By Tim Puko, FrontDoor.com | Published: 2/12/2009
Overcoming the Challenges to Growth
Whether the region can keep growing will depend on how it confronts some of the problems the steel industry left behind. Its collapse triggered a vast emigration of talent and now the city has one of the oldest populations in the country. Immigration, once a hallmark of Pittsburgh, slowed to a trickle. Much of the region's infrastructure is old and failing, and its governments are divided into scores of little towns, some unable to support themselves and their schools. Some local leaders have admitted these problems and attempted to deal with them.
Some problems the region hasn't really considered at all, two experts said. The steel industry and related businesses, though not dominant, are still big players in the region and announced billions of dollars in regional investment in 2008. But the problems of its past have sometimes led to its presence being ignored, said Ravi Madhavan, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh. And while the region may have a healthy bevy of small startups, it has no unified strategy to help them grow larger and build job-rich production facilities in Pittsburgh, said economist Perry Wong of the California-based Milken Institute. The planned closing of three world-class technology companies stirred up some angst throughout the region in recent weeks.
"I think they are kind of shy, they're shy in how they can convert their outcomes into an industrial base. Creating an industrial base is an idea that people in Pittsburgh have given up," said Wong, part of a Milken team that in 2006 did a study of the region's technology strategy. "In the past 60 years, Pittsburgh was the greatest industrial base in America. ... It looks like they don't want to redefine their role in that process. They would rather maybe be a ... sports titan and focus on their universities, but they can define their position as an industrial complex, too."
Building a Knowledge Economy
That will take time and long-term commitment from local leaders, economic experts said. Pittsburgh, in competing for high-tech and knowledge-sector jobs, is basically competing with any city that wants to grow a 21st century economy. Regions like San Diego and the North Carolina Research Triangle have blossomed because of those types of jobs, but it took decades for those areas to establish themselves.
"It is starting (to turn in Pittsburgh) but I know as a native who's written about this issue that it was starting to turn 10 years ago and I was hopeful. It doesn't just turn maybe as far and as fast as we hope," said Mark Houser, who covered the region, including its technology sector, as a former reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "We're digging ourselves out of the deepest hole that maybe any American city has ever found itself in. ... That takes a long time. It's not that the engine is stalling, it's that it takes a lot of work."
"I think that research and good universities are the drivers for building a knowledge economy," Houser said. "So if we possess ... a formidable research hospital (the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) and certainly one of the best computer/robotic/AI/high-tech universities on the planet (Carnegie Mellon), then we are situated really well for these industries of the future."
BACK: Building on its steel legacy and reviving downtown >>