Our whole region needs an overhaul, a vision and a new lease on life

Folks know I’ve been in the trenches fighting to help move Stowe Township and McKees Rocks forward and keep more ACHA housing out of the town, which has more government low-income housing than any town in the whole state of Pennsylvania.

It’s a big matter, but we have a bigger one.

Our whole region is withering. Our city, Pittsburgh, once named the “Most Livable City” in the nation, is a polluted, potholed, dilapidated mess. Our neighbors within city limits have elected a mayor who can’t get streets salted in the winter, and won’t, with an anti-police staff and stance, make them safe, either.

The infrastructure is old, as evidenced by the list of bridges with failing ratings, and the complete collapse of one bridge carrying commuters and a bus full of folks to the bottom of a valley in Oakland several months ago.

Folks who can afford to are heading for other nicer, less taxed counties, and the county executive is trying to offset the loss of tax revenue by raising property taxes on the existing, aging home owners, which causes more to leave, setting up a cycle of downward spiral.

Once the City of Champions, Pittsburgh’s sports teams stink now. Two because their most recent owner is either cheap (the Pirates) or not very good at the job (the Steelers), and the other kept great players beyond their shelf life and now has a team of legends too old to get into the playoffs.

This sounds petty, but it’s not. Sports, when teams win, draws visitors and revenue. When they don’t, sports can be a burden. We often hear about how the taxpayers built PNC Park to be the best ballpark in America, and it arguably is. Bob Nutting fielding a Little League team isn’t even approaching repaying that investment.

Voters today aren’t very savvy. In the past, when one party does a horrible job, either someone within the party who thinks differently primaried the existing regime or the opposing party gets more votes. Now, candidates simply know the triggering terms that turnout the same folks who voted in the ones failing today, so they parrot the same themes, and pursue the same goals, because it wins elections.

Corey O’Connor, whose bona fides are that his father was once mayor seems to be running to be Ed Gainey, who’s running away from Ed Gainey’s record and running against Donald Trump – who isn’t running to be Pittsburgh’s mayor – and screaming it’s racist for O’Connor to run at all.

You can see why this isn’t making the folks teem with confidence that things will get better.

Our whole region needs an overhaul, a vision, and a new lease on life. That’s easier said than done. Steubenville, Akron, Canton, Weirton and other towns faced many of the same matter over the last four decades, and none of them figured it out. When one shops in Robinson, 30 miles from Weirton, their cashier is often a resident of Weirton due to the lack of available jobs there.

When I look at the mess McKees Rocks is, I look just downriver to Coraopolis, which was in a similar state 25 years ago, and see a town where vision and cooperation brought about amazing change. Now it has boutiques, antique stores, handmade ice cream shops, a nice microbrewery, and – more importantly – a more prosperous society and a safer town.

Unfortunately, I see no great nearby cities that have recovered from decay. I do see real gains in Cleveland and Detroit, and, if they continue on these tracks, perhaps they’ll be the case studies for rustbelt rebirth – but it’s too soon to claim that now.

Mostly thriving cities are in the south, in places where ample flat farmland allows for cheap expansion and offered tax breaks for businesses. Perhaps if the president’s tariff notion pays off manufacturing will boom again and rivers might be integral to new success, but for now rivers simply carved out valleys that make land design a challenge easily avoidable by taking development elsewhere.

We need innovators. Folks with a new idea. Folks defined by hard charging success and fresh ideas – which are exactly the type of folks our current elected leaders ran down for being millionaires in order to be elected by an envious electorate that seems to miss the point: if you’re opposed to successful people being elected, you’ll have unsuccessful people in charge.

We can do better. The question is, can we do better before it’s too late?