Creative Class

So when I think about the lessons the Steel City’s 30-year economic transformation may hold for Detroit, another town built on an industry beaten by competition and confronting bankruptcy, I have to say that the first and hardest lesson for the Motor City is this: Fundamental change will be much longer in coming than you can imagine. You’ll survive. The automakers, bailed out or not, will shrink and adapt to a new future and a new reality. The city will remake itself in whatever ways it can. But there’ll be no “getting over” your past, only moving beyond it.

Organizing and managing contraction is not an activity we Americans know much about. But you’re stuck with the job, Detroit, and it will go better for you if you’re clear-eyed about who you are and where you’ve come from.

The city’s second, still-ongoing period of transformation started in the mid-’90s. It has featured less hyperbole and a steady conversion to a high-end service economy with an emphasis on higher education and health care. One reason for the more moderate approach is that we’ve lost and continue to lose too many people. Pittsburgh is a victim of “natural population loss” (deaths outnumbering births) and the only major urban region in the nation to have experienced a small but consistent population decline for three decades, now going on four.

Moreover, for every new technology company coming in, we’ve suffered the loss of such major employers as Gulf Oil, Westinghouse, Koppers Inc. and Dravo Corp. It wasn’t until 2001 that regional employment broke out of two decades of stagnation to reach a record 1.15 million jobs. But this change was short-lived as 9/11, the Bush-era recession and the US Airways bankruptcy — which cost the region 12,000 jobs — took their toll. Despite these realities, Pittsburgh today is a relatively balanced and steady place. Health and higher education are the largest employers, with 232,200 jobs as of January, but there are also more than 150,000 goods-producing jobs. As for steel, well, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland now produce more of it than Pittsburgh does, but we still retain both basic and specialty steel plants, as well as 329 metals technology service firms providing steel production equipment, engineering services, parts and supplies and raw materials …

Data from the last 10 years clearly suggest that the Motor City’s challenge is bigger than just making better cars. The city is dealing with long-term regional contraction. Since 2000, it has lost manufacturing jobs at a rate of 42 percent, nearly identical to Pittsburgh’s 44 percent loss of a quarter-century ago. And it’s starting to bleed population in the manner of Pittsburgh, though not as acutely yet. But if the automobile industry goes belly-up or even contracts significantly, all bets on that score are off.

Particularly challenging is the state of affairs in the urban core, where population stood at slightly more than 900,000 in 2006, down from a 1950 high of 1.6 million. There’s a critical difference here between the two cities. Even though it has only a third of Detroit’s population, Pittsburgh has more people working in it every day — 298,429 to 241,627. It also has a 1 percent county sales tax that serves as a user fee for regional entertainment and cultural institutions. Thus it’s able to offer area residents more urban amenities and job opportunities than Detroit.

For all its traumas, Pittsburgh retains an urban/suburban/rural coherence. That, coupled with striking architecture and a beautiful natural setting, goes a long way toward explaining why it consistently gets better press than it might deserve, and why, after you examine the region’s economic, demographic, environmental, health and local government measures, you refrain from blurting out, “Why, they’ve been treading water for years!” Which is, in any case, better than sinking.

Craig’s assessment seems more or less on-target to me.

From what I’ve been able to see, the urban turnaround process seems to take about a generation or two. Greater Boston launched its efforts to remake its economy in the wake of the decline of its textile and boot and shoe industries as early as the late 1940s, with the creation of the early venture capital fund American Research and Development and related efforts. When I studied at MIT during the early 1980s, the university was still surrounded by derelict manufacturing buildings. Pittsburgh, as Craig notes, began its own revitalization efforts during the 1980: They were still in take-off stage when I arrived in 1987.

Both were heavy industry towns, but Pittsburgh (where I lived for 17 years) and Detroit  (where my wife’s family is from and where I sit typing this message) are very different places.

Pittsburgh retains a significant downtown business district and a whole series of functioning urban neighborhoods as well as two major research universities and several other universities and colleges in the city. Detroit has seen much more demolition; its core is more isolated; and while Wayne State has a large urban footprint, both Michigan and Michigan State are outside the city.

That said, greater Detroit has a much bigger population than greater Pittsburgh – more than double; and a world-class airport. Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State provide research scale that’s quite a bit larger than greater Pittsburgh. Detroit also has a lot more immigration, and an energy and a “coolness factor” that also seems to trump what I experienced in Pittsburgh.