utterly opinionated

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.

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.

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!

What’s different about President Obama from any president who has come before him?  It’s a difference that has influenced him profoundly.  It’s a difference that will influence the future of this country profoundly.  

This President lived on a city block and returns to one when he leaves the White House.  It’s not a ranch or a secluded compound.  That the city is our country’s future is an important idea to this President, and plays a role in the policies that are being crafted by the White House today.  

I heard this today from Michael Strautmanis, Chief of Staff in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.  He told us that we had caught the President’s attention.  

That’s no surprise for an urban President.  The “we” is CEOs for Cities.  I’ve been in DC for its annual Urban Leaders Summit, a wonderful gathering of like-minded urban advocates, led by Carol Coletta.  Ours is an urban agenda.   We are a group of urban change makers, thrilled that we have a President in the White House who gets it.

The G20 protesters wound their way through Downtown Pittsburgh this afternoon. The grand finale to a grand show.

All is quiet this morning. Police are purposefully assembling for the G20 protest march that is expected to come through Downtown Pittsburgh at 2 pm this afternoon. Some small groups of protesters are scattered here and there. People are gathering and lounging on the jersey barriers. It’s a strange scene – armed forces and tourists, side by side.

Today, something fantastic happened. Something I have always dreamed of. We closed the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh to cars, and bicycles took over. Now, I know that was not the intent of the G20 security measures. But it was certainly an interesting, and positive, side effect.

It was quiet and peaceful. It was fun exploring the city. It was a chance for people who normally won’t fight the traffic to enjoy the incredible downtown we have.

Maybe we can plan for this more often? Minus the police of course.

It’s 3:10 pm.  The temperature has definitely changed …

The police are preparing themselves.  The G20 resistance group will be marching into town this afternoon.   They are gathering at Arsenal Park in Lawrenceville.  They have no permit and so are an unknown quantity.  

We’ve heard they mean business.  Let’s hope the march is peaceful.

From my window.  Yesterday and today.

Finally.  Someone says it as it is.  Rich Lord’s assessment of the City-county merger status quo is brutal.   “You go first.  No, you go first” he wrote in Saturday’s Post Gazette.   A forum on Friday intending to kick start the merger debate show-cased clearly why it won’t happen.   Politics.

It is shocking that something so necessary simply can’t be done.  Is it because every politician knows it’s a minefield?  Is it because every politician knows it will take a decade to accomplish?  Is there no-one who is selfless enough to lead this effort because it should happen and not shy away from it because they may lose votes?

The future of our Pittsburgh and it’s region depends on smart, selfless leaders who will get this done because it is the right thing to do.  

I want my leaders to tackle difficult things.   They aren’t leaders if they don’t.

“You must dare”, said Valentino Castellani, former Mayor of Turino Italy. “If you want to lead a city to a new place, you must dare”.

Italian, charismatic and an academic before he became Mayor, Valentino (as he asked us to call him) exudes quiet confidence. He is as sure today, as he was then, that his role as mayor was to change Torino’s future, and so change it he did.

Valentino became Mayor of Torino when it was at one of the lowest points in its history. Just like Pittsburgh’s steel mills, Torino’s Fiat factory closed in the 1970s. 80,000 jobs were lost just one decade. Millions of square feet of manufacturing facilities stood empty. At a population of around 900,000, the loss of 80,000 jobs was enormous.

Last Wednesday night Valentino spoke of Torino’s past and future to an audience of 200 at the cityLIVE! event, Your Region. Your Vision. “Torino is a city”, he said, “that has learned to reinvent itself through necessity”. In the 1700s it became the capital of Italy and blossomed into a metropolis. When the capital was moved to Rome, Torino’s first reinvention began. A century later it emerged as a significant manufacturing town. Fiat left and a second reinvention became necessary.

And so the daring began. As mayor, Valentino thought big and far into the city’s future, with the help of a populace who had never been engaged in this way before. His three pronged approach was daring to be sure. First, he engaged thousands of people in a visioning for the city’s future. Second, he forged international relationships with many other European cities to learn from them. And third, the biggest dare of all, he sought and won the winter Olympics.

Over dinner that evening, Gregg Behr of the Grable Foundation asked Valentino of his first impressions of Pittsburgh in the few short hours he had been here. He answered with astounding clarity. “You have a beautiful city, with talented people”, he said. “Much has been done to transform the city from it’s manufacturing past. But where is the leadership who will dare to take you to a better future?”

Who will dare for Pittsburgh?