Pittsburgh, Site of G-20 Summit, Is Shaking Off Its Smoky Image - washingtonpost.com

Host of G-20 Summit Has Evolved

By Alexi Mostrous
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 24, 2009

PITTSBURGH -- When President Obama announced that this Rust Belt city would host a meeting of ministers from the world's leading economies, many scoffed. "A lot of people are asking something along the lines of 'What, was downtown Baltimore booked?' " wrote the Atlantic's Derek Thompson.

But Pittsburgh has shaken off its smoky image, transformed by an industrial collapse that drove out half of the city's population in the early 1980s. As the Group of 20 gathers Thursday, members are more likely to ask what Pittsburgh can teach them than why they had to come here.

The city's unemployment rate is well below the national average. Wages and housing prices are stable or up. Nearby Cleveland has experienced rampant foreclosures, but here they are relatively uncommon.

The city's main industries -- health care and education -- are thriving. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, an $8 billion health-care company, employs 50,000 people in western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh's health services business has almost tripled in size since 1979, creating more than 100,000 jobs.

It is quite a turnaround for a city that lost 120,000 jobs between 1981 and 1984, after its steel industry collapsed. Thousands of young residents fled the city to find work, and unemployment reached 17 percent among those who remained. Much as with Detroit today, many wondered whether Pittsburgh could continue to exist.

"But here we are, still a major center and doing well," said Christopher Briem, an urban studies expert at the University of Pittsburgh. "The lesson is that there's life after your defining industry dies."

Diversification has been difficult, but Pittsburgh's economy is now healthier than that of many communities flattened by recession. "Pittsburgh does show that you can't rely on one industry. You have to retrain workers and inject money into new industries through a variety of means," Briem said.

A retraining program in the 1990s steered many workers into service industries. Public-private partnerships injected millions in state money into technology research. Now more than 100 billion-dollar companies have offices here.

Luis Von Ahn moved to Pittsburgh in 2000 after graduating from Duke. Now a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed a Web feature called reCAPTCHA, which he sold to Google last week for an undisclosed but substantial amount.

"The fact Google has a presence in Pittsburgh definitely affected my decision to sell to them," he said. "I guess I feel like it's my home now."

In his nine years here, Von Ahn, 30, can appreciate Pittsburgh's physical changes. The waterfront area, once a dumping ground for industrial byproducts, has been given over to parks. Along the Allegheny River, factories that once made cork and steel, strollers and Heinz soup now house upscale apartments.

Even the building where the G-20 meetings are being held is the world's first convention center to be certified "green" by the U.S. Green Building Council.

"When I came here, there were three coffee shops in the whole place," he said. "Now the rivers are cleaner and the restaurants are better. Many of my students, who used to leave for California or New York when they finished their PhDs, are choosing to stay."

Residents today are more likely to spot a Hollywood movie star than a functioning steel mill. Pittsburgh played a role in 12 feature films in 2008, partly the result of a change in the city's tax laws three years ago. A TV program called "Three Rivers," which will debut next month, is also set here.

"We're crazy busy," said Dawn Keezer, director of the Pittsburgh Film Office. "Russell Crowe is coming to shoot downtown in October. Tony Scott's directing a film starring Denzel Washington. Jake Gyllenhaal's in town."

In the past, Pittsburgh doubled for other cities, but no longer, Keezer said. "We've been New York, Paris, and Washington, D.C.," she said. "But now people are setting their films in Pittsburgh. And every time you see an image of the new Pittsburgh, it helps dispel the smoky, old version."

Like other burgeoning industries here, Pittsburgh's film industry is bolstered by an emphasis on education. In 2001, Carnegie Mellon introduced a popular program focusing on entertainment technology. Point Park University downtown began offering a film studies course, swiftly followed by Alleghany County's community college.

Along with two world-class universities -- Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh -- the city boasts three major-league sports teams, a top-rated symphony and a host of theaters. Six-bedroom houses can be bought for $500,000. The city currently has a budget surplus.

For all that, Pittsburgh still faces some major problems. The city's infrastructure has suffered from decades of underinvestment. Abandoned houses line the streets of some neighborhoods. Notwithstanding those high-priced apartments along the river, poverty abounds: Many children in city schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

The population of 310,000 remains less than half what it was before the steel industry faltered, and as Briem notes, it's an aged population: "We're the only major metropolitan area with more deaths than births each year,"

Those demographics have Pittsburgh struggling to fill positions in fast-expanding industries, said Bill Flanagan, head of the Allegheny Conference, an economic development group.

"We still don't have enough restaurants or bars to attract young people," he said. "We've got 30,500 open jobs and we can't fill them."

Flanagan hopes the "boomerang effect" -- where the children of families who left Pittsburgh decades ago come back -- will bolster the workforce.

Carl Kurlander, a screenwriter who grew up in Pittsburgh but moved to Los Angeles in 1982, returned with his wife in 2001 to teach screenwriting at the University of Pittsburgh. "We were going to take a year off -- a Hollywood sabbatical -- and then come back," he said. "But then a weird thing happened. We were happy."

Kurlander has just completed a film about Pittsburgh called "My Tale of Two Cities." "It suddenly felt like I had a life," he said. "Pittsburgh can be slow to change, but it's a great place."

The World and Pittsburgh - Nation

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September 16, 2009

Perhaps it's time to update the slogan that evolved from the 1999 Seattle protests against corporate globalization: "Another World Is Possible." One year into a financial crisis that has seen governments--especially that of the United States--emerge as guarantors against risk for investors while remaining lax regulators of speculation and CEO greed, it has become all too evident that "Another World Is Necessary."

That slogan would sum up the urgency of the calls for change that will be sounded during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, on September 24-25, of leaders of nineteen wealthy nations and the European Union. Presidents and prime ministers will arrive with a sense of that urgency; they know that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is right when he says the world economy is "far from being out of the woods." But activists are determined to use Pittsburgh's streets, campuses, churches and union halls to demand a paradigm-shifting response to the crisis, one that recognizes that the neoliberal policies that got us into this mess are not going to get us out of it.

A muscular letter to President Obama--signed by more than fifty groups, including the Change to Win labor federation, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, USAction and religious groups--argues that "remedying the current crisis, avoiding future crises and achieving economic justice and stability will require a new approach to domestic and global economic governance." For instance, the letter notes, G-20 moves to establish new financial-sector regulation "must also include revisions to the WTO's 1999 Financial Service Agreement, which exports worldwide the extreme financial service deregulation that is a cause of this crisis." New, more robust approaches are also needed to stimulate economies, promote sustainable development, address poverty and tackle global warming.

The leaders of the world's largest economies have failed to address the pathologies created by deregulation that rewards banksters and burdens consumers; free trade that favors multinational corporations over workers and communities; and gradualist responses to extreme poverty and climate change. Frustration with these failures was summed up by United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard when he declared that "right now [the G-20] stands for chaos, and it stands for economic destruction." Steelworkers, headquartered in Pittsburgh, will host pre-summit forums, rallies and concerts highlighting anger at failed economic policies and (with the Alliance for Climate Protection, activist State Senator Jim Ferlo and possibly Al Gore) the need for government investment in green jobs.

Obama's pre-summit rhetoric was appealing, especially his idea that the Pittsburgh gathering can launch a "global race to the top" to replace the race-to-the-bottom policies that have so widened the gap between rich and poor. But Stiglitz observes that "the administration seems very reluctant to do what is necessary" to regulate "too big to fail" banks and corporations. Indeed, within the G-20, Germany and France have far more aggressively pushed proposals to regulate CEO compensation and require greater corporate responsibility. Differences between European and American business models certainly underpin some of the transatlantic wrangling. Still, it's remarkable that it is French President Nicolas Sarkozy--no lefty--who promises a walkout in Pittsburgh if there is no agreement to curb bankers' bonuses. He says he'll fight to get world leaders to explore alternatives to the "cult of the market," including creating indexes of well-being and of the "quality of public service."

Demands for a leap from the rhetoric of change to the reality are generating street heat, which is being turned up by global justice groups, the United Electrical Workers Union and community organizations ranging from the Thomas Merton Center to 3 Rivers Climate Convergence. Unfortunately, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and his aides, in their determination to promote their city as a global economic center, have imposed restrictions on dissent so wide-ranging that peace activist Cecilia Wheeler had to remind an early September city council meeting, "We are not terrorists.... We're the good apples here. We want [global leaders] to see overall that this is a small town with values, that welcomes everyone, that discriminates against no one."

Roughly 4,000 police and new rules to detain protesters have not made dissenters feel welcome. So many requests for permits to march, rally and set up camps in city parks have been stalled or denied that on September 11 the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed suit alleging that city, state and federal authorities had conspired to deny the demonstrators' free-speech rights by keeping them out of earshot of the G-20 summiteers. "All we are asking for is a safe place near the convention center so that the leaders inside can hear the people's voices," says Pete Shell, an antiwar organizer with the Merton Center.

Actually, activists are asking for a lot more. And rightly so. Changes in global governance that shake the grip of bankers and CEOs, even changes in the way leaders think about global governance, don't begin inside the cloistered gatherings of the G-20 or the WTO. They take shape outside, in the streets, where the victims of the race to the bottom have a right and a responsibility to declare that Another World Is Necessary.

About John Nichols

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

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Pittsburgh Scrubs Up for Visit From the G-20

By KRIS MAHER

PITTSBURGH -- Perched atop Mount Washington, with its prime view of downtown, is the long-shuttered Edge Restaurant, a graffiti-covered building that has been empty for 30 years.

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, third from right, conducts the first of five G-20 sweeps around the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in preparation for September's summit. Cleanup efforts, which began in May, have already succeeded in removing 40 tons of trash from the banks of three rivers.

A neighborhood nuisance visible from downtown, the structure threatens to be a citywide embarrassment in late September, when finance ministers and their entourages from the Group of 20 nations arrive for a global summit. That is why the city plans to hide the eyesore under a drape and has enlisted the Andy Warhol Museum for ideas to dress up the disguise. Options include projecting faces of residents and famous people onto the covering, or painting on an image of the hotel proposed for the site.

With thousands of international visitors expected for the summit -- and advance workers coming to scope out the city -- Pittsburgh officials are frantically trying to get the city ready for the spotlight.

On Thursday, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl conducted the first of five G-20 sweeps, a late-morning walk along streets in the downtown cultural district during which he noted broken sidewalks and paint-chipped light posts and fire hydrants.

"This graffiti is pretty bad on this block," the 29-year-old mayor told Kevin Quigley, head of the city's Redd Up Crew -- named for a local phrase meaning "clean up." The 18-person crew received a list of "action items" from the first sweep. Among them: power-washing garbage cans and alleyways, renovating curbs and removing dead trees from what is known as the Priority Area, the zone around the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, where the summit will be held.

Cleanup efforts have been in full swing since May, when the Obama administration tapped Pittsburgh as summit host. Already, 40 tons of trash -- including tires, shopping carts and mattresses -- have been picked up from the banks of the city's three rivers. The biggest find was a concrete truck, found submerged near downtown, said Don Bialosky, of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, who helped coordinate a one-day cleanup event in June.

The city's G-20 spending is expected to total between $10 million and $20 million, including the cost for about 3,000 security personnel to supplement the city's 900 police officers. City officials are hoping for White House help. "We're very confident that the federal government is going to assist us in these costs," said Joanna Doven, the mayor's press secretary.

Pittsburgh's finances have been overseen by a state board since 2003, when it was declared financially distressed. The mayor is trying to raise revenue to shore up pension-fund shortfalls by leasing parking garages or raising payroll taxes on nonprofits.

The local economy could recoup some of that investment as an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 people -- including international delegations, journalists, security personnel and summit protesters -- fill local hotels and restaurants.

Joe McGrath, chief executive of VisitPittsburgh, the city's tourism bureau, expects the summit will generate about $8 million to $10 million, based on previous events in the city. Already, an hour south of the city, the five-star Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, which has trap shooting, a wildlife center with lions, leopards and zebras, and its own airstrip, said its 335 rooms, ranging from $300 to $650 a night, are booked for the two days of the summit.

Officials at Pittsburgh International Airport say they can accommodate increased traffic, given the abundance of unused gates since US Airways dropped Pittsburgh as a hub in 2004. The airport handles 157 flights a day, down from more than 600 in 2000. A nearby county airport is expected to handle many private jets.

Andy Masich, president and CEO of the Sen. John Heinz History Center, the largest history museum in the state, thinks the airport can use a few additions, and is recruiting actors to portray famous area natives such as Fred Rogers, Andrew Carnegie and Jonas Salk to greet G-20 dignitaries and media.

"We thought it would be good to make the point that Pittsburgh has changed the world over the last 250 years," said Mr. Masich. A history center robot might also translate the local dialect to visitors, explaining, for example, that "yinz" means "you" when spoken by a Pittsburgher.

Other proposals are in the works, some drawn from three public brainstorming meetings sponsored by the city. Some of the more conventional ideas -- flying flags of G-20 countries downtown and hanging welcome signs on streets -- are being considered. One that probably won't float: having delegates bring water from every G-20 country to dump into a downtown fountain.

Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com