Pittsburgh Forges A Future From `brownfields'

Eric Ellis, Pittsburgh

01/21/1998

There's a pawn shop on a corner In Pittsburgh, Penn-syl-vania

And I walk up and down 'neath the clock.

There's a pawn shop on a corner in Pittsburgh, Penn-syl-vania

But I ain't got a thing left to hock . . . 

FIFTIES golden oldie Guy Mitchell spun his own tale of woe in this famous song but he may well have been rueing the disappointments of Pittsburgh itself.

This grim perma-grey and heavily unionised city, the one-time "Forge of the Universe", where the Carnegies and Mellons and Fricks made their fortunes and founded the US 20th century economic dominance, has become used to decline.

It's been that way for much of the past 30 years as the US industry, led by Pittsburghers such as US Steel, Allegheny and Alcoa, found itself less able to compete against Germany and then the thrusting dynamos of Asia - South Korea and Japan in particular.

The steel belt became the rust belt, the decline mirrored across other once-thriving regional towns like Pittsburgh - Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Buffalo and Rochester.

While the steel industry slumbered, manufacturing stepped in to fill the breach. Another Pittsburgh local, Westinghouse, led the region's 1980s revival to become the area's biggest private-sector employer.

So complete was Pittsburgh's renewal that in 1985, when Westinghouse had more than 100,000 people on its payroll, Pittsburgh remarkably earned the title of the United States' most liveable city for its low crime rate, schools and housing.

And then when the steel industry learned how to compete again, in part thanks to the cheaper dollar of the early 1990s, along came the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

Pittsburgh got kicked again but again it bounced back, becoming one of the US's most impressive exporters to Mexico and Canada now that tariffs were cut, the resurgence led by yet another big Pittsburgh denizen, food giant HJ Heinz.

And now there's another blow to the city that in 1979 could boast 17 Fortune 500 companies (as against just five today).

Slumping Asia has suddenly got more competitive in Pittsburgh's key industries, manufacturing, and, in a double whammy, its main manufacturing employer, Westinghouse, is re-inventing itself virtually out of Pittsburgh and into a New York media company.

Now recast as CBS Corporation to honour its media interests, the former Westinghouse's Pittsburgh employment is now running at about 7,000, down from 16,000 in 1991 and the 100,000 total workforce of the 1980s. Its old 23-storey Pittsburgh headquarters will have a small office to handle pension processing.

But as some might say, where there's muck there's brass. New technologies are transforming old industrial towns such as Steel City and their estimated 500,000 derelict and often toxic sites known as "brownfields".

Across the steel belt and the industrial US Midwest, malls, golf courses and housing estates are suddenly sprouting in areas where for decades locals knew nothing but slag-heaps and derelict coal mines where steel offcuts and shavings had been laid down in a less environmentally sensitive era.

Technology is even extending to ways to turn the derelict waste itself into components for computers and circuit boards, building material and household items.

The efforts are being assisted by radical changes in urban planning and law. Enlightened States and city authorities have begun making it easier for companies to develop polluted brownfields by setting down laws that encourage investment and limit corporate liability, assuming that a renovated site passes adequate environmental regulation.

Some 20 States in the Midwest and north-east, the US's older States where urban blight from industry has been its most severe, have set up such programs - with Washington's blessing and money. Incentives totalling US$2 billion ($3.02 billion) have been approved by Congress to go towards inner urban renewal. It's having results.

Once derelict warehouses on Pittsburgh's south side have had new life breathed into them, with high-tech companies and advertising agencies moving into their suddenly trendy loft spaces.

Pittsburgh's local authorities helped transform an old meat-packing facility in the Allegheny River into a modern marina-based suburb.

In Milwaukee, new office buildings stand on an old Schlitz Brewery site. A prime mover behind this urban renewal is Paul Helmke, mayor of the steel belt city of Fort Wayne in Indiana.

He is also the chairman of the Conference of Mayors of more than 1,000 cities.

"The real menace of brownfields is not what they do to America's centre cities, it's what they don't do: they don't encourage expansion, investment or jobs." he told a mayoral conference last month.

Already efforts at rejuvenating brownfields are bearing fruit. One such site in Pittsburgh even hosts a PGA Senior Tour event. It may well be that Pittsburgh may yet again attain that honour of being a liveable city. She was peaches, she was honey and she cost me all my money, coz a night on the town was her dream, took her dancing took her dining til her blue eyes were shining with the sights they never had seen.