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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Will we always be second best?

Over the last month I have been corresponding with a young man from Tokyo.  He will be moving to Pittsburgh for a job, with wife and baby daughter in tow.   He is in fact an American  but has lived abroad for years now.  He believes that America can offer a better life for his family.

But apparently not Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is his entry point back into the country.  He already has a timeline firmly implanted in his mind for the length of his stay here.  Three years and then on to a better place.

My first reaction when he told me this was disappointment.  But Chris Briem set me straight.    He said  “I bet places like Manhattan or Boston, or places one might think are ‘not second best’ are full of transitory people who will not stay.”.    And of course, he’s right.

Just last month the Wall Street Journal’s selected their 10 top-rated Next Youth-Magnet Cities.  Washington DC tied for first place with Seattle.   Washington DC has an enduring brand as a place of transition, full of people who don’t stay long.   And yet, it is, according to the WSJ the number one pick for today’s youth.   Interesting.

If a region has churn, according to Chris, then it is attracting those mobile workers who have the most options on where they go.  And this is a good sign.  For decades now, the region has been moribund, unable to attract new workers,   For decades now we have been number one in weird statistics like the highest percentage of people who have lived in their current home or current county.   Now we have companies like Westinghouse who are growing so rapidly that they may be the provider for the churn we are looking for.   Westinghouse alone is looking to fill some 600 positions they have open.  

If the city is going to expand and grow then this is something we should learn to expect.  It will be hard to forget the last 3 decades. Then, a person who left was not necessarily replaced.  Now we should expect more people to come and leave and be replaced by others.  New people, with new families and new ideas.

The day after he left Pittsburgh after his first brief visit here, my Tokyo friend wrote to me. “Strangely enough” he wrote “I miss the time I spent in Pittsburgh.”   

Churn or not, I had to smile.

Is the rush out of Pittsburgh finally over?

Was there ever really a rush?

Every year since 1995 Christopher Briem has updated his annual report on migration trends in and out of the Pittsburgh region.   Every year an average of 13% of the population has migrated out the Pittsburgh Metro Statistical Area and almost the same number has migrated in. 

While in the past the local media has focused on the 13% who choose to leave, Pittsburgh is apparently attractive enough for almost the same number to choose to come.  Just a sliver has separated these two numbers in past years.  For every 10 that leave, 9 others find reason to come, a mere 10% imbalance.  This was never a profound imbalance but just a slow leak that eventually had to be plugged.  That moment has now come.

For me, this year’s report marks the beginning of the end.  The decline of net population loss has been steady since 2005.   In 2007 – 2008, there was a net population loss of just 738 people.   That is just 0.25% of the population.  Nothing.  Nobody worth talking about.    

Nothing worth talking about, except for this.

In past years the local media has trumpeted Pittsburgh’s migration misfortunes loudly, focusing on those leaving instead of those coming.  I suppose because this year’s loss number is so pitifully small it isn’t much of a story.  This year, the first with good news, the media are painfully silent.

But for me, this is a story worth talking about.   It is another indicator of Pittsburgh’s transformation.  The point is this.   We are healthy.   A lot of people are finding a reason to come here.  Let’s keep that in mind.  And let’s keep them coming.

I can hardly wait for the 2008 – 2009 numbers!

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I’m at the epicenter.  Just a block and a half from the entrance into the David Lawrence Convention Center.  The seismic wave has to be at least a level 9 here.

On Thursday the G20 summit begins in Pittsburgh, right on my doorstep.  There is no escape for me. Both my business and my home are here. When I step out of my front door, sometime on Thursday, I will  be greeted by an unfamiliar landscape.  I’m having trouble imagining myself in the midst of it.  Youtube’s videos of past G20 events don’t help me very much.  They are surreal documentaries of events that don’t belong in this compact little downtown.

I, like many Pittsburghers, am slightly nervous.  There are protesters who will be here to protest honestly.  And then there are those who just want to wreak havoc.   Still, my nervousness gives way to excitement when I remind myself what this means to Pittsburgh.  Like a movie star on the rise, Pittsburgh has been analyzed, criticized and inspected in detail for months now by the world press.  Stories of reinvention abound.  Who can deny the image changing effect this will have?   

I wonder, when the fences come down, when the jersey barriers are put back from wherever they came, and when we have reclaimed our downtown, whether the stories will continue?   That should be our task.  To keep the world’s eyes on us forever more.

Join me at the first event of cityLIVE!’s third season,  as we examine how to brand (or not brand) Pittsburgh.

The eyes of the world are on Pittsburgh right now.  Not only is the G-20 Summit drawing world  leaders and thousands of reporters, but over the last year Pittsburgh has been constantly in the “good” news.   

How is it then that the response to our selection as the location of the G-20 Summit has been a resounding “Why Pittsburgh?”  David Francis reported (for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) that some people in Europe have “expressed concern that world leaders might not be safe in such a place.”

What must we do to shake an image that no longer fits our city?   Our moderator and panelists will engage in a feisty discussion on branding (or unbranding)  our city.

Panelists include Madhu Malhan, VP and director of creative branding, Publicis, USA;  Gloria Blint, president of Red House Communications; and Charlie Humphrey, executive director of Pittsburgh Filmmakers, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and the Pittsburgh Glass Center.

Moderating will be Brian Bronaugh, president and executive creative director of Mullen-Pittsburgh.

Bring a friend and you both get a drink free! Show your love!  Show up ….

Josh and Adam at the Pocono Indian Museum in Delaware Water Gap.

There’s another transformation going on, and I’m going to have to leave my old habits behind to explore it.

Just yesterday morning I had coffee with a (very) young man.  Only 24 years old, Adam moved to Pittsburgh a year ago and likes it here.   He did not come for a job.  He brought his job with him.  As a programmer he can work virtually wherever he likes.  

One year into his stay, Adam has decided to dig in. This is where he is going to stay.  He has some energetic and creative business ideas that I for one want to see come to fruition.  He shows the sort of focus and passion that I wish some of my older friends had hung onto.  Now, they are jaded and cynical about Pittsburgh’s future and about what we can accomplish.

He is not.

Adam likes it here, likes his lifestyle, lives in a loft and can bike everywhere.   He is fascinated by the stories he hears of young entrepreneurs and the interesting businesses they are starting here.   He wants to tell those stories so that people will understand what Pittsburgh, the authentic Pittsburgh, is really like. 

We talked about how he might disseminate these stories.   And that’s when he floored me.  As I blathered out my traditional list of economic development agencies, he bubbled forth with a list of blogs, web sites, and groups I had never heard of.   He looked blank when I said the words, Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, as if I was from Mars.    At the moment I understood how much I have to learn if I’m going to help shift Pittsburgh’s meter from mediocre to spectacular.  I’m going to have to learn what he and others like him want, not what we think they want.

I’m going to have to stop doing business as usual.  

I felt energized by that meeting.  He thanked me, but truthfully I should thank him.   For his excitement about Pittsburgh.   For reminding me not to become jaded and cynical.   For showing me that there is always a new way.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet the unabashedly pro-urban Enrique Penalosa.

A former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Peñalosa was responsible for numerous radical improvements to the city during his term. He prioritized access for children and public spaces and restricted private car use. He built hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways, and parks. And he organized Car-Free Day in 2000, for which he was awarded the Stockholm Challenge Award and rewarded by a referendum vote endorsing an annual car-free day and the elimination of all cars from Bogota streets during rush hours from 2015 onwards.

This is radical urbanism at its best!

I’ve always wanted to be Steve Jobs when I grow up.   A purposeful, visionary man, he did not allow anyone to bend him from the course he was determined to take.  Just ten years ago I remember having altercations with PC users.   They were arrogant and certain that PC was the only way.   But I kept buying MacBooks and iBooks, seduced by their beauty and their supremely perfect design and functionality.  I clung onto the hope that Apple Inc. would one day conquer the world as good Design and Vision should.

And it did.  Now those PC diehards are jealous of my MacBook Air and covet my coolest of cool iPhone. 

So you see why I almost jumped out of my seat when David Voll, a fellow in Coro’s Public Affairs program, proclaimed that  “Pittsburgh = Apple”. 

Wow!

One of twelve Coro fellows this year, David is the only one with a very pragmatic engineering undergraduate degree.   The rest have studied policy, government and other wonkish things.  His analogy put a smile on my face.  Admittedly, David was talking about social innovation and the role it might play in Pittsburgh’s future.  But the moment he said it my head filled with visions of Pittsburgh, ten or twenty years from now, being the coolest, hippest city in the world.  Of Pittsburgh being THE place to be.

if we want Pittsburgh = Apple, we must map our vision and relentlessly, unforgivingly, pursue it.   It should be a vision of immense creativity and beauty.   Let people laugh on the sidelines.  Let people scoff at why we were selected for the G-20.   We should ignore them and steadfastly move towards our vision so that Pittsburgh too, one day, will conquer the world. 

What is the resource we need if we want to be the Apple of cities?  There is no rocket science here.   Steve Jobs has shown us.  It is not market share.  It is not branding,  It is  not trying to be like Cleveland or any other city.  It is to set stratospheric goals and be absolutely unwilling to compromise.

It’s heating up in Pittsburgh.   Hot and sweaty, I curse the fact that I have moved from a city with a beach to a city without one.   When I read this story in the New York Times in July,  I wasn’t hot enough to care.   But now it’s tantalizing.  Dumpster dipping.  Not dipping into a dumpster for treasure.  Lining a dumpster with a big black trash bag, filling it with water and dipping your body into it.    

Hot in New York City, some enterprising developers came up with this “lo-fi” version of the country club on a rented lot. The ultimate low cost swimming pool, dumpster dipping is accessible to everyone with a plastic bag.  This is the mark of a great and creative city.  Ideas that would be laughed at in small towns are revered here in New York.

Plans for Pittsburgh’s G-20 Summit are heating up as well.  This week I learned that dumpster fires are a G-20 Summit sport.  I pondered the fate of the 30 or more dumpsters lining the alley behind my downtown home.  My home, by the way, is inside the G-20 security zone.   Ever cognizant of security risks, Pittsburgh is considering locking all of the dumpsters or hauling them away.    But wait!  If we filled them all with water there’d be no chance of fire, and we’d have a pool party in the making.

I know you think I’m being silly.    The point I’m trying to make is this.  We are aspiring to be a great city.  Great cities are full of creative people with innovative ideas.   Great cities do not shut down when the G-20 comes to town.  Great cities are not afraid of dumpster fires.   Great cities use their creative talent to find creative solutions that will make a lasting impression on everyone who comes here.  

Let’s be great.

Photo by Yana Paskova for The New York Times

John Schmitz walked me around the block yesterday.   That is the block where the G-20 Summit will be played out in just two months from now.   He had warned me in advance of what he wanted.  He wanted the dirty, devily details for his story.  He wanted to focus on things that we normally don’t focus on, and so we did.

We noted the thousands of black round dirty gum splotches stuck to the sidewalk and the once red brick pavers now grey with dirt.   We noted dead trees with long forgotten christmas lights strung through them.   We noted muddy fire hydrants and badly patched roads.   We noted asphalt sidewalks where brick is the standard; contractor parking in a lane that ought to be open to vehicles;  and poorly sign-posted street works.  And we noted enough signs that if they were collected and stacked, they’d fill Heinz Field.

As I mouthed the dirty little details, the voice in my head became stronger until I had to say it out loud. Pittsburgh has good bones.  It is rich with a remarkable downtown, historic architecture, amazing river trails and beautiful neighborhoods. We should not forget that the film of dirt can be washed away.

The remarkable by-product of the G-20 summit is the energy that it has harnessed.   In just nine weeks since the announcement was made, over 1,600 people have volunteered to assist and that number is growing.  This is for an event that is just two days long.

And so I must wonder.  What if that energy were harnessed for something more than spiffing things up? What if the energy continued beyond those two days?  Could 1,600 people rebrand Pittsburgh?   Could 1,600 people bring new businesses here?  Could 1,600 people craft a strategic vision for Pittsburgh and the region?   Could 1,600 people finish the last 11 miles of the Great Allegheny Passage?

Do we have the courage to let 1,600 people loose?

Last week Mickey McManus put a smile on my face.  

As CEO of MAYA Design inc., Mickey heads up one of the most successful local companies in Pittsburgh.   MAYA (“most advanced yet acceptable”) is an unusual firm.   Their work centers on the interaction of technology and humans, from washing machines to defense.

Over the last few weeks MAYA has been noticed not only locally, but also nationally by Fast Company and Fortune Small Business.   Cool.

And then last week at our CEOs for Cities salon in downtown Pittsburgh, Mickey put that smile on my face.   We were talking about the Talent Dividend, and how a 1% gain in residents with college degrees in Pittsburgh would reap an annual dividend of $1.8 billion.   “Forget 1%” he said, “we should think big.  Let’s shoot for 10 or 20%.”  Cool.

According to Nathan Martin, CEO of Deeplocal, another Pittsburgh firm, cool is what we need. Lots of cool.  Deeplocal, a mobile software design, development, and strategy studio, brings together artists, designers, and technologists to solve complex communication problems.  They are a very hip firm.  Nathan believes that more cool companies will bring that talent knocking at our door.  He might be right.  

“What if we become the city of Entrepreneurs?” urged Terri Glueck, director of Community Development and Communications at Innovation Works.  “What if we create a community fund, all contribute just a little and all become angel investors in new entrepreneurial ventures?  Pittsburgh would be known world wide as the city of Entrepreneurs.”

Big thinkers, cool thinkers and strategic thinkers like Mickey, Nathan and Terri should be at every power table in Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh would become the center of the universe mighty quickly.

There was a traffic jam on Pittsburgh’s South Side this Sunday.  This one was new and different.  Between 1:00 and 2:00 pm I passed 227 people on the riverside trail.  There were young, very young and not so young  all jammed together.  Most of them were on bikes and some were runners and skaters, elbowing their way through the crowd.

Three years ago I would have been lucky to pass fifty people on the trail.

Now bikes are everywhere, but not everywhere enough for us to rank as one of the top ten great biking cities.  We should aim to be in that top ten.  Cities that are bike friendly are cities where we want to be.  Bike trails, bike lanes and friendly drivers are golden assets that bring new people and new life.  Here, in Pittsburgh, we have all the pieces we need to get onto that list.  There are three rivers, six river fronts and miles of trail connected to distinctive and authentic neighborhoods.  We already have what many cities are now struggling to create.

My favorite list of the top ten bicycle cities is Wired Magazine’s. It wanders all over the world.  Beginning with Amsterdam it ends in Basel, passing through a host of great cities in between.  Four US cities make that list: Portland, Boulder, Davis and San Francisco.  

National Geographic lists their top five as Portland, Davis, Tucson, Madison and Boulder.  The Washington Post likes Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Davis, Tucson, Madison, Chicago, Austin and Philadelphia.  Some cities are repeats.  Some are on everyone’s list.  Pittsburgh is on none.

A study is in order.  Someone needs to send me to study these cities. I’ll figure out what makes them great.  I’ll put a plan in place to inch Pittsburgh up that list.  And I’ll try not to have too much fun doing it.  This is serious work.

So, Mr. Mayor and Mr. County Executive, get rid of those gaps in the trails.  Finish those last connections.  Get those shared lanes painted.  This is economic development at its best.  Quick, inexpensive with the potential for extraordinary results.

I wrote about the Talent Dividend summit a couple of days ago.  Now I’d like to tell you what I learned there.

If Pittsburgh focussed on increasing the number of residents with four year college degrees by just 1%, we’d reap an annual dividend, the “Talent Dividend”, of $1.8 billion dollars.   $1.8 billion dollars is the equivalent to the payroll of a very very large company.    This is not an argument for education.  This is an argument for economic development.  

Currently Pittsburgh sits in the bottom one-third of 50 metro areas in four year college attainment rates.  I’m sure you know the cities that sit at the top of the list.   They are cities that thrive and continue to attract talent.   Those cities are Washington, San Jose, San Francisco, Boston, Raleigh, Austin, Minneapolis and Seattle.  Talent begets talent.

What benefits would we gain from a better educated population?  First, higher median incomes across the board, with an approximate increase of $2000 per household per annum.  Second, lower unemployment rates, since unemployment rates are always higher with less education.  

Our best opportunity for achieving the Talent Dividend, may lie in several areas.  First, we have many expatriate Pittsburghers who would like to return.  Second, we may be able to do a better job retaining the talent we have.  Can we do a better job match making people to jobs that are available?  There are currently 17,000 positions posted on imaginemynewjob.com, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliances new job site.  That’s a lot of vacant jobs!  Third, there are a large group of people who started college and did not finish.  Who are they?  How can we help them attain that four year college degree?

There are important initiatives, such as the Pittsburgh Promise, that are underway and will help us to reach this 1% increase.   It will take focus to find other ways to get there.