossing over their tawdry aspects, Fifth and Forbes are two of the Golden Triangle's last real old-time shopping streets.

At noontime during the week, when office workers fill the Triangle, Fifth and Forbes' sidewalks host a socioeconomic swirl of black and white, poor and rich, old and young, dirty and clean, sane and disturbed. Mothers carrying kids mix with lawyers carrying briefcases. A vendor or two hawk flowers or hats, carefully standing on private property. Vending has been outlawed on the public sidewalks. Add a bum in a doorway, a pusher making his rounds, and a bellowing street preacher, and it's easy to see why suburban shoppers prefer the safety and predictability of their well-regulated malls.

In pre-mall days, Fifth Avenue was greater Pittsburgh's classiest shopping corridor. Not so now. Its businesses survive by serving an unusual customer mix--well-to-do downtown office workers and low-income city dwellers who arrive by public bus and jitney. Its parallel sister street, Forbes, is far funkier--and scarier to suburbanites--thanks to a small but highly visible collection of drug addicts, drug dealers, and homeless misfits. Its crumbled curbs and cracked sidewalks attest to decades of malign neglect by City Hall.

When people say the area's retail mix isn't up to par, they're usually referring to Fifth Avenue's wig shops, pager stores, and gold shops. Those are the expendable enterprises, stores that provoke snickers from everyone with class and taste. Of course, the shops' owners and customers see things differently.

Sook Kay owns Eastern Wigs, one of three doomed downtown wig stores. For 25 years she's made her living selling wigs and women's accessories on Fifth. Her poor-to-middle-class customers come from across western Pennsylvania; as with most other stores on Fifth and Forbes, her clientele is split about evenly between blacks and whites. Half buy accessories, half buy wigs--and no, they're not all transvestites. Many, for example, are women undergoing chemotherapy. "People think wigs are not necessary," says Kay. "But if they don't have hair, they really need one."

The gold shops are equally friendless. No one cares for them--except for their steady customers. David Kashi, owner of Golden Triangle Jewelers, has five or six competitors on both sides of the street, all selling discount gold chains and clunky hoop earrings. But he has obviously figured out how to please his market, which is almost 80 percent black. He's been in business for 12 years, somehow surviving City Hall's street-discombobulating, two-and-a-half-year repair job on Fifth Avenue's road surface and sidewalks, which some merchants suspect was deliberately protracted in order to kill off as many unwanted businesses as possible and make redevelopment seem even more necessary.

Kashi, an Israeli immigrant, can tell you why his business has lasted: "I am the only jewelry store that fixes jewelry on the spot. I am the only one that does body piercing. I sell pagers. I do dental gold cups." Kashi isn't afraid to adapt to change, and he doesn't care what he's selling, as long as he sells. City Hall wants him to move his shop, but there's nowhere else he can go. "It's an established clientele, and after years of trying you are forced to give it up," he says. "You are the bad guy because you are not rich enough."

Then there are Aaron and Bonnie Klein, the first merchants to contact the Institute for Justice. They run Camera Repair, a 60-year-old downtown business doomed by the city's plan. They also own the well-maintained building their shop resides in, near Market Square. The Kleins, who rent their upper floors to a beauty salon and a dental office, were outraged to learn that City Hall planned to use eminent domain to take the building they had bought as an investment for their kids' college educations. The city hasn't even made them--or any other property owner--an offer yet.

"It's amazing," Bonnie says. "Someone can pay a mortgage and pay taxes on a building they think they own, and all of a sudden the city can come in and decide they can claim your building. I think it's a disgrace."

The city's plan offends the district's shoppers as well as its shop owners, adding a current of racial politics to the issue. If you visit the National Record Mart, G.C. Murphy, or Revco Drugs, you'll find the racial mix is about 50-50. The window displays at Bradley's Book Cellar always include the latest books by black authors. The Card Center carries the entire Mahogany line of greeting cards to serve its black customers.

At Headgear, about 70 percent of the customers are black. They are Fifth Avenue regulars like James Hill, a tall, dapper, 32-year-oldclotheshorse who lives in the city and rarely shops at suburban malls. When I met him, the radio ad salesman was wearing about $900 worth of clothing, most of which he bought at Fifth Avenue thread shops like Mo-Gear, a short walk or bus ride from his apartment.

Hill says the mayor's plan to attract choice high-end retailers like Nordstrom (which will reportedly demand upwards of $40 million in city money before it comes) and Lord & Taylor (which has already gotten $12 million of city dough) makes no sense. "There is no reason to take away something that has been here and is a tradition," he says. "You don't have to have totally upscale. It means you only want one kind of person downtown. That is discrimination against the underclass."

Unfortunately, neither the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People nor black councilman Sala Udin has stood up for the black victims of City Hall's plan. Udin's district includes downtown Pittsburgh and several of the neighborhoods its black shoppers live in. Asked why he and other minority leaders aren't raising a fuss about the plan's racial implications, Udin hints that it's "a racist misconception" and "stereotypical" to assume that black people want to shop at jewel and wig shops but not at Nord-strom or J. Crew.

Udin says he's willing to risk the mayor's plan, as long as the process is slow and "responsible" and includes as much input as possible from all corners of the public. As for eminent domain, Udin "dislikes displacing one private interest for another private interest." But he also thinks "there are times when the city has to move forward in the public interest."

In its bulldozing simplicity and arrogant certainty, the city's redevelopment scheme sounds suspiciously like the urban renewal disasters of the '50s and '60s. Since 1950, the local Urban Redevelopment Authority has leveled more than 1,500 acres of land. Any Pittsburgher over 40 can name the three poor and/or black neighborhoods that the bulldozers revitalized nearly to death: the Lower Hill District, East Liberty Circle, Allegheny Center. Urban renewal reduced hundreds of acres of these once-vital communities to sterile concrete wastelands, a condition that remains four decades later.

Less well-known projects have damaged nearly 70 acres at the tip of the Golden Triangle. In what are known locally as Renaissances I and II, City Hall and its mostly Republican friends in the area's corporate power structure erected modern office plazas, such as Gateway Center, and city-block-eating monoliths, such as Fifth Avenue Place. They look great on postcards and when Pittsburgh's muscular skyline appears on Monday Night Football. But they also turned huge chunks of organic city into artificial office parks devoid of human street life and retail commerce. History-drenched blocks filled with priceless old buildings were destroyed, along with railroad tracks and warehouses. Hotels, restaurants, scores of small businesses, and hundreds of residences were wiped out.

What's more, the Golden Triangle's streets were ripped up or blocked off for several years in the early '80s while the authorities built the T, the city's absurd three-stop subway and suburban light-rail system. Patty Maloney, whose family has owned several greeting card shops downtown for nearly five decades, claims that the turmoil caused by subway construction was what finally killed off downtown shopping. Stores that once stayed open until 8 or 9 p.m. started closing at 5 or 6.

The Maloneys have spent their lives playing dodgeball with City Hall's demolition experts. Four years ago, for instance, one of their stores was forced to move from Fifth Avenue, where it had been for 38 years, to a building they bought on Wood Street, a road that intersects both Fifth and Forbes. The shop was one of seven booted to make way for a $78 million Lazarus store that City Hall built as a virtual gift for its owners, Federated Department Stores. (Federated got $48 million in public funds, plus a secret sweetheart rent deal based on future sales for the store. This, City Hall hoped, would jump-start Fifth Avenue's retail rejuvenation.) So the Maloneys spent $350,000 refurbishing their new property--and now it's doomed by the Fifth and Forbes plan.

Many of the property owners on Fifth and Forbes are happy to sell out to the city. After all, property values have jumped since the city's plans were announced. These owners will be getting their just compensation, and most will be happy to settle.

But Maloney won't. She's leading a new organization of doomed businesses that has commissioned a gentler plan to spruce up the district without blowing everything up. Nor will landlord Gerald Schiller voluntarily sell out. The Schillers bought three buildings on the corner of Forbes and Wood more than 30 years ago as a long-term investment. The rental income from the buildings, which are now paid off, was to provide them with a stream of annuities and money for college educations. The money they'll get if they're forced to sell won't begin to provide that kind of financial security.

Mayor Murphy hopes he won't actually have to use the city's powers of eminent domain to get the Kleins, the Maloneys, and the rest to move. Usually, he gets his way just by threatening to bring in the law. That's what he did last year to try to force the Pittsburgh Wool Co. to sell its land to H.J. Heinz Co., so Heinz could expand its large warehouse and distribution center (and so the mayor could take credit for keeping about 1,200 jobs here). He's threatened eminent domain proceedings so often, in fact, that he's attracted the ire of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which doesn't usually concern itself with Pittsburgh's local politics. And it's worked: In his seven years in office, Murphy has had to pull the trigger only once. (In that case, the victim was an adult movie theater that mounted a stiff First Amendment defense. The court battle continues to this day.)

How does the city get away with this? In large part, it's because Pennsylvania's courts have consistently allowed local governments to give private property to other private entities, as long as it's part of an effort to eradicate "blight." And the courts generally trust the judgment of the local authorities when it comes to what qualifies for that designation. As broadly defined by the state's 1945 redevelopment law, blight is essentially in the eye of the beholder: It can be everything from dilapidated buildings to inadequately planned streets to substandard lot sizes. In the last half-century, Pittsburgh has declared virtually the entire downtown blighted.

Bill Robinson, the state legislator who represents downtown Pittsburgh, is pushing a bill that would amend the redevelopment law to include "a more precise definition of blight." His carefully worded amendment includes the sentence, "In no event may private real property acquired by an authority through eminent domain proceedings be sold, leased or otherwise transferred to a private person."

It's easy to get support for gentrifying Fifth and Forbes from suburban editorial writers and others who don't shop on the streets now. To them, Fifth and Forbes are too messy, too ugly--too urban. City Hall and its downtown allies agree. They're too busy patting themselves on the back to notice the damage their wrecking balls have been doing.

But City Hall's plans have opponents from across the political spectrum. There is Rep. Robinson, and there are businessfolk like Maloney. There are historical preservationists, including Arthur Ziegler, the nationally known developer behind Station Square, the former train terminal that is the city's top tourist destination. Ziegler says the Fifth and Forbes plan is "the 1950s revisited" and predicts that relying solely on national retailers is guaranteed to fail. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, he had his influential Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation commission a New York architect to draw up a more sophisticated, commercially diverse, and street-life-friendly alternative. It too would use eminent domain to remove unwilling property owners, and only about 25 percent of the existing businesses would be able to stay. It saves more buildings and adds about 700 residences above the stores; as a bonus, it includes a new Market Hall over Market Square that would be home to food stalls and a rooftop skating rink. Thus far, Urban Retail Properties has ignored these ideas.

A more hard-core opponent is the Allegheny Institute, a pro-market Pennsylvania think tank that's less interested in designing a more livable plan than in stopping the city's power to impose such plans at all. Funded by local billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife (of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy fame), the institute has organized rallies against the mayor's eminent domain abuse. Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review has also railed against the plan, in contrast to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's relentless editorial cheerleading. The city's two alternative weeklies also strongly oppose the plan.

There are even a few opponents within the city government. By January, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the City Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission--all of whose members are appointed by the mayor --had approved the plan with no squeaks of dissent. Most people expected the all-Democrat City Council to rubber-stamp the plan as well. It's been less compliant than expected, though, with leftist councilman James Ferlo mounting the fiercest fight.

Ferlo believes he can scrape together a 5-4 vote to stop the Fifth and Forbes project. Few insiders agree. They predict most council members will cut private political deals with Mayor Murphy. As of late March, it's too early to tell whether Ferlo will prevail, or if soon only the lawyers will stand between the district and the wrecking ball.

Assuming that the city gets the go-ahead, there's at least one more problem with the Fifth and Forbes plan: It probably won't work. Since the malls came, Pittsburghers have shown a deepening disinterest in the Golden Triangle: About 125,000 people work there by day, but virtually no one but the opera-and-symphony crowd goes there regularly at night. Pittsburgh's nightlife is on the South Side and the Strip District--two neighborhoods largely untouched by city planning. A rebuilt Fifth and Forbes shopping and entertainment playground would have to compete with those districts, with new developments planned for Station Square, and with the urge simply to head home to the suburbs after work. Furthermore, though serious, predatory crime is rare, the bums, pushers, and prostitutes who haunt the area's sidewalks can't be ignored. Their numbers are small, but they are visible enough to drive most suburbanites away.

Even if the Fifth and Forbes project succeeds in resurrecting downtown--a wild crapshoot at best--its costs will be high and many. The middle of the Golden Triangle will be torn up for another three years. At least 62 old buildings, some of them architecturally precious, will be lost forever. Pittsburgh will lose the only shopping market in the center city for poor people and people dependent on public transportation. As many as 1,000 jobs will be lost. And scores of small and medium-size businesses will have to move.

Assuming, that is, that they can find a place to move to, in this downtown that's been steadily stripped of its character and vitality by government planners and their demolition crews.