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Pittsburgh Gets a Tech Makeover (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2015, Monocle magazine, a favorite read of the global hipsterati, published an enthusiastic report on Lawrenceville, the former blue-collar neighborhood here filled with cafes, hyped restaurants and brick rowhouses being renovated by flippers. Last year, in a much-publicized development, Uber began testing self-driving cars on the streets, putting this city at the forefront of the autonomous-vehicle revolution. Also last year, in a less publicized development, Jean Yang, 30, returned to this city after more than a decade of living in Boston, finding a Pittsburgh she hardly recognized from her 1990s childhood. And four months ago, Caesar Wirth, a 28-year-old software engineer, moved from Tokyo to work for a local tech start-up, Duolingo. These seemingly unrelated events have one thing in common: Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Much has been made of the "food boom" in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But perhaps the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor -- the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Ore., as an urban hot spot for millennials -- isn't chefs or artists but geeks. In a 2014 article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource "churning out that talent" from which the city is fueled. Because of the top students and research professors at Carnegie Mellon, tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber have opened offices here. The big tech firms, along with their highly skilled, highly paid workers, have made Pittsburgh younger and more international and helped to transform once-derelict neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty. Indeed, East Liberty has become something of a tech hub, said Luis von Ahn, the co-founder and chief executive of Duolingo, a language-learning platform company with its headquarters in that neighborhood. Google Pittsburgh, with its more than 500 employees, also has part of its offices in East Liberty, as does AlphaLab, a start-up accelerator.
My mother's family is extensive in the Pittsburgh area. My grandfather and uncle worked in the mills, my grandmother worked in the mills during WWII. After the steel industry collapsed, the town was largely written off for dead, but there are some people who love the town and its history and have worked hard to get it back on track. Good to see their efforts paying off. On the plus side, Pittsburgh has a lot of things that people like in a city: major sports franchises, good universities (CMU has a looooong history!), local color. Pittsburgh also has four seasons and the surrounding area has a lot going for people who like four season outdoor pursuits -- hiking, fishing, hunting, skiing, etc. There's some unique mixing from all the people who worked in the mills over the years. Housing can be very reasonable versus other cities. There is an international airport there, too. Of course, there are downsides: there is still a lot of straight up poverty, the winter can suck if you don't like snow/cold, the city is still is very much in "recovery" mode, PA has weird liquor laws. But as someone who works in tech, I'd not just turn down an offer from there any more outright given the better press it's been getting and reports from people who have lived there in the last few years.