utterly opinionated

Four hours and forty-one minutes outside Pittsburgh, anger slapped me in the face.  How ridiculous is this, I thought.  Only two hundred and thirty-three point eight miles in four hours and forty-one minutes?  If I were flying, I’d almost be in Paris.

While we fuss about better transportation inside our city, we are missing the boat (or the high-speed train).  Who cares about a slightly better connection between Downtown and Oakland?   We need a better connection between us and the rest of the world.  Right now it takes a startling twelve hours to go by train from Pittsburgh to New York.

A train that moves at just one hundred miles per hour would not only make it possible to get to New York, DC or Philadelphia faster, but would also open a flood of opportunities for Pittsburgh.  More jobs for those who live in our region, spread over a wider geographic area.  More opportunities for businesses located in Pittsburgh, with ready, fast connections to other places.  More.

Come on now.   Who’s working on this?

Outside, along the edge of the river trail, the smell of honeysuckle is intoxicating.

Go.

I was disappointed.   And then I wasn’t.

Every month Kim, Sara & I host a cityLIVE! event.  We are interested, as we believe our audience is, in understanding issues that impact our city and region.  We are interested in holding a forum that allows everyone to attend.  And we are most interested in nurturing a thoughtful exchange of ideas.

And so last night I was disappointed.  Some people came to our event with their minds made up.   They intended not to listen to others.  They did not intend to exchange ideas.  The resulting conversation was bitter and cruel.   “Answer the question” they shouted when they didn’t like the answer they were given.  Some even challenged the location of the venue, the legitimacy of the panel and the sincerity of the speakers.

Admittedly, the topic we chose was an emotional one — the fate of Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.  Should the Igloo be demolished or should it be saved? This iconic building, a spectacular remnant of the Modern Movement, has a sordid history.  It was built where a vibrant neighborhood once was.  It left behind it a wake of blight and devastation as big as a Tsunami wave.  The Hill District, a predominately African American neighborhood, still lies in ruins sixty years later.  Lingering bitterness and mistrust accompany the physical devastation.  Mistrust of black for white.  Mistrust of everyone’s motives.  MISTRUST.  I did not understand this clearly until last night.

The event and the tense exchanges left me feeling unsettled, as if somehow the questions we’d asked, the issues we’d raised, the panel we had so carefully selected were irrelevant next to this much bigger issue.   I felt like an impostor in the room.  I heard clearly that I had no right as a white woman to have a say about the fate of the Igloo.

This thought rankled with me.

How can a civic building belong to one neighborhood or to one group of people?  How can it’s future lay in the hands of politicians who will soon be gone?  This building and it’s history is far bigger than that.  Its fate should be decided by Pittsburgh’s people – ALL of them.   As the event came to a close I felt very alone with these thoughts.

Then something remarkable happened. A steady stream of people came to thank me.  Emails followed.  How unfortunate that not everyone understood the nature of the event, they said.  The Igloo is important to us too.   We want an opportunity to be educated, to help decide.   We want to hear other perspectives .  We want to be involved.

So many voices, thinking just what I had.  And with every voice, the disappointment faded.

The next time someone tells you that Pittsburgh is losing population, yell at them.

For the first time in 19 years the Census reports that the number of people migrating into the Pittsburgh region in 2009 exceeded the number migrating out.  The remaining tiny population loss of 434 people last year is accounted for by more people dying than being born.  We are still a very old region.

So get busy.  Lets young up and shake that “really old” title as well.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a weekend bicyclist, “might consider keeping his head down and his helmet on” suggests the Huffington Post this morning.  ”A backlash is brewing over his new bicycling policy.”

LaHood blogged that he is ending the era of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.   “The new policy has vaulted LaHood to superstar status in the bicycling world. Bike blogs are bubbling with praise. A post on Ridemonkey.com calls him “cycling’s man of the century.” The Adventure Cycling Association’s Web site calls LaHood “our hero.” says Huffington.

He’s my hero too.

Black is de rigeur in Paris

Black coats, black boots, big black scarves, and even black hair.  Black is as certain as the methodical parade of grey stone buildings on every Parisian street. Paris wears black well.  Tres chic.

At home the exuberance of individuality is as messy as the backdrop of our chaotic buildings and streets.  Black hair is eclipsed by blond, red and even purple strand.  Colorful clothing abounds.  Gaudy sneakers encase happy feet.

The elegance of Paris and its inhabitants pleases me.  The exuberance of my fellow Americans puts a smile on my face.

Remember this story?   Mon dieu!  You don’t have to spend $1010 on a trash can.

I love the pragmatic simplicity of Parisian trash cans.  A short steel post, with a ring at the top, bolted to the sidewalk with a plate.   The bag is held in place by an enormous, sturdy, bungee cord.

Get a local manufacturer to make these and I’ll bet they won’t cost much more than $50 a piece.  In Paris, you don’t have to walk much further than a block or two to find one.   They don’t take up much space, and the bag is simple to replace.

When did we start to believe that trash needed an architectural masterpiece to house it?     Admittedly, this solution was born as a safety measure, after trash cans became a great hiding place for bombs.  I love this solution.  Bombs can’t hide in clear plastic bags.

Bring it on!

Its my third coffee shop of the day and I’ve overdosed on coffee so this time I ordered tea.  Tea and a palmier.   I sat down around 4:30 and by 4;45 the coffee shop was packed.  Teatime, coffee time, snack time.  There is no other time as busy as this.  This is when the stores shut for a few hours and everyone takes a break before the evening rush.  Very civilized.

Unlike coffee shops in Pittsburgh, mine is the only computer in sight.  Parisians take their breaks seriously.   And unlike coffee shops in Pittsburgh this one caters to everyone.  The youngest person I see is 1 and the oldest is probably pushing 80.

Paris is a dense city.  There is not much space here.   Streets are narrow and crammed with cars.

A typical parking space in Pittsburgh measures twenty feet long by eight and a half feet wide.   This smart car fits into a space just nine feet long.  I measured it.   Fill a city with tiny cars and there’ll be twice as many parking spaces.

I’ve been sleeping through the winter.  Paris has woken me up.

24 hours ago I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport, caught the RER metro into central Paris and settled into my tres petite chambre a coucher.   Tres petite.   Very un-American.  Lured here by a free room and a cheap ticket I thought what better way to emerge from the winter, but five days in Paris?

When I travel to a city I always promise myself that I will hit several museums and the important sights, but I should know myself better.  Once I start walking I am lost in the streets and there is no stopping me.   I cannot help myself.   Time inside seems time wasted.

On this trip I decided to focus on Le Marais, on the right bank of the Seine, and perhaps one of Paris’ most interesting neighborhoods.   My Eyewitness travel guide says this about Le Marais.  “ A place of royal residence for centuries, it was abandoned to the people during the Revolution and descended into an architectural wasteland, before  being rescued in the 1960s”.   Such a description cannot keep me away.  It takes an hour to walk there from my hotel and an hour back, but the journey is part of the adventure and it helps to burn off the endless food temptations along the way.  Tomato and mozarella pressed “sandwichs”,  crepes filled with nutella and wrapped in paper and lots of cafe creme.  Past the Jardin du Luxembourg and a school with children screaming in the playground, past scooter stands, markets, through the streets of the Left Bank, across the Ile de la Cite and then I am almost there.

This morning I set out after eating my petit dejeuner of french bread, croissant and hot coffee.  As I walked I absorbed the simple adaptions to life that Parisians have made in this very dense city.

We can learn from this.

Read on …

We sold our Lake House a couple of years ago.   It had become a burdensome retreat, large and a lot to care for.   Most days we’d sit in the tiniest room just off the kitchen, reading and looking at the gorgeous lake view.

I’ve adapted to life without a weekend retreat.  Still, I daydream about the perfect place to spend a weekend day and list the formula in my mind.  No more than an hour’s drive from our home in downtown Pittsburgh;  one room with a great view;  a fireplace center stage;  by water; on a biking trail;  with grounds that are rough and weedy.

Heaven.

And then I found the Red Guest Houses.   Designed by Totan Kuzembaev for a resort near Moscow, they have helped to transform once filthy waste land.  I will  build one.  It will hover above the old steel and weeds, right next to the river, bright red against the grey ground.  Apart, yet part of the landscape.  My Red Guest House will be something new and creative set into the solid roots of the region.

Soon.

cityLAB is going to pop Pittsburgh up in some other cities.  We are hosting a one-day creative event (a charrette) at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh. Designers, architects, artists and wanna-be artists will work in teams to design a pop up that describes Pittsburgh best.

Not sure what a pop up is?   Come and find out at 10 am.

Creative and itching to design?  Stay on and we’ll assign you to a creative team.

Curious and got a point of view?  Come to the presentations at 2:30 pm and join in the critique.

Questions?   Email me at eve@citylabpgh.org.  We’ll be working in the College of Fine Arts Building at CMU, Room 214.

Everyone is welcome!

Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh.  While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired.   The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter.   It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought.  What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.

Santa Monica, on the other hand, is celebrating its bus system   Last year their Big Blue Bus Agency awarded Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects and Bruce Mau Design the Big Blue Bus Architectural and Branding Package.   These two internationally recognized firms were charged with the job of exploring how public transportation has the potential to cultivate, enrich and connect the community.

Their joyful solution, “The Blue Spots” takes the dreary out of bus stops.  Eventually, these flexible blue shelters will be implemented at 360 stops.

Ours or theirs?   You pick.

Everyone deserves to earn enough money to pay for their daily essentials.  On face value alone the proposed prevailing wage bill in Pittsburgh makes sense.  It speaks to the basic decency of employers and their willingness to take some responsibility for their employees lives.

As I understand it, the legislation ties real estate development dollars that the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority invests in a project to a guarantee that the developer pays prevailing wages to everyone involved, for evermore.  This means any business within a development must also comply.  No longer do the proponents of the bill want to trust employers to do the right thing.  They want to ensure that public dollars result in prevailing wages.

I so sympathize with this point of view.

But I’m going to land on the other side of this debate, and here’s why.

About five years ago I purchased the Liberty Bank Building on main street in East Liberty.  It sits in a neighborhood that at that time had many shuttered storefronts.  It had been vacant for ten years, and I lovingly called it “green”.  The building was covered inside with green mold.  The renovation that we embarked on was extensive and complicated.  Not much was left to save but the beautiful sandstone walls.  It is not a huge building but it was a huge financial undertaking.  It required the URA’s assistance, my life savings and an awful lot of time.  This is the sort of project you call “patient”.  I took this on because it matters to me that my projects make a difference in the long run and I was sure this one would.

In the early years it was almost impossible to find good tenants.  Tenants came and went, damaging the spaces and requiring more funds to repair them.  New potential tenants could not see the value of locating to this neighborhood.  It was tough.  Very tough.  My partners and I lost money.  Dollar Bank and the URA helped as much as any financial partner could.  They worked with us, unfailing, through the tough times until now, five years later, we are beginning to break even.

The due diligence that came along with city funds that were borrowed has also been burdensome but I believe a fair exchange.  Every year (amongst a sea of other reports) I compile a report of jobs created in the building.   Where once no-one was employed here, now sixty-one people come to work at the Liberty Bank Building every day.  I consider this a staggering success.  If I had to entice tenants to the building and require that they report their wage rates to me or the URA, I doubt that we would be at break even today.

Today, Rich Lord reported Rabbi Jami Gibson as rhetorically asking developers, “Why can’t you get by on the minimum profit?”.

This comment hits me hard in the gut.  I get by on LESS than minimum profit, Rabbi Gibson.  I’ve invested myself whole-heartedly into this neighborhood.  While the building I built may not require that everyone in it receives prevailing wage, it has helped to turn this neighborhood around, and brings far more jobs along with it than just inside the building alone.

Would I have tackled this building with the prevailing wages as an added mandated obligation?

No.

On January 12, cityLIVE! presents pop culture in the city of Pittsburgh.  Don’t you wonder what we are watching, reading and listening to – both good and bad?   We will discuss television, movies, printed material, the internet and music, and how pop culture goes from a niche phenomenon to a full-on pop cultural extravaganza. How have these influences changed Pittsburgh and the region, our population and our perception of ourselves in the larger world – both positive and negative, and is any of it within our control?

Our panel includes Pablo Garcia, from the Architecture Department at Carnegie Mellon; Emmai Alaquiva, of Ya Momz House; and Kathy Savitt, of Lockerz … and we will be moderated by Rob Rogers, editorial cartoonist and president of the ToonSeum.

Cocktails and conversation to follow.

Don’t let the cold weather keep you away.  Warm up with us.  RSVP here …

Every city needs its angels, and Los Angeles has plenty of them.

It has been several weeks since I returned from Los Angeles.   My trip there as a panelist for an American Institute of Architects SDAT was a rich, if exhausting, experience.  Three intense days there bred a familiarity I will never shake off.  I know downtown Los Angeles now.

Whenever I make one of these trips I expect to discover a city that is somehow better off than Pittsburgh.  I expect to find a city that somehow has its act together. Los Angeles, after all, is the second largest city in the United States covering almost 500 square miles.  In 2008, it was named the world’s eighth most powerful city by Forbes.com. Full of significant architecture, with a rapidly growing residential population it is easy to imagine that downtown Los Angeles should be the envy of every other city.

And yet, like most other American cities, it is rotten at its core.   It is the hole in the donut.  It has some serious problems to overcome.

Politics keep its nine districts distinctly divided, reinforcing the already existing and striking differences between them in both architecture and population. A civic center with great building stock, historic Broadway with a vibrant ethnic community, Skid Row with a sad and unwanted population and a manufacturing district, unheard of in most downtowns, essentially all ignore each other.   Its streets are wide, fast and disruptive, a convict population continues to be discharged at alarming rates into the city center, and the economy has stalled the growing residential population and is endangering the vitality of historic Broadway.

Like every other city one needs to look beyond these physical issues to really understand it.   Here, just like in Pittsburgh, I met a group of passionate and hopeful people all working tirelessly towards improving their downtown.   They are not elected officials.  They will not be paid for their work.   This is their neighborhood and they have claimed it.  They are the city’s angels.

Who knows better than them what the problems are?   Who knows better than them what the potential is? If I were Mayor of Los Angeles I would let them rise up, craft their vision and give them the resources to fulfill it.

I came home happily, eager to see Pittsburgh’s beautiful downtown again.   Our problems seem small now compared to Los Angeles.  Yet one is the same.  Our angels, plentiful and passionate, are all too often ignored.

Last night’s cityLIVE event, 10 people. 3 minutes, was a rollicking success.  10 brilliant people with 10 brilliant ideas.

Our moderator, Chris Potter of the City Paper, conducted a survey to determine the “winner” by providing 5 pennies to each audience member and a styrofoam cup for each panelist, bedecked with their photo.    Late last night, Chris and his wife counted pennies.  He remarked that as an alternative-weekly journalist, a lot of his workdays end this way.

Top honors, or should I say, the most pennies go to Jon Rubin of the renowned East Liberty Waffle Shop.  Chris will make a donation in his name to Pittsburgh Promise.  The amount is TBD but he promises it will be less than the $10 million donated by UPMC, but more than the 41 cents dropped into Jon’s cup.

Jon amazingly crammed three big ideas into three little minutes.

First, he proposed to kick all of  Pittsburgh’s universities (classrooms, teachers, students and all) out of their buildings and relocate them throughout the entire city into storefronts, apartments, boats, and tree houses.  No longer would students be tempted to stay on their cloistered campuses. Writing classes would be conducted on coal barges,  a physics program in row houses, a business school at city hall and university lectures in backyards and street corners.  Imagine!

Second, he proposed super-gigantic sky fans to be installed around the perimeter of downtown Pittsburgh, blowing clouds away and creating a perpetual sunny zone over downtown to attract businesses, tourists and even more new residents.  Sunbathers would abound.  Suburban flight would be reversed and most importantly, the weather in the surrounding suburbs would actually become worse.

And last, but not least, John proposed exporting our greatest resource – the Steelers.  Our football team would become an international traveling soccer team in the off season.  Think of them as the Harlem Globetrotters of soccer.   The last World Cup had viewership of 30 billion people and John thinks we are missing out.  ”If we really want to call ourselves the city of champions, I suggest we take the big leap and go with the sort shorts” said John.

Last night was a celebration of the talent we have here in Pittsburgh.   It was a chance to hang loose and let ideas roll.  In every idea presented there was passion, conviction and truth.   Take any of them and push them forward and we could rebrand Pittsburgh in a completely unexpected way.

I’m voting for the city wide campus.  Short shorts on Steelers don’t seem quite right to me.

Back by popular demand!  We’ve gathered 10 more brilliant Pittsburgh minds to tell you about their funkiest, biggest, hairiest. most brilliant ideas for change.   Give us 30 minutes on December 9, and we’ll change the way you see the city at this cityLIVE! event.  Forget feasibility, funding or anything as ridiculous as consensus-building. We asked for ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘outside the box’.

You’ll want to meet our panelists after the show.  A glass of wine and a chat to polish off the evening. Hilary Robinson, dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.  Raymar Hampshire, the young founder of sponsorchange.org.  Jon Rubin, CMU Art Professor and the man behind the wildly successful Waffle Shop.  Susan Everingham, the director of RAND’s Pittsburgh office.  Scott Faber, a developmental pediatrician at the Children’s Institute.  Alexi Morrissey, artist.   Priya Narasimhan from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobility Center and founder of YinzCam.  Janera Solomon of the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater.  LaVerne Baker Hotep from the Center for Victims of Violence and Crime.  Sean Jones of the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra.  They make for spicy conversation.

And to make sure that we don’t take ourselves too seriously, Chris Potter, the renowned editor of City Paper, will moderate with his unabashed and ascerbic charm.

You can read about last year’s event here. Greg Viktor will be writing a story again on it this year, in case you miss the event again.

But you won’t, will you?   See you there …

Just back from Australia, with my internal time clock still off kilter, I’ve turned around and headed back to Los Angeles for an intense, but fun, three day project.  The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has invited me to participate as a panelist in an SDAT in Downtown Los Angeles.  What an honor.

The SDAT program is a national community assistance program sponsored by the AIA that focuses on the principles of sustainability.  SDATs bring teams of volunteer professionals together to work with community decision-makers and stakeholders to help them develop a vision and framework for a sustainable future.

For me, this is more fun than a vacation.  I get to spend 3 days in a city I don’t know well and discover every corner of it.  And then I get to think about how to make it better.

Our panel is peppered with smart and interesting people.    An architect and preservation specialist from New York, a neighborhood and governance expert from Seattle, a downtown manager from Oklahoma City, Washington State’s bike/pedestrian/transportation planner, a streetscape and open space designer from Seattle and me, urban guru from Pittsburgh.

For three intense days we will immerse ourselves in the good and bad of downtown LA.  One day will be spent outside, touring, seeing and absorbing.  Another day will be spent meeting with downtown stakeholders -  advocacy organizations, government departments, politicians, neighborhood groups, the transportation sector and plenty more.  A veritable sea of faces.

And on Friday, from early morning until our evening presentation to the public, we’ll prepare our report here and hope that our efforts will have been worthwhile.

Sleepless in LA, but loving it.

Endless miles of freeway have always irritated me.  They plow through neighborhoods, dissecting blocks and turn well worn paths and local connections into dead ends.  Instead of sustaining cities they perpetuate sprawl.

Someone in Melbourne must be thinking the same thoughts.

While riding a 20 mile loop through Melbourne’s close-in neighborhoods, I found myself riding UNDER a freeway.  This creative solution, while not a pretty ride, re-connects the neighborhoods on either side of this freeway and gives back what it took away.  I rode for miles with the sounds of fast-moving traffic above, on a smooth concrete deck, hung by steel straps from the substantial freeway structure above.

Brilliant.

Often, when I’m traveling that horrendous thirty hours from Pittsburgh to Australia, I day dream about laksa.  This Malaysian soup is worth the trip and I eat it whenever I can.

Ingredients

Richard Florida ranks it as a  city “where the kids are heading”.  Melbourne, the second most populous city in Australia, with 4,000,000 residents, has also been ranked one of the top three most livable cities in the world by the Economist Group’s Intelligence unit, since 2002.

The most Important criteria for ranking cities on this list are safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation.  I’m not sure I’d choose to live in a city based on these rankings.  My criteria might look a little different, and certainly, right at the top, would be cuisine.

More than any other metric, the fact that 34.8% of Melbourne’s population was born overseas has the biggest impact on this city.  This is the reason I’d choose it as a place to live.  This percentage far exceeds the national average, already high at 23.1%.  It’s easy to guess this.  The by-product of this percentage is the large number of ethnic restaurants, clustered in every neighborhood and flavoring every street corner.

Flavoring my trips home.

Visits with family members are interspersed here with visits to restaurants and food markets.  Lebanese, malaysian,  vietnamese, turkish and greek food, each meal better than the last.  Fresh food readily available in abundance from every corner of the world.  A melting pot of food and people that is hard to imagine. With the diversity of people comes a diversity of talent.  Once you have lived it, it is difficult to live without.

This week I fly back to my adopted home, Pittsburgh.  Only 5% of our population was born overseas.  We are missing out, big time.

While I write this at four in the afternoon, in Pittsburgh the day I have just enjoyed has not yet dawned.

A week ago I made my way half way across the world.  First, bright-eyed,  from Pittsburgh through Minneapolis St. Paul to Los Angeles.   Then, bleary-eyed from LA to Melbourne in Australia.  Every time I make this journey I am determined to spend the horrendously long travel time well and at first I do.  I read, I write and I work.   By the end of the first fifteen hours, when I board the plane from LA to Melbourne, my resolve crumbles and the remaining hours are spent dozing while watching bad movies.

When I arrive I fight my way through the fog of jet lag (ferocious since the time difference is sixteen hours) to reconnect with my parents, my sisters and my nephew.  Family visits crammed into two weeks always leave me feeling dissatisfied.  They are both too short and too long.  I vow I won’t eat too much so I don’t have to wrestle the pounds back off when I get home.  But the food is a reminder of the home I grew up in. For two weeks I am tempted by the tastes that I cannot take home with me.  Milk bars, laksa, licorice, ginger beer, turkish bread and tropical fruit are all stronger than me.

Although I am Australian by birth, by now I have spent half my life in America and I am caught forever in between.  My strange half Australian half American accent  marks me.  Interesting in my adopted town.  A defector in my country of birth.  Quizzical looks wherever I go.

A few years ago I set about finding a way to fit in on these visits to Melbourne.   The trail that runs beside my sister’s house loops its way through and around the city.  This has become the starting point for my visits.  Two days after I arrive, my head still slightly foggy, I pull out her ancient bike and cautiously ride down the trail that was once unfamiliar but now belongs to me.  Here I fit right in. On a bike my strange accent is barely noticeable.

Here, on the trail, I am surrounded by people of every ethnicity.  This is where the people of the city congregate, on its trails and in its parks.  This is where differences fade away.  Just like in Pittsburgh.

This lovely little city, Pittsburgh, is under siege.  Every day the media describes yet another crisis.  Eight more schools to close.  Library branches to be shuttered.  A court order to fix the water and sewer system.  Underfunded pension funds. Property and business taxes that are burdensome.  Disappearing bus stops.  Disappearing mail boxes.  And the latest, a mayor who wants to tax our local college students to balance the city’s books.

Someone has been asleep at the wheel.

It has been decades now since Pittsburgh’s population was halved.  Any sensible person would surely understand that half the people + the same number of services = disaster?

For the past decade the question in my head has become louder, more strident.   Where is the leadership who will say it the way it is?  Where is the leadership that will prepare it’s citizens for reality?

A leader should look like this.  She should prepare her city’s citizens for the strategy that must be thought through – a shrinking city strategy.  She should find ways to consolidate the city’s citizenry, to consolidate services.   She should have the courage to say that upfront.  She should focus on how to grow the city.  And she should share the plan so that her citizens will understand that there will be pain, but there is also hope. She should know that cities are the future and that Pittsburgh will grow again.

Neither the head of the library system nor the superintendent of the public schools are to blame for the situations they inherited.    Audits, anger and outrage will not change that fact.

Streamlining city government:  What can we do NOW?

City County consolidation is a big, top down idea. We’ve worked on it locally for years now and are told there are many valuable efficiencies to gain from such a consolidation.

In the meantime, while we are waiting, are there ways to streamline government services from the bottom up? Should we wait for the big prize, or should we be chipping away at consolidating smaller chunks that may eventually add up to the big prize?

On November 4, a panel of experts will present and discuss their ideas for effectively streamlining government services today at the latest  cityLIVE! Pittsburgh event.  Our panel includes Kathleen McKenzie, deputy county manager for Allegheny County;  Moe Coleman, professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and Urban Studies;  Sala Udin, president and CEO of Coro Center for Civic Leadership; and moderating will be Laura Ellsworth, partner at Jones Day.

Sign up here and show your love!