It's All About the Schools

The theme of the week is definitely schools.

Taxing schools? Is it legal to tax college tuitions in the city? Is it legal for college tuitions to have a meteoric rise over the past 2 decades? From 1982 to 2007, college tuition rates rose 439% compared to a 147% rise in family income. What's an extra 1% city tax when tuition rates will inevitably rise faster than inflation for the next 25 years as well? My advice to students? Don't waste your breath whining about that measly 1%. Complain about this year's 6% increase in your tuition. Similarly, health insurance costs have risen by 131% over the last 10 years while the median family income has remained flat. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder.

Low GPAs? Pittsburgh has lowered the bar for kids go to CCAC on the Pittsburgh Promise with as little as a 2.0 GPA (C-average). Previously, they required a 2.25 GPA. Let's be honest, if you have significantly higher than a C-average (and you can afford it and have the family support), you're not choosing to go to a community college. Let's see these kids go to community college for a year or two and give them the chance to turn themselves around.

School dropouts? Pittsburgh has a serious problem. In a 2006 study, Rand Corp. estimated that 35 percent of all Pittsburgh students drop out of high school, with the rate nearly 50 percent for black males. Any effort sent addressing this is a good thing. It's easy to point fingers at Pittsburgh's poor city schools on this one, but to put it into perspective, city schools are failing our students across the country. Cleveland and Baltimore are some of the worst with high school graduation rates of 38% and 41% respectively, but even New York City has an abysmal graduation rate of 54%. These numbers make the our 5-year 64% graduation rate almost acceptable.

Lesson learned? You can still mock Cleveland.

East Vs West

Pennsylvania is a funny state. I've heard it described as "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle", a joke I'm sure that Harrisburg (and Alabama) hates. But the fact of the matter is there's a lot of nothing in between the two major Pennsylvania cities, except its capital. So it totally makes sense to have high-speed rail with few stops connecting these cities.

What do we have?

Philadelphia to Harrisburg

• 204 miles
• 90 minutes by train
• Train runs 14 times per day

Harrisburg to Pittsburgh

• 311 miles
• 5+ hours by train
• Train runs once per day
  

Why the difference? Historically, Pittsburgh's gotten the shaft?

At this point, Pennsylvania (and Pittsburgh) government has shown so little initiative that Congressman Altmire is instead hopping on board with Ohio's plans to connect Pittsburgh and Cleveland. And I don't blame him. As R2P writer, Jim Russell, has been espousing for years, we need to stop thinking of Cleveland as the enemy and instead build a mega-rust-belt-region to promote all of us. The first step to that collaboration might as well be a frequent and convenient train between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. If Cleveland can eventually have a smooth connection to Chicago via train and we're a hop-skip to Cleveland, you'd better believe that PennDOT and the PA governor would be banging on the door to let in a better train from Harrisburg.

In the meantime, I'd really like to see some local initiative on all public transportation fronts. Let's here Onorato and Ravenstahl step up and say that they will pursue city-wide light rail, regional commuter rail, and inter-city high speed rail. All of these options are vital for the region in terms of generating jobs, attractiveness to immigrants, and general congestion.

Cleveburgh vs Pittsland

This weekend, I roughly followed the dated 36 hours in Cleveland piece by the New York Times with some yelp help thrown in. I was drawn to the inevitable comparisons between the two struggling rust belt cities. Looking for the city's equivalent of Primanti Brothers left me stuffed at Cleveland's kitschy and charming Sokolowski's.

Oakland = University Circle a little further from downtown but more accessible via RTA
Bloomfield = Little Italy with less Thai food more Italian food
Tremont = a trimmed down Shady Side
Ohio's City's awesome West Side Market = our beloved Strip District
The Flats = Station Square

Deserted downtown = deserted downtown

My first impression of Cleveland in spite of the dirty piles of snow (they get about 20% more snow than Pittsburgh) was very positive. It reminded me of a European city with its wide boulevards, grandiose statuary, and classically styled buildings from the Convention Center to the Library.

The highlights of the weekend were definitely the West Side Market and the Great Lakes Brewery. The West Side Market is another European addition to Cleveland - a giant hall with everything for sale from bratwurst to pierogies to chicken gizzards to cannolis. The Great Lakes Brewery and Bar is an outstanding ambassador of the city. Not only is the beer great, they give hilarious tours of their eco-friendly brewery and have a packed-to-the-gills bar all adjacent to the West Side Market.





As rock music is not my biggest interest (and the $22 price tag a big deterrent), I steered clear of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Instead the Cleveland Museum of Art was a nice cap to my weekend. It's currently under an ambitious re-construction plan with only half of the galleries open to visitors - the rest re-open in June, but you can still check out their crazy collection of medieval armor and swords.

Things we can learn from Cleveland?

• Better bus shelters and bus lanes. They have special lights for their bus lanes which give them an edge over normal motorists. They have bus shelters that remind you more of getting on a light-rail line than anything else.
• Use light-rail judiciously to connect important places. They don't have a large light rail system, but it does connect downtown to the west side to university circle. They also connect their airport directly to a mall downtown which contains a hotel. How sweet is that?
  
• More city hotels - no visitor to the city should have to stay in Greentree unless they really really want to.
• Our own market - we even have the South Side Market House - invite regional butchers, bakers, and farmers to sell their wares in the winter months. Pittsburgh has an eating and cooking culture that can support multiple foodie-areas and being able to step inside the market on a cold day is a wonderful respite.
• More cheap parking - almost every downtown parking lot had super-cheap weekend rates - not just the ones owned by the city of Cleveland.
  

Things Cleveland can learn from Pittsburgh?

• More cohesive neighborhoods. Perhaps this can only come with time, but the only time I really felt I was in a full-fledged neighborhood was in the quaint Little Italy. Everything else just seemed a little too piece-meal - like our currently evolving Penn Ave district.
• A better alternative city paper. Our City Paper blows their Scene out of the water. I understand they have more pages to fill in the live music department but their Scene doesn't talk about politics at all. After the Short List, my favorite part of the City Paper is their off-beat take on local politics.
  
• More ethnic variation - aside from European offerings there was a dearth of international options at the West Side Market. Considering that Cleveland has 7 times the Hispanic population of Pittsburgh, I was disappointed to see only 1 booth of the 180 booths of the West Side Market selling tortillas. The Strip in Pittsburgh is a treasure trove with its Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Italian, Greek, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European stores.
• More reasonable restaurants. Cleveland has PLENTY of over-priced hoity-toity food and a fair share of super-cheap college eats, but not enough in-between. Without my pre-trip yelp research, I would have been lost for a reasonable dinner in the city.
• Less Blight. Pittsburgh has its fair share of blight in certain areas but on the main route between University Circle and Downtown, there were more abandoned buildings than I could shake a stick at. It would greatly improve a visitor's first impression of Cleveland if some of those eyesores were demolished. How about turning mid-town into a nice big green space filled with cross-country skiing, biking and walking trails?
  

Overall, I had a great weekend in Cleveland. If you haven't been there, hop in your car and drive the scant 2 1/2 hours next weekend. As one Browns fan told me: "You have the Steelers, but we have Great Lakes [brewery]."

On Population and Transportation

How many of us have invited out-of-towners to visit and had them be shocked about how nice Pittsburgh actually is? How cool the bridges and museums are? How sweet all the old architecture and stained glass is? How funky all the coffee shops and art galleries are?

For me, it's the never-ending story. (To which I respond, why else do you think I would have moved here??? Masochism???)

So maybe we should be focusing on getting more people here? It's a noble goal of VisitPittsburgh and the ever-green convention center. However, we all know those organizations are pretty pathetic and clearly they aren't getting the message across on a broad scale. Plus, it doesn't solve the actual getting-here problem.

The New York Times and Forbes are attempting to deal with the attitude problem.

So we're left with the problem of accessibility.

It's hard to get a non-stop flight here unless you're coming from Baltimore, NYC, or Boston - places that already have a gazillion non-stop flights. We can't even fly non-stop to Harrisburg.

The interstate and intrastate train and bus situation is horrendous. Either you transfer 3 times to get anywhere worthwhile or take about 3 times longer than the equivalent car trip. The brand-new Steel City Flyer is the one exception to the rule. And now we're tolling the hell out of people who dare to take the turnpike. Interstate 80 is barely holding on as the one bastion of free-riding left in the state.

Heck, we haven't even actually finished the Great Allegheny Passage, the bike route between DC and Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately, we are inconvenient and out of the way of every major tour itinerary around the country. How do we fix that?

I don't know. But it seems to me that intrastate and interstate initiatives are a good start. Why don't we start working with Cleveland or Philadelphia? Instead we're fighting Toledo's population count, and all these mid-size cities are fighting for their own pieces of pie instead of realizing that Toledo is a stop on the future high-speed train to Chicago. These are the big nation-changing projects that I'd love to see Obama's stimulus package devoted to.

This is a recurring theme on the Burgh Diaspora who loves the term Cleveburgh. And I'm coming around to the idea. Let's think bigger. Pittsburgh has a great central location. Let's stop Pittsburgh from being the end of the line.

The Merger

Am I beating a dead horse by talking about the PNC / National City merger?

The merger has been approved. Theoretically, this seems good for Pittsburgh because a bank based here is getting more and more powerful. However, I'm sure there are a lot of people in the region who will lose jobs because of National City leaving.

What about the current National City skyscraper? Does PNC really need another tower with their name on it in Pittsburgh? Won't they want to get rid of that office space because it brings down their LEED-certified building count? (Plus, isn't it kind of ugly?)

"It doesn't strengthen Cleveland at all," shareholder Melanie Deutsch told The Associated Press, calling yesterday "a sad day for Cleveland."

Nobody is quoted in the Trib article as saying that it's a good day for Pittsburgh. Is that just good old-fashioned Pittsburgh self-deprecation?