#TransitionWatch: Person your Stations!

National Geographic

A few items merit some attention:

Mayor-elect Peduto's employee retirements jubilee legislation advanced in committee.

Four members voted for the bill, three abstained, and one was absent. Darlene Harris, Corey O'Connor and R. Daniel Lavelle said they needed more time to consider the bill. 

Ricky Burgess was absent but said later that he opposes it. A final vote is scheduled for next week. Burgess called the offer unfair because it's being offered to employees who “did not earn and did not deserve” it. (Trib, Bob Bauder)

Well, they do not otherwise qualify for it. It is precisely the question before the Council, whether or not they will have "earned" or "deserve" it.

Peduto argues that the total budget impact of his retrofits on city government are likely to be minimal due to other budget moves, and the fact that only roughly half of the small pool of eligible nonunion employees are expected to participate in this.

As we stated last time in a post and some comments, it should be immediately clear that hitting the ground running and without distraction will bring considerable efficiencies. And it can be construed as unfair that employees who built their lives and families' lives around the proposition that the City would operate as it always had, must now see their retirement plans exploded because all of a sudden it will operate some other way.

A specific consideration is litigiousness. If the Mayor-elect essentially proclaims for all to hear, "Sorry, I don't think you're good enough to work for me and you must go," why should a dismissed employee not respond with, "You are only getting rid of me for very bad reasons, such as prejudice or a political vendetta. Cities cannot do that. I am suing, and I am subpoenaing all sorts of things!"

Those cases might rarely be of any merit, but they would certainly satisfy the cheering throngs, and we could not prejudge a single one of them.  That makes for an annoying, time-consuming, distracting and ultimately costly slog -- especially for the city's Law Dept.

The Mayor-elect's legislation is not only an investment in a smooth transition, it seems to be measured and right-sized. The Comet very much appreciates the seeming incongruity of seeking new predictable revenue streams while making unexpected investments, but this one is a money saver in the long run.

Near the Housing Authority, things are looking a little rough:

"It sounds to me just like the pure greed of money," said Larry Blair Jr., 46, a car salesman who is president of the Oak Hill Residents Council. (P-G, Lord & Zullo)

It's a long story. Oak Hill in 2009 was quite the thing, but it sounds like the developer has been getting the short end of the stick on upkeep.

Kevin Acklin, who is heading the transition and will be Mr. Peduto's chief of staff, called the housing authority "really the only authority that we haven't found any significant cooperation with." (ibid)

Cactus McCoy

Hard to say whether this is a function of changed administrative priorities towards socioeconomic integration in certain parts of the Hill, or of a certain developer being on the political outs, or of Councilman Burgess just happening to be the Mayor-elect's nemesis, or of a personality clash within the transition and the Authority provoking increased scrutiny. But it's a messy indicator and indicative of a need to break out the scrubbing bubbles.

Elsewhere in the city center, rumor had had it that the Planning Commission would formally introduce the Penguins' plans for the Lower Hill, early next week at its final meeting of the year. While an introduction is followed later by presentations, a hearing and perhaps other measures before a vote, this might have been one case where the Mayor-elect's ability to wrangle the direction and appointment of a new Board in real time would be tested. It begins to appear however that the reality of the impasses between the Pens, the community and the next mayor have become so significant, the Penguins might be taking a quick hustle back to the drawing board. We hope it is a pivotally constructive session.

*-UPDATE: Hill groups have composed a letter to the Dept. of City Planning asking that it conduct a fair market housing study for any plan submitted for the 28 controversial acres, and are inviting other interested groups across Pittsburgh to cosign it.

Finally, the Pittsburgh Comet is humbled to disclose that we are working on the Mayor-Elect's City Ethics Hearing Board subcommittee of the Law and Ethics transition team. It should go without saying that this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

After inspirational introductions by the Mayor-elect and his apostles, roughly fifteen of us were ushered into a spacious college classroom for more specific guidance and instruction from Solicitor-designate Lourdes Sanchez Ridge. Then we were left to it. Our subcommittee has a couple of past members of the Ethics Board to provide insiders' perspectives, and more than enough attorneys besides.

Using the "I Will Make Sure Everybody Gets To Talk" gambit, I ruthlessly seized the chairmanship and proceeded to do pretty much only that. Here is what the team came up with in terms of goals, preliminarily:

For Dec. 2013:

1) Mission statement

2) Identify best criteria mix for Board Members

3) Provide justifications, specifications of funding / support needs

For Peduto's first 100 days:

1) Have that board operational

2) ID opportunities for improvement in the code

3) Have given top City employees (executives, directors, asst. dirs) updated training

4) Clarify Ethics Board reporting duties

For the first 6 months:

1) All City employees trained up.

2) Adequate public reporting of routine Ethics Board business online

3) Be funded through legitimate budget lines or foundation boost

One year:

1) All City / City-County Authority personnel as well as Contractors trained & addressed.

What do you think? What did your transition team do?

Charitable Holiday Fundraiser and Online Competition!

At Task Work Management

We here at the Comet have a soft spot for Community Human Services Corp., and in the winter months particularly its Holiday Gift Project.

This year the blog I heart PGH has set a goal to inspire 100 different people to contribute online by Wednesday's party at Hough's, and invited us to help them spread the word.

Also, its lead editor proposed a little contest:  which of our online readerships can raise the most in donations by December 15, for providing the small holiday gifts such as gift cards for the many Pittsburghers who participate in CHS's several programs?

We have our work cut out for us. I heart PGH is a wonderful and longstanding information source for cool events, new and exciting places around town, and resources for getting the most out of City living. The Comet is going to do something different:  harness the power of rage and bitterness to inspire a generous public attitude.

Donate via the Pittsburgh Comet's own fundraising portal and spread some dark holiday love!

Cities are built by entrepreneurs and by monarchs or other military or political rulers, to exploit natural resources and various advantages, and then to exploit the large, diversified labor pools drawn to economic opportunity. Clever people enjoy living in dense communities with abundant opportunities for education, commerce and culture as well. Before long, regional and global industrial conglomerates as well as banks take the reigns to a significant extent. Things take on a life of their own. Among other things we encourage high property values especially Downtown, we design neighborhoods, arteries and regions for the conveniences for the most mobile, we thrive on the might of a profit-based health care industry. Many of us continue to enjoy very much the blessings of our cities, but how do we address issues of mental illnesses, physical limitations or traumas, addiction, poverty, poor education, malnutrition, incarceration and other hardships among families with children and all those less than fully adaptable to the demands and pressures of competition?

Caboosinator

In a recent effort to restore some perceived semblances of balance, Occupy Pittsburgh came in for lots of justifiable criticism (from within and without) for its lack of capacity to sustain a population accounting for homelessness, transience and common urban social problems, and for contributing towards a scene of devolution and disarray. But if there's anyone out there in Comet Country fortunate and able enough to be working high up in industry, or in real estate, or at a bank, or a major law firm, or is just a regular semi-well-off hipster or townie, might I suggest as humbly as possible, if the thought had not occurred already:  that we have convened Pittsburgh for a reason. Agglomerations of human misery is the price of doing so much business, and having so much enjoyment. Let's all do our best to clean up after ourselves, and to take care of Pittsburgh's less fortunate denizens as sustainably as possible. That can begin with affording them a little dignity, such as the opportunity to shop for a suitable gift like winter gloves or a children's' doll.

Thank goodness there are organizations like CHS doing the heavy lifting and making it relatively easy. Until we can do better and more than rely on charitable giving, donate via the Comet's portal or through or to whom anyone else you prefer. Let's beat I heart PGH, and happy Sparkle Season!

And if you can, go to the party in Greenfield on Wednesday!

Loading: Transition Watch updates...

Tim McNulty at the P-G covers the Gang of 1200 and Aaron Aupperlee at the Trib notes more advice coming incoming from Harvard to Youngstown.

Modern Pittsburgh and Community Building

Amish America

"Community building" means different things depending on whether you put the emphasis on the "MUNE" in community or the "BUILD" in building.

In the former instance, community itself is what one sets out to build; in the latter, building is in some manner undertaken by a community.

We should like to do some of both.

To paraphrase a former Defense Secretary, "community building" also means building with the communities you have -- not the communities you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Development forces are already at work in different theaters as we begin our civic transformation.

The Hill theater is fiercely engaged at the Lower Hill / Upper Downtown, and can be defined by the following:

• High civic demand for development
• Zoning still up in the air
• Private entity owns development rights on entire footprint, Sports & Exhibition Authority owns land.
• Development rights will begin expiring in years, absent new development.

Impasses between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Hill District community in rezoning the quasi-City land include affordable housing, inclusive workforce and commercial development practices, neighborhood legacy acknowledgments in naming and place-making, identified source funding for some Greater Hill Master Plan (pdf) and neighborhood initiatives, and enforcement provisions for whatever is pledged. To that grand neighborhood consensus, the Comet and others like to add that anything purporting to connect Downtown to the Hill District ought to have brilliantly complete streets, suited to the needs and aims of the environment.

Councilman Robert Daniel Lavelle, who represents the Hill District, Downtown and parts of the North Side, duly reminded the Penguins at a recent community meeting that he can "tear [their] plan up." And this is a Councilman that has been anxious for the prosperity of new development.

More on-point, recently to the Times:

Mr. Lavelle, the city councilman, said the Hill District tumbled into poverty and crime with the demolition of many blocks in the 1950s to make way for a civic arena. It wiped out a grid of stores and jazz clubs that the poet Claude McKay once called “the crossroads of the world.”

“When you tore down the Lower Hill District, you took away the entrepreneurial spirit,” Mr. Lavelle said. “The extreme poverty was a result of that.” (NYT, Trip Gabriel)

That gets me thinking upon dirigisme.

The rules of any "nuclear endgame" between the City and its hockey team may involve not just a stalled transformation, but the lease for the Consol Center. If the City moves to solicit new proposals for any Lower Hill parcels upon whose rights the Penguins' have or will soon expire, that could entail the Penguins making vague (and likely erroneous) references to that 30-year lease, which will get every sportswriter and sports broadcaster in Pittsburgh mad.

Few desire mad. Everyone wants significant commercial and residential development happening in the Lower Hill soon that is smartly tailored for Pittsburgh.

Making it so means pruning only the most unsustainable of avarice from what are otherwise responsible, unobjectionable plans presented by the Penguins:  that which involve sealing off too much legitimately available opportunity and benefit to the community, or that which will consume very many public funding opportunities without reasonable collaboration.

Basically, it's just a routine matter of urban planning and negotiation among several parties.  It's a simple microcosm, but high-angst due to historically challenging topography.

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National Get Outdoors Day

The Allegheny River theater is different, where until the train tracks opposite in the Strip District, land sprawls flat into a post-industrial distance and the Buncher Company is further along.

Here is what we see at "Riverfront Landing", that section nearest to Downtown:

• Low-to-moderate civic demand for development.
• Zoning fixed at private entity's behest last year.
• Entity owns most property free and clear.
• City retains provisional power over historic 5-block building at heart of immediate plans.

When we say there is low "civic demand" for development near the site, we mean that those who traverse the Strip District near Downtown -- whether it be for a commute, work, shopping, a meal, a drink or to visit to the Heinz History Center -- are not given to turn their heads and say, "Come on already. What a mess." It just looks like Pittsburgh: a river, parking lots, greenery and small industrial relics; and there is enough excitement going on around it, it doesn't seem such a shame.

But of course Buncher Company is willing and now able to transform things at what it calls Riverfront Landing, so change is due. Creating jobs and attracting new stake holders is nice, besides.

Buncher Company is a company with a fascinating history, which might account for its nuanced and evolving tone on whether to proceed despite what comes of the historic Produce Terminal.

It makes a fine point:

Mr. Balestrieri cautioned that development could be slowed and marketing affected if the produce terminal is excluded from the project. He said a prospective condominium owner or building tenant might balk without knowing the future of the hulking Strip District icon.

I think it's important to know what it is," he said. (P-G, Joe Smydo)

What Buncher misconstrues in the discussion of "What happens when the City declares a building historic?" are all the thoughtful processes and resources assembled at hand to weigh what are the civic (including economic) needs outweighing aspects of preservation, and what are the mitigating or creative adaptations that can be explored while maximizing historic value.

Buncher pays enough for architectural and design consultants. It is unknown, aside from undue self-securitization, why it seems averse to taking advantage of the City's own resources and expertise in pursuing that course with some optimism. The City and its URA might be best-suited to devise commercial uses for its prized past possession.

On the other hand, much was said last year about the ecological health of our river and the vibrancy of public space along that river front. This is the province of zoning and planning. The property owner's zoning was duly passed. It might be tempting for Mayor Bill Peduto to hold a punitive line over the Produce Terminal in order to convince Buncher to readdress that past perceived avarice, but doing so now to any excess would probably fall into the province of political vanity.

While the scope and potential for both development and its challenges expands as one travels upriver, Riverfront Landing is just a routine matter of urban planning and negotiation among several parties.

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Doing things right takes a little more time than doing them heedlessly. We all know this from experience.

If the Hill District and the Allegheny Riverfront theaters are complex due to inherited urgency, the Hazelwood, the Homewood and the At-Large theaters all represent different sorts of clean slates.

By all accounts in Hazelwood, at the former LTV Coke works site along interior of the Monongohela, we today see few intrinsic challenges and a developer in ALMONO who must patronize many fine planners, consultants and advisers. The City also did patient work. Councilman O'Connor of the area voiced no concerns. No major concerns arose from the community, aching for jobs lost years ago.

The opportunities lie in what exactly spreads from that footprint.

Housing renovation? Mainstreets development along 2nd Avenue? Claiming Junction Hollow? A greenway corridor connecting towards Downtown? Something heavier, transit-wise? It's all in play, and the City will have opportunities to encourage community building and improve some more crassly expedient practices.

Conde Nast: Julian Capmeil

Digging a network of canals is one idea. The feds are requiring expensive upgrades to our storm water infrastructure, to meet its volumetric calculations of need. Intelligently designed landscaping and canals would satisfy a portion of that need as determined by a judge, much like a holding tank. Water features enhance both community sentiment and commercial demand. The ability to host kayak racing competitions through an interlocking series of canals along the Mon would be gin for Pittsburgh.

We shouldn't be shocked if some our more dazzling fantasies fail the reality test, however. Next-level success is just a routine matter of organizing, city planning and negotiation.

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While our previous theaters were given massive nudges by some developer, the Homewood theater appears on the agenda due primarily to Mayor-elect Peduto.

Knockout development in northern Shadyside, East Liberty and southwest tip of Larimer is causing ripples of interest, recently evident deeper into Larimer. Councilman Ricky Burgess is not unwelcoming of investment. The community is vocal for change. Homewood itself is blessed with not only flat land but a square corners, rectangular street grid; miraculous in this city.

Yet by investing so much symbolism in his commitment to Homewood and by choosing to name it properly -- not to creep towards the troubled and traumatized community -- Peduto has committed to build a Homewood for Homewood; for its own sake.

I will not speculate on what that means. There must be a blizzard of stakeholders, property titles, built environments and natural resources to sort out. The chaos of its eager unpreparedness represents the cleanest of all possible slates within which to organize, plan and negotiate.

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City Parks Blog

Finally there is the At-Large theater, or as I like to call it "The West End" but really the other 80 neighborhoods now less conspicuous on the development radar.

Like a ninja, the City will have to recognize, concoct and seize opportunities to build community in ways smaller for now, but no less burdensome of history and no worse as investments.

Markers of progress in Greater Homewood, along the Mon and in places like the West End will acclimatize Pittsburgh to more deliberative and sensitive city planning functions on titanic-sized items.

The demonstration of real productive engagement with the Penguins and Buncher Co. and the eventual implementation of some community-building in the Hill and the Allegheny Riverfront will reward patience and alert Pittsburghers to an enlightened vision.

A selective embrace of market forces, together with the respect dividend for building community in challenging theaters, will enable Pittsburgh to follow through in rehabilitating its vast, half-abandoned and poverty-stricken expanses properly -- and will act as the most encouraging and illustrative diorama for why to invest in a smart, collaborative and efficient government.

NEXT IN THE "MODERN PITTSBURGH" SERIES:

Part III: Gentrification

PREVIOUSLY:

Part I: Virtue's Promise

FROM: The Penguins. TO: The Hill District.

penguins.nhl.com

(This is a fantasy, though not satire, of what frank and open communication from the Penguins to Hill District stakeholders might look like after last night's meeting.)


Dear Neighbors,

In the interest of moving forward while retaining institutional and personal credibility, we accept responsibility for our role in encouraging what has become a significant misunderstanding.

We regret having informed you that we cannot pursue the Inclusionary Zoning practices used in the Almono development in Hazelwood only because the City will not allow it.

We regret using the term "affordable" housing to describe rental units accessible only to the upper middle class.

We regret having encouraged something called the Greater Hill District Master Plan, a fine and solid planning document with the legal weight of cotton candy to which we do not intend to adhere, least of all in the Lower Hill.

We regret having so often touted our willingness to "identify funding" for public art, infrastructure and residential affordability gaps -- in an attempt to obscure that we already possess more than sufficient funding, or that via this business venture we shall soon possess it. We regret that in all past agreements, documents and contracts regarding jobs and business development opportunities, weak language such as "best faith efforts" and "minimum goals" is all we could muster -- and there have never been enforcement mechanisms.

We regret having asked you to participate in the Curtain Call public art project in order to diminish your opposition in 2008 to our plans for the Consol Energy Center -- and that we did not see the project through.

We regret that we always brand our development for you positively by putting overwhelming emphasis on the "green cap" over the Crosstown Expressway -- while the costs, funding sources, and timetable for such a feature is literally the last thing on our agenda.

We regret having invited you to scores of community meetings over months and years at which our position on your specific concerns does not change, only so we can later demonstrate the quantity (not quality) of our community engagement.

We regret having hired enough consultants to give you inspirational speeches about our intentions, we might otherwise have funded several community projects.

The truth of the matter is we have no interest in addressing your demands. We are trying to find commonalities across two very different worlds. Our only concern is to parlay these 28 acres of the Lower Hill of the City of Pittsburgh into the greatest possible long-term profit for ourselves, because life is short and we want to live as grandly as we might.

But our efforts to get you to like us have become counter-productive and silly. In the interest of not generating further ill-faith relations, we suggest that you redirect all your concerns about affordable housing, place-making, shared prosperity and community building to your civic government.

Best of luck at the City Planning Commission on December 9th and thereafter. However, in this new spirit of honesty and collegial frankness, our impression is that you are not destined to make out very well there either -- especially since we gave ourselves every advantage by submitting our plan at the end of the year during the waning moments of the Ravenstahl administration.

But in government at least you will encounter decision-makers whose capacity to feign a cooperative spirit has not been utterly exhausted.

Sincerely (at last),


The Pittsburgh Penguins


PS. By the way, thanks for your support in demolishing the Igloo, without our having to give up anything of substance.

Modern Pittsburgh and Virtue's Promise

CBS, Paramount

Pittsburgh is conditioned to seek industry, growth and development.

The green PNC Tower continues to rise Downtown, and major work with Almono in Hazelwood will soon begin to percolate. Down the pipeline, four major new revitalization efforts are on Mayor-Elect Bill Peduto's agenda: in the Strip District with Buncher Co., in the Hill District with the Penguins; and both Homewood and Smithfield St. by his own choosing. And let us not forget the other eighty-two neighborhoods.

The alchemy and adaptability required to build popular momentum behind such a development vision is reflected in the whole political latticework for moving that jobs agenda together with agendas for municipal retirees and taxed residents, for public safety and due process, and for arranging necessities such as transportation, infrastructure and education in an Eds, Meds and Tech-rich economy.

As the drawstring is pulled and this web of conviction acts on Pittsburgh, the purpose in all is to cull unsustainable avarice, undue self-fortification and political vanity -- and to let the commons thrive. But it would require an epic guide to envision beforehand how it all will work.

Ready? Okay.

You have also entered Your Guide to 'Burgh Drama S2E1: The 'Burgh Remembers

S1E1   S1E2   S1E3   S1E4

NEXT IN THE "MODERN PITTSBURGH" SERIES:

Part II: Community Building

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Related Footnotes:  Trib: Bob Bauder, About Talent City, Oversight Committee, Screening Committee, Job Openings, @TalentPgh. See also via the Post-Gazette on Twitter:

@EarlyReturns

 
Collateral footnote by P-G: Diana Nelson Jones

Political footnote by C-P: Chris Potter
 

Weekender: Quashing our Illusions

~choe

Now this is a wake up call:

My French is pretty much limited to asking for ice cream, the bathroom and to go to the Eiffel Tower, but the Washington Post summarizes it this way: "The French urge their citizens to avoid Mount Oliver, Hill District, Homewood-Brushton and Hazelwood." (Early Returns, Moriah Balingit)

Yes. We are a serious tourist destination for Europeans in general and for French-speaking peoples. Thank you Mario, but your princess is in another castle.

Yes. The Hill District, Homewood-Brusthon and Hazelwood are being categorized as hazardous no-go zones by the French government. Think about that.

Mount Oliver is war-torn, too? Forgive me, I'm from the North Side by way of Squirrel Hill. Mt. Lebonon, Mt. Pleasant and Mount Oliver is all sort of a blur.

Mount Oliver? This is the municipality which Pittsburgh completely surrounds? I know what you're thinking, but not until we get a new Police leadership to partner in settling the scourge of urban violence in the Hill District, Greater Homewood and Hazelwood respectively. And even then we'd need to muster a new army and declare war (and/or prepare terms for an annexation.)

MORE:  Homewood Nation

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In better news, another really good article was written about us:

Once she got back home, she couldn't help but notice both the exciting changes happening in Pittsburgh's East End, and the work that still needed to be done in the city's low-income neighborhoods. She realized Pittsburgh could use a native like her, and that she could apply the skills she learned in New Orleans right in her backyard. (Atlantic Cities, Nona Willis Aronowitz)

Names, labels.

Artist and Pittsburgh native D.S. Kinsel, 29, is trying to bridge that divide. He lives in gentrifying Lawrenceville and works as a program coordinator at MGR, a youth empowerment organization. MGR teaches middle and high school age students to use art as a tool for activism. Pittsburgh isn't full of oblivious young yuppies, he assures me. Many twenty-something natives living in the East End neighborhoods of Lawrenceville, Garfield, Bloomfield, and Friendship are "reaching out and listening to what these [lower-income] communities need." He welcomes change and transplants—"as long as they’re respectful when they get here"—but he gives most of the credit to people like him who have been there all along.

"Young Pittsburghers want to lay down roots," he says. "We're interested in making sure the grit survives." (ibid)

Irish Central

That's funny. Not long ago you would have heard, "We're interested in scrubbing off the grit." These days they appreciate there is some grit, some neighborhoods, some stories, some history, some real civic, cultural, educational, industrial and technological resources that have produced their own stories.

We're the ones who work on the big things that need to be made (and try to make them better) and who take care of the home front because that's what makes life worth living. We want to be beating most everyplace else at football, economically and in terms of quality of life.

The grit is the soil. The grit is the nitrogen.

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Unusual squabbling amongst Allegheny County law enforcement:

Zappala asked council for nearly $500,000 to revive a violent crime task force to combat drug-related activity in Pittsburgh's eastern suburbs.

He wants to use the money to hire five detectives, a request that surprised some county officials. (Trib, Aaron Aupperlee)

It's a shame we can't just get out of this drug war business, and treat it as a crisis of public health.

UPDATE / MORE: Blame this link on Radley Balko.

Thanksgiving is coming. In Pittsburgh there are lots and lots of good opportunities to react to feelings of gratitude, but the KD Turkey Fund has long been a good one (see Julius's Turkeys). Look alive.