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.

Comments

Re:Do not want

[OzPeter]

Too many hills, and the streets are all completely fucked.

I was going to say something similar. I lived there for 3 years and it felt claustrophobic driving around those rolling hills with limited line of sight and no visible horizon. And don't forget the lack of sunshine.

Maybe that's why nerds love it? Even when you are outside it is like being in your mom's basement.

Big difference

[PeeAitchPee]

My grandfather worked the famous Jones & Laughlin Steel open hearth furnaces across the river from what is now CMU's technology park. He worked there for over forty years until he was laid off in the 1970s. In those days, the big steel mills employed many thousands of workers and paid them well -- these were dangerous jobs that required hard physical work every day, and indeed J & L and others like it provided blue-collar, middle class Americans with a career and long term job security. He put five kids thru college working there. I grew up hearing stories of the sky being red all night every night because of the mills, and that was a great thing because "men are working." And it was -- at its peak, about 15% of US domestic steel production traveled over the Hot Metal Bridge. Most of us cannot even comprehend the magnitude of a manufacturing facility like that.

I love Pittsburgh, but as cool as it is, the tech rebirth on the river won't create the same number of jobs as back in the day, and certainly not for ordinary Americans like my ancestors. The steel jobs are all gone -- outsourced and out-regulated (for better or for worse). In J & L's case, as with many others, when the US rebuilt Europe and Japan after WWII, our former enemies ended up with better technology than we had domestically -- and that was the beginning of the end. That work is not coming back to the US, regardless of what anyone -- politicians, unions, or anyone else -- says, does, or hopes. Mainstream, normal people aren't going to put five kids thru college because of CMU's new ventures -- only those select few who actually get to work there (and good for them -- talent and hard work should be rewarded). Don't get me wrong -- I think it is fantastic that the Burgh is reinventing itself as a technology center -- but it's not the same, and never will be the same, as it was at its peak of industry.