Pittsburgh's Latest Renaissance Hits a Dead End

Pittsburgh is a city well-acquainted with decline. Like a punch-drunk boxer climbing back into the ring despite repeated knockouts, the Steel City has endured multiple economic collapses over the past century – after the 1919 “hunky strike,” the periods preceding and following World War II, and most cripplingly in the wake of the 1980s steel industry implosion. Now, Pittsburgh finds itself on the ropes once again, this time felled not by labor unrest or global competition, but by a more prosaic foe: dwindling school enrollment.

What's left behind would be an increasingly hollowed-out city – rising housing costs pricing out long-time residents, an influx of childless millennial remote workers from richer areas claiming the existing housing stock, a growing homeless population, and an ever-widening chasm between the tech elite and everyone else. It's a far cry from the “most livable city” accolades Pittsburgh basked in just a few years ago.

The region faces a demographic time bomb. The metropolitan region has been experiencing “natural population loss” – more deaths than births – since the mid-1990s. This trend, once tied to the decline of the steel industry, has persisted even as the city's economy diversified. It’s a feedback loop – as young people leave, the population ages, further depressing the birth rate.

Mayor Ed Gainey, who replaced Bill Peduto and his Uber-placating urban planning policies, has so far made distributing recycling bins one of his signature initiatives. It’s an apt metaphor for a city government seemingly content to rearrange deck chairs while trying its best not to think about the iceberg looming ahead. Gainey has admirably pushed for more low-income housing in new developments, but this may prove too little, too late to stem the tide.

Even as the population declines, Allegheny County added about 2,800 housing units in 2023, a 0.46% increase from the previous year. But this creates a chicken-and-egg dilemma for policymakers. Does new housing attract residents with school-age children, or does population growth drive housing development? With a shrinking tax base, maintaining the essential services – schools, police, sanitation, and more – needed to support this new housing stock becomes increasingly challenging.

The proposed school closures are just the most visible symptom of deeper rot. A city that can’t provide quality education to all its children is a city without a future. It’s that simple. Yet Pittsburgh's leaders seem reluctant to confront this reality head-on, perhaps hoping that another tech boom or “eds-and-meds” expansion will save the day. Admittedly, they have few good choices available to them, so this Chicken Little-style avoidance makes sense. 

Alas, such magical thinking ignores the lessons of Pittsburgh's own history. John Hoerr’s And the Wolf Finally Came chronicles how the steel industry's collapse in the 1980s devastated the Monongahela Valley. Entire communities were hollowed out, their economic and social fabric shredded beyond repair – today, a visit to main street in a town like Bentleyville will reveal about as much activity as one might encounter on the surface of the moon. Today’s Pittsburgh isn’t facing quite so dramatic a crisis, but the slow bleed of school closures and population loss could prove every bit as damaging in the long run.

The tragedy is that Pittsburgh's latest renaissance held a fair degree of promise. The city reinvented itself after the steel crash, leveraging its universities and medical centers to build a more diverse economy. Tech giants like Google and Facebook set up outposts. Uber tested self-driving cars on city streets. Nonprofits interested in community development sprung up faster than Starbucks cafes. For a brief, shining moment when I was working on my Ph.D. at Pitt during the late 2000s, the hype appeared to be hyper-real – it seemed like Pittsburgh had cracked the code on post-industrial revival.

But that success came at a cost. As the tech sector grew, so did income inequality. Longtime residents found themselves priced out of gentrifying neighborhoods. The very qualities that made Pittsburgh attractive to newcomers – affordable housing, a strong sense of community, numerous long standing pockets of racial and economic diversity – began to erode under the pressure of rapid change.

Now, with this shock-treatment school closure plan serving as a rude wake-up call regarding these long-standing negative population trends, we’re seeing the chickens come home to roost. Families that might have anchored neighborhoods for generations are eyeing the exits. The city’s tax base, already strained, will continue to dwindle. It's a vicious cycle that will be difficult to break.

The proposed closures span the city, from Spring Hill on the North Side – a mere block from our own house, and soon to become nothing save a vacant shell – to Carrick High School in the South Hills. Each represents not just a building, but a community hub – a place where generations of melting-pot Pittsburghers forged identities and built futures. To close these schools is to cut away at the city’s very soul.

Of course, Pittsburgh isn't alone in facing these challenges. Rust Belt cities across the country have spent decades grappling with population loss and the need to right-size their aging infrastructure. But Pittsburgh’s situation feels particularly acute because of how far the city had supposedly come. To slide back into decline now would be a bitter pill indeed.

There’s still time to change course, but it will require immense political courage and a willingness to make hard choices that only the most masochistic of public servants still possess. Raising taxes to properly fund schools and infrastructure. Implementing inclusionary zoning to ensure affordable housing. Making tough decisions about which neighborhoods to invest in rather than trying to save every part of an oversized city footprint.

The alternative is a reversion to the mean – another generation of decline followed by vague hopes of yet another renaissance decades down the road. It’s a cycle Pittsburgh knows all too well. The shame is that this time, the city briefly had the momentum to break free of that boom-and-bust pattern. Instead, it has squandered a golden opportunity, content to coast on “Silicon Valley of the East” hype while ignoring cracks not just in the foundations of its many bridges but in the civic foundation of the entire metropolis.

In a few years, those recycling bins Mayor Gainey distributed may prove a fitting monument to this era – receptacles for discarded dreams of a city that was always on the cusp of being reborn, now waiting to be picked up and carted away to the landfill of history. Pittsburgh has risen from the ashes before. But each rebirth gets harder. Each comeback story has a less happy ending. This time, city leaders may find there’s nothing left to recycle.