Not many urban scholars frame their presentations with rock-song snippets from the 1980s, but that’s how Don Carter began and ended his talk at City of Asylum on Tuesday night.
The director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Carter edited a book, “Remaking Post-Industrial Cities,’’ that looks deeply into what’s become of the old factory towns on both sides of the Atlantic, from Pittsburgh to Milan.
So he jump-started the night with “My City Was Gone,’’ Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders’ 1982 lament for her hometown of Akron, and ended with Billy Joel’s “Allentown’’ from the same year. And in between he talked about — and showed us — how far these misnamed Rust Belt cities have rebounded since.
It’s a long story, as longtime Pittsburghers know maybe better than anyone else. But Mr. Carter, an architect, took us from those days when this region produced half the steel in the world, through the post-war Renaissance and into some of the great public-planning mistakes of the 1960s and ’70s, such as the leveling of the historic downtown of Allegheny City on the North Side to make way for a mall that’s been dead longer than it was alive. Or the imposition of the ring road in East Liberty that did so much to kill commerce in the neighborhood where Mr. Carter grew up.
But now, the 22nd Ward that includes Allegheny Center has some of the highest median housing prices in the city, and almost any conversation about East Liberty includes a term that few old-timers would have guessed residents would ever have to worry about: gentrification. The University of Akron opened the Goodyear Polymer Research Center in 1991, Mr. Carter said, and hundreds of polymer-research-related companies now provide more jobs than Akron’s four big tire companies did in the 1970s. Allentown’s Lehigh Valley is now one of the most economically diverse and best-performing regions in the United States, he said, and so is Pittsburgh.
He didn’t ignore our many problems. They range from entrenched poverty to a static regional population (largely because of the absence of immigrants) to the mill towns of the Mon and Ohio valleys that still haven’t recovered. But Mr. Carter’s most important comments may have come when he fielded a question about gentrification, and he explained why that term is unfairly pejorative.
“The problem is displacement, not gentrification,’’ he said. “Pittsburgh is 90 neighborhoods. Let’s say three or four are encountering gentrification right now and people are wringing their hands about that.”
He wasn’t making light of the problem, but it’s preferable to the one in the 10 or 15 city neighborhoods that are in really bad shape “and nobody is gentrifying those neighborhoods. They’re just continuing to go downhill.’’ People moving in, renovating houses, starting local businesses and getting involved in the community — those are good things.
Gentrification is a double-edged sword. It’s hard on renters when the cost of housing goes up, but it can be a godsend to poor homeowners ready and willing to sell.
“It’s complicated, but I think we have to give gentrification some positive aspects. Because we’re lucky that Lawrenceville, for instance, which was almost given up on just about 20 years ago maybe — look at it now.” Displacement is a problem that we must confront with the help of the nonprofit community, but “aren’t we glad that we have a stronger Lawrenceville, aren’t we glad that we have a stronger East Liberty?”
Smaller cities and towns are in worse trouble. “I am concerned about whether we can save them all,’’ he said.
That’s not the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning of one. Because Pittsburgh has more than three or four neighborhoods encountering gentrification. As Tim Grant recently reported in the PG, only 18 of the city’s 32 wards have median home sale prices of less than $150,000 — and there were 23 such wards just three years ago.
But more people wanting to invest in Pittsburgh is a better problem than the one some half-joked about 30 years ago: Who’d be the last one to turn out the lights?
Alan Mallach, author of “The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America,’’ can carry this conversation further when he speaks at 5 p.m. Tuesday in Hamburg Hall at CMU. Pittsburgh, Johnstown and Youngstown, Ohio, are in that book, and Mr. Carter recommends it. Admission, unlike housing, is free.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: October 25, 2018, 4:00 a.m.
