This an’at

I have both said it and blogged it before and I will do it again here: Holly Brubach is a joy and a great resource for Pittsburgh.  Her proposal to turn the Granite Building into a true boutique hotel is very exciting.  She is the real thing and developing a one-of-a-kind hotel property exhibits the integrity that reflects the Pittsburgh’s narrative.  The news blog site NEXTpittsburgh.com, which itself is awesome, quotes a story of how a local business executive told her boutique hotels were for cool people and “cool people don’t visit Pittsburgh”.  Let’s have less of those like him and more of people like Holly.

This week Pittsburgh was named on the Huffington Post as one of the 40 Prettiest Cities in the world.  Who knows who throws these lists together but it was nice to be noted alongside Venice, Paris, Sydney, Rio and the other more usual cast of characters.

The latest employment numbers for metro Pittsburgh are, to me, perplexing.  So many statistical measures of the region’s economy are positive: businesses are opening, young people are coming into the city – or simply staying after graduation, and the real estate development activity is higher than it’s ever been.  So while unemployment is declining, there is still a relatively low labor participation rate in western PA coupled with anemic job creation.  7,400 new jobs were created in September 2014 but most local economists say that something from the high teens to 20,000 new jobs a month are needed for a labor pool of 1.2 million workers.  What’s up?  Taxes?  Heck, look at New York, New Jersey, Minneapolis or even across state at Philly.  High taxes don’t seem to hold them back.  Lifestyle?  Can’t use that excuse any longer especially when Pittsburgh keeps appearing on so many “hot lists”.  So what gives?  More to think about.

It Takes a While

A couple items in the news this week reminded me that Pittsburgh’s current growth spurt is still in its infancy.  As I recently remarked to a long term Pittsburgher, the current generation of residents has no concept of the paroxysm that was the collapse of the steel industry.  A testament to the region’s resilience is that while something less than 20% of jobs were eventually lost and for most western Pennsylvanians, a semblance of the good life was still lived.  Pittsburgh and the region are regaining strength, rebuilding their economy practically from scratch.  It’s as if it were newly settled, akin to cities on the West Coast after World War II.

                                  

This week, an online piece about one of the Silicon Valley’s titan companies mentioned that it started with a visit to the Stanford Research Institute [SRI] in 1959.  It then took another 10 years for that particular company to develop into an ongoing entity, and still more time to become a Fortune 500 name.  So my interest piqued, I looked at SRI’s beginnings and discovered it was founded in 1946; immediately following WWII.  That’s almost 70 years of work in the Bay Area.  And even Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center [PARC], which among other things played a major role in Apple’s early development, was started in 1970.  Note that it’s only been in the last dozen years that UPMC’s Hillman Cancer Center has hit its stride and this year’s establishment of The Brain Institute is a comparative newborn.  How many years will it take both these centers to spin out not only important breakthroughs in their fields but the expected economic benefits?  Time obviously will tell.  Patience is called for.

Related to this is the issue of whether Pittsburgh’s nascent entrepreneurial spirit is growing and do we ultimately have what it takes to re-establish as a world technology center.  Of course we do, as does anywhere else on earth if given freedom to think.  But I do wonder how and when that special Petri dish of circumstances forms to ignite the creative geniuses.  We’ve all heard that Michael Dell started his computer company in his University of Texas dorm room.  But in that same period at UT, John Mackey was dreaming of the natural grocery store that became Whole Foods and his lesser known housemate on campus, Kip Tindell, started his business plan for what became The Container Store.  Billion dollar companies all.  Why did UT during that period, long before high tech start ups were spoken of colloquially everywhere, provide ground for those ideas and not Pitt or CMU?  I’m just asking.  Time to make up for lost time.