Pittsburgh

Of Niche Markets and Broad Markets: Commuting in the US

Wendell Cox — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 21:29:58 -0400

The six transit legacy cities - mostly urban cores that grew largely before the advent of the automobile - increased their concentration of transit work trips to 57.9% of the national transit commuting, according to the 2018 American Community Survey. At the same time, working at home strengthened its position as the nation’s third leading mode of work access, with transit falling to fourth. The transit commuting market share dropped from 5.0% in 2017 to 4.9% in 2018. Carpooling, after at least three decades of decline, has seen an increase in this decade.

Concentration of Transit Commuting Destinations in Legacy Cities

Based on transit work trip destinations (as opposed to residences of commuters) the cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington increased their share of commuting by 4.8% (2.6% points) in just eight years (from 2010 to 2018). The legacy cities are home to the six largest downtown areas (central business districts) in the United States, the destination for most of their transit commuting.

This increased concentration occurred even as transit commuting has begun to trend downward, from the 2015, the peak ridership post-1960 year (Figure 1). The transit legacy cities accounted for 6.1% of the nation’s employment in 2018. Their 57.9 share of transit commuting is nearly 10 times their equivalent share of jobs. The more favorable performance of the legacy cities in this decade resulted in their garnering 79.7%% of the increased commuting, more than 13 times their share of jobs.

The intensity of the concentration is illustrated in Figure 2, which compares employment, transit commuting and transit commuting increase (2010 to 2018) shares for legacy cities and the balance of the nation. The work trip market share to the legacy cities is 47%. By comparison, in the rest of the nation, transit’s work trip share is a miniscule 2.1%. Only 19 of the nation’s 53 major metropolitan areas has a transit work trip share of 3.0% or more.

However, to get to jobs outside the legacy cities (in the same metropolitan areas), transit commuting is only 8.6% of the national total. Strikingly, in New York, nearly 51% percent of the jobs are outside the city of New York. Transit’s share to these jobs is only 4.4%, a fraction of the 58.0% who use transit to jobs in the city of New York (the urban core)(Figure 3). Large differences between transit commuting to downtown and the suburbs occurs in most major metropolitan areas, not just those with legacy cities.

New York continues to have by far the largest transit commute share, at 30.9% (Figure 4). The lowest transit commute shares are in Birmingham and Oklahoma City, at 0.6%. Transit work trip data is provided in the Table below by mode.

Working at Home: The Big Winner

The American Community Survey data reveals working at home continues to be the big winner among the most popular employment access modes. Between 2017 and 2018, working at home (which includes telecommuting) gained 258,000 workers nationally, rising from 8.00 to 8.25 million in total. This was a considerable accomplishment. Working at home increased disproportionately relative to driving alone. Having only 7% of the driving alone volume in 2017, working at home added more than 20% of the entire commuting increase over the last year.

Working at home strengthened its number three position, following driving alone and vehicle pools, and now exceeding transit by more than 600,000. In 44 of the 53 major metropolitan areas, working at home accounted for more employment access than transit. The nine exceptions, in which transit led working at home included the six metropolitan areas with “legacy cities” plus Seattle, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Overall, working at home has increased 2.3 million since 2010. It now has a market share of 5.3%, up from 4.3% in 2010.

Raleigh again had the highest work at home market share, at 9.1%, followed by Austin, Denver, Portland and San Francisco. The great advantage of working at home is that it reduces traffic, and does so without public subsidy (Figure 5). The work at home market shares exceeded that of transit in all but one of the ten top metropolitan areas (San Francisco, with its legacy city). Meanwhile, among the other nine strongest work at home metropolitan areas, seven have built expensive rail systems. Each of these has cost from hundreds of millions to billions of tax dollars. Yet, working at home, which is virtually unsubsidized has attracted substantially greater use.

Working at home exhibits little of the concentration observed in transit. All 53 of the major metropolitan areas have work at home shares of 2.5% or more. By contrast, 28 major metropolitan areas have transit commuting shares below 2.5%. Memphis had the lowest work at home share. Second lowest Buffalo, at 3.5% had a work at home market share larger than the transit market shares in 39 major metropolitan areas.

Carpool Resurgence

Carpools increased 300,000 between 2017 and 2018 and more than 600,000 since 2010. This follows decades of decline. This, however, was not enough to keep the mode from falling to 9.0% of the market in 2018 from 9.7% in 2017. There were 19.1 million carpools in 1980, the first year carpool data was collected and only 13.9 million now. The high market share was in Salt Lake City, at 12.0% (Figure 6), while the lowest was in New York, at 6.3%.

Ride Hailing

The data show a huge increase in taxicab use, which is probably due to recently initiated ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Taxicab commuting has increased more than 150%, from 150,000 to 360,000. The impact may be even greater. “Other” means of commuting increased almost 300,000, for a 25% increase. This was greater than that of all other modes of employment access, except for work and home and taxicab. It is not hard to imagine some respondents ticking “other” if they did not associate these new services with “taxicab.”

Work Access: Niche Markets and Mass Markets

While transit used to serve the largest share of motorized urban trips (probably about 90 years ago, but I have found no data), it has become a “niche” market among commuters who have a choice (have a car).Transit is about downtown and the urban core, with much of the share of transit commuting being destinations in these areas. Mind you, these are important markets, but they are small in the overall context of employment and transit’s access to metropolitan area jobs is miniscule.

The other three largest modes, cars, car pools and working at home serve broad markets. They can reach virtually any job in the metropolitan area, or in the case of working at home, many jobs around the world. That’s why those three modes hold a near monopoly on commuting, and represent most of its growth. With them, you can get from here to there.

EMPLOYMENT ACCESS BY MEANS OF ACCESS
US Major Metroopolitan Areas: 2018
	Drive Alone	Car Pool	Transit	Taxi	Motor-Cycle	Bicycle	Walk	Other	Home
Atlanta, GA	77.3%	8.9%	3.0%	0.5%	0.1%	0.2%	1.3%	1.2%	7.6%
Austin, TX	76.9%	8.7%	1.9%	0.1%	0.2%	0.8%	1.9%	0.7%	8.7%
Baltimore, MD	77.0%	8.0%	6.0%	0.3%	0.0%	0.3%	2.4%	0.8%	5.3%
Birmingham, AL	84.8%	8.8%	0.6%	0.0%	0.1%	0.0%	0.9%	0.6%	4.2%
Boston, MA-NH	66.1%	7.0%	13.2%	0.3%	0.0%	1.1%	5.6%	1.0%	5.5%
Buffalo, NY	82.1%	6.8%	3.1%	0.2%	0.1%	0.4%	3.0%	0.8%	3.5%
Charlotte, NC-SC	79.2%	9.4%	1.5%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.4%	0.9%	7.3%
Chicago, IL-IN-WI	69.8%	8.0%	12.1%	0.3%	0.1%	0.7%	2.8%	0.9%	5.4%
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	81.6%	8.2%	1.7%	0.1%	0.0%	0.2%	2.2%	0.8%	5.1%
Cleveland, OH	81.6%	7.9%	2.7%	0.1%	0.0%	0.4%	1.9%	0.8%	4.6%
Columbus, OH	81.3%	8.2%	1.7%	0.1%	0.1%	0.3%	2.2%	0.7%	5.5%
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	80.8%	9.5%	1.3%	0.1%	0.1%	0.1%	1.3%	0.9%	5.8%
Denver, CO	75.0%	8.2%	3.8%	0.2%	0.1%	0.9%	2.4%	0.8%	8.7%
Detroit, MI	83.2%	8.6%	1.3%	0.2%	0.1%	0.2%	1.4%	0.7%	4.3%
Grand Rapids, MI	82.0%	9.1%	1.4%	0.1%	0.1%	0.4%	2.2%	0.5%	4.2%
Hartford, CT	81.2%	7.7%	2.6%	0.1%	0.0%	0.2%	1.8%	0.8%	5.7%
Houston, TX	81.0%	9.4%	2.0%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.9%	1.3%	4.9%
Indianapolis. IN	83.4%	8.0%	0.9%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.3%	1.0%	5.0%
Jacksonville, FL	80.3%	8.5%	0.9%	0.1%	0.2%	0.6%	1.6%	1.5%	6.4%
Kansas City, MO-KS	83.8%	7.8%	0.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.2%	1.2%	0.7%	5.2%
Las Vegas, NV	78.7%	9.8%	3.3%	0.2%	0.3%	0.2%	1.4%	2.1%	4.1%
Los Angeles, CA	75.0%	9.5%	4.8%	0.3%	0.3%	0.6%	2.5%	1.1%	5.9%
Louisville, KY-IN	82.2%	8.5%	1.7%	0.0%	0.0%	0.3%	1.3%	1.0%	4.9%
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	86.1%	9.0%	0.7%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.9%	0.6%	2.5%
Miami, FL	77.7%	9.2%	3.1%	0.5%	0.2%	0.7%	1.4%	1.4%	5.7%
Milwaukee,WI	81.5%	7.5%	2.6%	0.2%	0.1%	0.5%	2.3%	0.3%	5.0%
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	77.4%	8.1%	4.5%	0.2%	0.1%	0.8%	2.4%	0.6%	5.9%
Nashville, TN	80.9%	9.2%	0.8%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.5%	1.0%	6.2%
New Orleans. LA	78.6%	9.3%	2.6%	0.3%	0.1%	1.2%	2.5%	0.9%	4.5%
New York, NY-NJ-PA	50.3%	6.3%	30.9%	0.8%	0.0%	0.7%	5.5%	0.8%	4.7%
Oklahoma City, OK	82.9%	8.8%	0.6%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	2.1%	1.0%	4.2%
Orlando, FL	80.3%	10.4%	1.3%	0.3%	0.3%	0.3%	1.1%	0.9%	5.0%
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	72.3%	7.2%	9.8%	0.3%	0.1%	0.6%	3.4%	0.8%	5.5%
Phoenix, AZ	75.8%	11.2%	1.8%	0.3%	0.3%	0.7%	1.3%	1.2%	7.4%
Pittsburgh, PA	76.6%	8.3%	5.6%	0.1%	0.1%	0.3%	3.4%	0.5%	5.1%
Portland, OR-WA	70.4%	8.8%	6.1%	0.2%	0.2%	2.0%	3.4%	0.7%	8.1%
Providence, RI-MA	81.3%	8.5%	2.4%	0.2%	0.0%	0.2%	3.0%	0.6%	3.8%
Raleigh, NC	79.0%	8.9%	0.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.1%	1.3%	0.5%	9.1%
Richmond, VA	81.2%	8.7%	1.7%	0.3%	0.1%	0.7%	1.4%	0.9%	5.2%
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	79.8%	10.9%	1.2%	0.1%	0.3%	0.2%	1.5%	1.0%	5.0%
Rochester, NY	80.9%	7.9%	2.2%	0.2%	0.2%	0.5%	3.0%	0.4%	4.8%
Sacramento, CA	76.6%	9.2%	2.2%	0.2%	0.3%	1.3%	1.7%	0.8%	7.9%
St. Louis,, MO-IL	83.6%	6.9%	2.1%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.8%	0.6%	4.6%
Salt Lake City, UT	74.5%	12.0%	3.2%	0.1%	0.2%	0.7%	2.2%	0.5%	6.7%
San Antonio, TX	79.2%	11.2%	1.8%	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	1.8%	1.0%	4.6%
San Diego, CA	76.5%	8.8%	2.6%	0.2%	0.5%	0.4%	3.1%	1.2%	6.6%
San Francisco, CA	57.2%	9.6%	17.3%	0.7%	0.4%	1.9%	4.7%	1.2%	7.0%
San Jose, CA	75.3%	10.3%	4.0%	0.3%	0.3%	1.6%	2.2%	0.9%	5.0%
Seattle, WA	66.1%	10.0%	10.7%	0.3%	0.3%	1.1%	4.1%	0.7%	6.7%
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	78.9%	9.0%	1.3%	0.3%	0.2%	0.5%	1.4%	1.1%	7.3%
Tucson, AZ	76.8%	10.0%	2.1%	0.2%	0.4%	1.5%	2.1%	1.3%	5.5%
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	81.2%	8.5%	1.4%	0.1%	0.1%	0.4%	2.8%	1.0%	4.4%
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	65.8%	9.2%	13.0%	0.5%	0.1%	0.9%	3.3%	1.0%	6.1%
UNITED STATES	76.3%	9.0%	4.9%	0.2%	0.1%	0.5%	2.6%	0.9%	5.3%
Derived from American Community Survey 2018.

Photograph: Interstate 5 in Orange County California, with elevated express lanes (by author)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Population Transformation in Pittsburgh and Chicago

Aaron M. Renn — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 01:33:38 -0400

Out of the 53 metro areas with more than a million people, only four lost population last year. The two biggest losers were Pittsburgh and Chicago.

Both cities are ones where a significant cadre of local boosters brush off population loss, arguing that a closer look shows that they actually are undergoing a demographic transition that is actually putting them in a stronger position. So let’s take a look.

In Pittsburgh’s case, you have a city that was devastated by the steel collapse, lost a generation of people, and now skews very old. Pittsburgh is the only metro area in the country with natural decrease in population. That is, more people are dying than being born. Pittsburgh’s natural decrease last year was -3,825. Pittsburgh also has net domestic outmigration, last year to the tune of -8,633. However, a good chunk of these are likely retirees; the top net migration destination for Pittsburgh is Florida.

However, Pittsburgh’s share of young people with degrees has been surging. It added over 50,000 of them since 2000, an increase rate of 52% that was tops in the Midwest. Their share of young adults with college degrees increased by over 14 percentage points. This is a big contrast to regions like Detroit and Cleveland, which in addition to their poor headline demographics, had low growth in young adults with degrees. Pittsburgh’s international migration isn’t particularly high at 4,359, but I believe is mostly highly educated immigrants.

Folks like Christopher Briem and Jim Russell have already written voluminously on Pittsburgh so I won’t say more.

Chicago is another interesting case. Chicago’s population problems seem to be driven by three factors, which are different from Pittsburgh:

1. The continuing loss of black population, especially in the city but also in the region.

2. A collapse in Mexican immigration (which had been Chicago’s biggest source of new immigrants).

3. A significant migration loss from people making less than $75,000 per year, and especially less than $25,000 per year.

None of these forces appear to make the upscale classes of Chicago sad. You certainly don’t hear anyone sounding the alarm about black population loss, and saying that the city needs to do something about it. In fact, the city’s ineffective policing would appear to be a contributor to driving blacks out, meaning black population decline is de facto public policy.

Likewise, the community seems blasé about the collapse in immigration. We are constantly assured that a steady flow of immigrants is a necessity for urban success. Back when the immigrant flow was positive, you’d hear local boosters talk about how Mexican immigration saved Chicago, and well as the frequently cited (as it turns out) poorly substantiated claim that 26th St. was the busiest retail strip in the city apart from Michigan Ave. But now that the Mexicans aren’t coming anymore, all of a sudden it’s no longer a big deal civically.

As for the loss of lower earning population, the Chicagoland Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) published a recent study on this. Interestingly, it was timed with the census estimates release, but does not really draw on them for its conclusions on this point. It would appear that they had some of this analysis in the can, and were anticipating that the census data would be bad news. Here’s their chart:

Again, I’m not hearing people shed a lot of tears over this.

As the CMAP study indicates, Chicago has been attracting a large number of high end earners and highly educated people, especially to the North Side of the city. This part of the city is booming.

Pete Saunders has described the situation in Chicago as “one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.” (Interestingly, author Andrew Diamond appears to have jacked Pete’s formulation by calling it “a combination of Manhattan smashed against Detroit.”) The surge in high education, high income residents, combined with black population loss, a collapse in low skill immigration, and a bleed off of lower education, lower income residents should shift the ratio in the city over time, maybe towards 50% San Francisco, 50% Detroit.

That kind of demographic shift would give the city of Chicago a composition closer to those of coastal elite cities, which is probably one reason it is tacitly desired by many locals. (Increasing tax rates actually fuels this transition as well, so the fiscal mess will be an accelerant).

Beyond troubling questions of equity – see this Atlantic piece on Chicago’s divide – it’s unclear whether this is something Chicago can actually pull off successfully. For one thing, it is almost entirely a city phenomenon. Most of the positive analysis on Chicago focuses on the city proper, or even subareas of it. It’s harder to generate great stats on the region.

Weak population dynamics also affect things like the housing market. Chicagoland has more underwater mortgages than New York and LA combined. Chicago’s housing market was dead last in appreciation among major markets last year – even worse than Cleveland. Demographics will be a drag on the region in ways like this.

A more elite city in a demographically declining region and state also has downsides. Those elite sectors of the city will be called on to pay the bills for everyone else, just as happens in California and New York. Can the Greater Loop and North Side of the city generate enough wealth to pay the freight for the rest of a sclerotic Illinois? It’s hard to say.

So like Pittsburgh, Chicago is not just in demographic decline, but also in part in demographic transition. Where that leads is a question only the future will tell.

This piece originally appeared on Urbanophile.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: Tim Tierney [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Black Homes Matter: The Fate of Affordable Housing in Pittsburgh

Nick Coles — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:38:23 -0500

“I live here. I’m from here. My whole family is here. We try to stay close together. This is America. I’m a Marine, I went to war three times. I served my country. It feels crazy not to be able to live in my own area where I grew up,” writes an East Liberty resident in Black Homes Matter, a booklet describing alternative approaches to neighborhood revitalization in the city of Pittsburgh. Since the Reagan-era shut-down of funding for public housing projects, the lack of decent affordable housing for low-income people has become a crisis in many cities. San Francisco and Seattle are notorious for pushing out poor and working-class residents, but mid-sized cities like Pittsburgh will be following suit unless city governments have the courage to implement equitable development.

Pittsburgh has been designated the “most livable city” in the US several times in the past decade. It gets points for its parks and rivers, excellent universities and hospitals, low crime rate, strong family-centered neighborhoods, expanding high-tech economy, and fine dining. Of course, The Economist and Forbes magazine do not consider how the city’s livability is distributed unequally across lines of race and class. The facts that we have among the steepest bus fares in the nation, the lowest minimum wages, and high infant mortality among African Americans do not figure in rankings designed to attract tourists and new businesses to the city.

Housing is one of the sharpest of these class-race fault lines, as gentrification accelerates in desirable neighborhoods. In a city already segregated by race, affordable housing is rapidly being replaced by high-end units for young professionals attracted by the city’s hi-tech reinvention of itself after the decline of steel and other industries. The former Nabisco factory in East Liberty now houses a Google hub in the Bakery Square mall and “village,” with an LA Fitness gym, Anthropologie store, and high-priced coffee shops. Its developer received major public funding because the project borders a “blighted” neighborhood, whose mostly black residents have hardly benefitted from the action. Few local residents are employed by the new businesses in their neighborhood.

East Liberty is also the site of a nearly completed Transit-Oriented Development project along the Port Authority’s east bus-way. Residents of the 360 new apartments, built by private developers with infrastructure provided by the city, will be able to get downtown in twelve minutes. Rents in the transit center buildings start at $1,100 a month for a studio apartment. No units have been reserved for tenants whose income is below the city’s median income, which in Pittsburgh is $37,161 overall, and $21,790 for black residents. Calculating housing expenses at 30% of income, maximum rents would be $929 and $545 respectively. In the absence of inclusionary zoning, or other enforcement for equity, there is no room in the attractive new development for even the average city resident, let alone those getting by on much lower incomes. Ironically, these are traditionally the primary users of public transit. Pittsburgh is on a course to follow Washington DC, where a recent Washington Post study found that neighborhoods with Metro stops are now majority white, and “the Metrorail system is becoming more inaccessible to minority workers.”

Throughout what was a predominantly black neighborhood, residents are being forced out either through direct eviction from public housing that is being demolished for re-development or because rents have risen beyond their means. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Diana Nelson Jones writes, “Many who are leaving East Liberty can’t find rental housing under $800. Many are having to accept living without adequate services, including transit, outside city neighborhoods where they have earned a sense of belonging. The vast majority are our elders, lifelong laborers and the working poor. Nobody should get sick with stress in the struggle to pay their expenses, then get sent off to the fringes.” But that is the current reality. One resident quoted in Black Homes Matter says, “We wasted six months looking for something affordable around here so we finally moved out to Millvale. I had to buy a car to commute back here to my job and then I had to take another job to pay for the car. I get very little sleep. And I miss my neighborhood.”

As a white middle-class resident of a neighborhood bordering East Liberty, I have benefited from the area’s revitalization. I shop at Trader Joes and Home Depot and eat at Chipotle and Whole Foods. I have a choice of three nearby yoga studios. The house I bought twenty years ago for $50K, with help from the Urban Redevelopment Authority because it was in a “transitional” neighborhood, is now worth upwards of $300K. My street, which was mixed-race back then, now appears to be entirely white, despite being majority rental. There’s a deep injustice in the fact that many residents who lived through the period of “blight” in the neighborhood are not here to share in its renewal or in the wealth being generated. Some residents who stay no longer feel at home: “There are people looking at me like ‘what are you doing here?’ I had my first kiss on that street.”

Along with its “most livable” designation, Pittsburgh is also credited these days for its progressive city administration. Mayor Bill Peduto, in office since 2014, is listed alongside New York’s Bill De Blasio as a leader willing to tackle structural inequality in his city. Bakery Square and the East Liberty TOD were initiated before Peduto’s term, and he has recently set up an Affordable Housing Task Force. A test case will come with the development of the “28 acres,” a vast parking lot between downtown and the largely black Hill District. This was the site in the 1960s of one of Pittsburgh’s most brutal acts of “urban renewal” – or “negro removal” as activists call it. 8,000 people were displaced and their homes and businesses razed to make way for an arena and parking for the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team. The arena has been demolished and the Penguins have relocated, but they still own the land and they refuse to include more than 12% of affordable housing on the site. With “affordable” defined as 80% of the market rate, even those few homes will be out of reach for descendants of the families that used to live in what was a thriving community.

It doesn’t have to be this way. On Pittsburgh’s North Side we have a counter-example: a strong tenant council prevented the eviction of more than 300 low-income families from Section 8 housing slated for redevelopment. Working with the URA and other agencies, Northside Coalition for Fair Housing acquired properties and used a “rehab for resale” strategy to keep people in their homes. “The result has been higher-quality housing, safer and more attractive neighborhoods, and increased tenant incomes,” according to the Pittsburgh Fair Development Action Group, which produced Black Homes Matter. The group advocates a range of strategies to resist displacement and support resident control in neighborhoods threatened by gentrification: inclusionary zoning, community land trusts, rent stabilization, tenant ownership schemes.

There is no shortage of successful models from around the country. In Pittsburgh and other cities, we need the political will to hold private property developers accountable to equitable standards and to include residents in determining plans for improvement of their communities. Affordable housing and accessible transit are essential to neighborhoods that are “livable” for all.

This essay was first published by the Working-Class Perspectives blog, which offers weekly commentaries on current issues related to working-class people and communities.

Nicholas Coles holds BA and MA degrees from Oxford University and MA and PhD degrees from SUNY, Buffalo, and has been a member of Pitt’s English Department at the University of Pittsburgh since 1980. Coles is a past-president of the Working-Class Studies Association, and is a founding member of the Pittsburgh Collaborative for Working-Class Studies, a new multi-campus interdisciplinary organization.

Image of Eastside III development courtesy of mosites.net.

Family Friendly Cities

John Sanphillippo — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 01:00:32 -0400

One of the common criticisms leveled at people who promote urban living goes something like this. “Cities are great for college kids, people starting off in their careers, bohemians, and maybe some older empty nesters with money who have a taste for theater and art. But most people have families and tight budgets. Suburbia is the only place that provides a high quality, safe, affordable life for regular folks with children.”

Last year I flew to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to attend a wedding. As we were all milling about with friends and family on the porch eating ice cream on a gorgeous September afternoon I noticed some of my fellow out-of-town visitors from New York and San Francisco looking around with a peculiar expression. It was the same kind of look that dogs get when they’re curious and a little confused – one ear up and one ear down. They looked at their kids playing in the grass and sitting on grandma’s lap. I knew very well what they were thinking. They were a family of four living in a tiny one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and their oldest child will be starting school next year.

Now, I need you to picture the neighborhood so you get the context here. This is a century old streetcar suburb five miles from downtown. There are tree lined streets, front porches on elegant old homes, a charming Main Street with mom and pop shops a couple of blocks away, and an elementary school directly across the street. Even in this very comfortable and pricey neighborhood a grand home with a patch of grass could be purchased for significantly less than the cost of a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. You can actually ride a bicycle to downtown Pittsburgh – and it would be a pleasant and convenient ride. Carnegie Mellon University and a dozen other prominent institutions are nearby.

In large expensive cities many young families are having to make harsh choices. They can stay where they are and pay exorbitant rents or a shockingly high mortgage for less than ideal accommodations in order to have access to good jobs and urban amenities. Or they can move to a more affordable suburb and spend a couple of hours each day schlepping in and out of the city. Or they can step away from the city entirely and organize their lives around a purely suburban set of arrangements: the subdivision, the office park, the shopping mall… For many people who value urban life these are difficult decisions with a lot of unsavory trade offs.

Pittsburgh is just one of hundreds of small and medium sized cities in the interior that people in coastal cities like to dismiss as part of “Flyover Country”. What isn’t clearly understood is that Pittsburgh isn’t competing with New York or San Francisco. Instead Pittsburgh is competing with the distant suburbs of places like New York and San Francisco out in the endless smear of anonymous tract homes and strip malls that ring those cities. Pittsburgh wins that taste test hands down every time for anyone who shows up and actually looks around and experiences what’s on offer.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He's a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

America’s Shrinking Cities Are Gaining Brains

Aaron M. Renn — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 08:17:12 -0400

If there’s one thing that’s a nearly universal anxiety among cities, it’s brain drain, or the loss of educated residents to other places. I’ve written about this many times over the years, critiquing the way it is normally conceived.

Since brain drain seems to be a major concern in shrinking cities, I decided to take a look at the facts around brains in those places. Looking at the 28 metro areas among the 100 largest that had objective measures of shrinkage – in population and/or jobs – between 2000 and 2013, I looked what what happened to their educational attainment levels.

My results were published in my Manhattan Institute study “Brain Gain in America’s Shrinking Cities.” As the title implies, my key findings were:

Every major metro area in the country that has been losing population and/or jobs is actually gaining people with college degrees at double digit rates.

As a whole the shrinking city group is holding its own with the country in terms of educational attainment rates, and in many cases outperforming it.

Even among younger adults, most shrinking cities are adding more of them with degrees, increasing their educated population share, and even catching up with the rest of the country in their college degree attainment levels.

The following chart of metro area population change vs. degree change for select cities should drive the point home.

Click through to read the whole thing.

In short, for most places, it looks like the battle against brain drain has actually been won. As people there can attest, thanks to many improvements public and private over the years, they are now viable places to live for higher end talent in a way they weren’t say 20 years ago. This means the attention and resources that have been devoted to this issue can now be put to more present day tasks such as repairing civic finances, rebuilding core public services, and creating more economic opportunity for those without degrees.

More commentary later perhaps, but for now please check out the report and share widely.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor at City Journal. He writes at The Urbanophile.

Super Bowl XLV: The $10 Billion Bag of Chips

Matthew Stevenson — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:27:32 -0500

I am raining on the big parade by equating the Super Bowl with trade deficits, budget shortfalls, state bonds on the edge of default, and unemployment close to ten percent. But if thirty-second ads that cost $2.7 million or The Black Eyed Peas at halftime can’t lift the economy out of its doldrums, how can we expect the same miracles from Troy Polamalu or Aaron Rodgers?

From the perch of anyone staring at a TV or looking down from a skybox, what industry could be more bullish for America than the National Football League? Revenue for this year will top out between eight and nine billion dollars, which is roughly shared among the thirty-two professional teams. Does it not speak of economic recovery when even the fan-owned Green Bay Packers, with their retro stadium and rust-belt market, are given a market valuation in Forbes Magazine at more than $1 billion?

How can it be fourth-and-long for America if, at the Super Bowl, tickets on the thirty yard line cost $10,366? Or if half of a sky box is fetching $384,993 at the Dallas stadium, which itself cost $1.5 billion to build?

For the partners in what Theodore Roosevelt might have called “the football trust,” the economics of the game puts every NFL team owner in the Super Bowl. That the Buffalo Bills chose to pocket their subsidies instead of investing in a quarterback who didn’t graduate from Harvard is their business, and a good one at that. In 2009, they earned $28 million while the New York Giants, fresh from a Super Bowl win, only made $2 million.

A closer look at football economics, however, makes the touchdown business a perfect metaphor for an industry—not unlike the nation—that talks up competition, “good conduct”, fair play, and free enterprise, but then goes to the subprime bank with hand-offs from sweetheart contracts, congressional subsidies, tax breaks, restrictive labor agreements, and underwater municipal bonds.

Twenty-eight of the thirty-two NFL stadiums were financed with some public money, and eleven were built entirely on the dole. The NFL has enjoyed something like $10 billion in stadium subsidies in recent years. I wonder how many depleted state and city governments (Cincinnati gave the Bengals $450 million for their stadium) wish that a financial booth review could challenge the ruling on the field. As China built steel mills and high-speed rail, American cities went with skyboxes and entertainment venues that are used on about twelve days a year.

The MVP of subsidies for the NFL is its antitrust exemption, which limits the number of teams at the professional level. Were free enterprise to govern the sport, instead of a medieval guild, anyone could put together a club.

The NFL would simply be the best thirty-two teams in any given year. Teams that were improving would move up; bad teams, like the Browns, would be relegated to lesser leagues. Golf is played by this principle. Every town and city in America could compete.

With Congress stuffing the competition at the line, the NFL enjoys a football monopoly, which allows it to dictate the prices of everything from official jerseys to cable subscriptions. “You want the NFL?....Go to the NFL...with about ten grand for an upper deck seat.”

To be sure, the NFL has an engaging product and, if you can sit through the hours of time-outs and commercials, even some exciting games. But given that football is staged to sell things, what trots out on the field at the Super Bowl has more in common with billboards or beach banners than with sport.

The advertisers at this year’s Super Bowl, paying $90,000 a second, include Volkswagen, Bud Light, Cars.com, Mars, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, CareerBuilder, Coca-Cola, and no doubt the knowing leer of the Viagra man, looking over his wife as if she were a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

Their products will be seen in forty-eight million homes and by almost 100 million Americans. Fifty million Americans, myself among them, watched the first Super Bowl in 1967, in which a hung-over Max McGee twice took it to the house against the Kansas City Chiefs. The networks thought so little of the spectacle that no videotape of the game remains.

The Super Bowl is a windfall for caterers, pizza joints that deliver, beer distributors, and guacamole middle men, not to mention the Dallas escorts who are charging $24,000 for a week of bump-and-run. But does it not also suggest a spectator nation, day dreaming about cars, sex, and getting a job?

Under the current NFL contract, which expires March 3, the salary cap for each team is between 56 and 60 percent of the league’s revenues. The fans are told that the cap is to insure parity in the league, so that on any give Sunday the Panthers might not lose by more than twenty points. The salary cap also keeps the word "free" out of the enterprise, and fixes the game to insure a profit for every team owner (except maybe the Lions).

Few NFL player contracts have much in the way of long-term financial guarantees, and teams can cut veterans, even those who have sustained serious injuries, to clear “space” from their cap.

Very much in the spirit of earlier monopolists, NFL owners are not content with their billion dollar team valuations, subsidized stadiums, cozy TV contracts, and parking lot rebates.

Now owners are asking the players' association to accept an 18 percent pay cut in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement. Among the owners’ negotiating demands are a reduction in player salaries, especially for rookies, and an addition of two more games to the schedule.

Owners are threatening to lockout the players (as if they were Pullman workers) and suspend football for next year. Or the games could be played with scabs, as happened in 1987. Shutdown losses would run into the billions.

Fans can only hope that Taft-Hartley would be invoked to keep the Oakland Raiders on the field, or that President Obama would pass a Football Recovery and Mall Consumption Act to rush stimulus money into the red zone.

After such a diatribe, will I be watching Super Bowl XLV? Of course I will. From the first Super Bowl (which was really an exhibition game at which tickets were $12) onward, I have seen some or all of the other forty-three games. Along with cheering McGee, I have seen the Packers’ Donny Anderson knock out the Chiefs’ Fred Williamson (aka “The Hammer”), the reigns of Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana, and even those four terrible Super Bowls that the Buffalo Bills lost in a row.

As a fan of the New York Jets, I remember Super Bowl III more clearly than some others. (As Joe Namath said, “I never drink at halftime.”) But I know where I was when the “Refrigerator” (William Perry) scored in Super Bowl XX, and I cannot read anything about Armenia without thinking about Miami Dolphin kicker Garo Yepremian and that absurd pass.

Despite my institutional memory for the Super Bowl, I wonder whether it makes sense to elevate a sporting event into a national consumer revival meeting (“brought to you by Cialis...when shopping isn’t enough”). Nor do I think that the hoopla fulfills Vince Lombardi’s dreams, unless they involved Janet Jackson.

Although he wasn’t speaking about economic competitiveness, former Washington Redskin and current TV announcer Joe Theismann revealed a truth about the big game when he said, “Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”

Photo by americanistadechiapas

Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, a collection of historical essays. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine.

Forged in Pittsburgh: The Football Industry & The Steelers

Matthew Stevenson — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:47:28 -0500

When will the Labor Department come up with a statistic (GEP or Gross Entertainment Product) to measure to extent to which the economy is dependent on fun? The Pittsburgh Steelers are, at the very least, the emotional heart of Pittsburgh. In season on Sundays, the faithful wear their jerseys to church, and the city takes a reverential pause during the games, as it did during last Sunday’s AFC championship competition. Football wins in Pittsburgh are best understood as divine rapture, delivered by Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, despite his pre-season time in purgatory.

The football industry has its factory lines across the river from downtown Pittsburgh. A joint venture between the Pittsburgh Steelers, the University of Pittsburgh, and local government accounted for the financial package that replaced Three Rivers Stadium with Heinz Field, a hulking monolith that, instead of producing steel by night, hosts football games on about twenty days a year.

At the same time, the city replaced the baseball stadium and added on to the convention center, for a total expenditure of $809 million. Costs allocated to Heinz Field are estimated to be $281 million, although the accounting is more impenetrable than the Steel Curtain.

Why would a city struggling to replace jobs lost to Asia put millions into two stadiums that are little more productive than Crusader fortresses in the Levant?

Some answers might be found in the Obama appointment of the Steelers’ owner, Dan Rooney, as U.S. ambassador to Ireland. Presumably, Rooney and some local unions had delivered Pennsylvania to the Democrats over the course of many elections, and their reward was a sweetheart contract to build a football stadium and an ambassadorship.

The arrangement casts professional football in the guise of a protected guild, although perhaps one as vulnerable as steel tubing is to competitive destruction.

Were professional football not to enjoy an antitrust exemption, the Koreans and the Chinese might be supplying games for costs far less than those requiring a publicly funded stadium ($158 million directly) in which the Rooneys pocket the $125,000 per year from each of the high-end sky boxes.

The first time I went to Pittsburgh, in 1972, I came up the Ohio Valley on a series of buses that stopped in places like Moundsville, Wheeling, Steubenville, and Weirton. Pittsburgh was an iron and steel city, although the London fog of soot no longer hung over the downtown. Still, it looked more like the past than the future, with the riverbanks lined with rusting barges and empty steel mills as forlorn as an Edward Hopper painting. The trip came after two weeks in Appalachia, studying coal mining for a High School project, together with my friend and classmate, Kevin Glynn.

Approached from the south, Pittsburgh felt like the coal and iron ore capital of America, where train, road, and river traffic came together to form the crossroads of the carbon revolution. Opposition to cap-and-trade explains why Pennsylvania recently voted Republican.

As we made our way up the Ohio Valley, Kevin and I went by car plants, rail yards, smelters, and gas flares, which, had I known more about economics, I might have recognized as the eternal flame of industrial America. Heavy industry was then moving to the Far East, which left downtown Pittsburgh with the air of a frontier settlement in which the saloon and the company store had closed.

We stayed in a shabby hotel, went to a baseball game, and caught a night train home to New York, having liked Pittsburgh more than we expected. After the narrow valleys of West Virginia and claustrophobia of the fading coal mines, Pittsburgh had felt expansive, and the three rivers that converged off Fort Pitt suggested that the city had currents to wider worlds, as Abraham Lincoln found when he drifted from Kentucky to New Orleans.

Thirty-eight years after my first visit, I recently came back to Pittsburgh, this time on the aft, open deck of a private railroad car, as if whistle-stopping in a political campaign.

Although the private rail car offered excellent food, wine tasting, and good company, what interested me most was to see how Pittsburgh had changed since 1972. A friend who owns the car, New York Central 3, invited me to join him, and the excursion gave me the feeling that I was touring Rust Belt America in a steel gondola.

I made much of the trip west on an outdoor folding chair that gave me a box seat as the train crossed the Alleghenies and moved toward Pittsburgh through the historically drenched valleys around Conemaugh and Johnstown, site of the flood, nature’s 9/11. At each stop I wondered the extent to which Smokestack American was underwater.

In 1889 the dam of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, above Johnstown, is said to have contained 20,000,000 tons of water before it broke, equivalent to the amount that goes over Niagara Falls in 36 minutes. A wind tunnel preceded the wall of water that killed 2,000. Another kind of tsunami has since swept over the modern American steel industry.

Along the banks of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, the Pittsburgh steel mills that once belched fire are gone, replaced by highways, empty spaces, apartment blocks, and hotels. Much of the local steel production has been outsourced to Eastern Europe, reminding me that I had seen a train emblazoned “US Steel Serbia,” on a trip to the Balkans.

The extent to which Pittsburgh has shifted into the service economy was clear, with universities, hospitals, government office buildings, and sports complexes accounting for the local growth industries.

At the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum, I collected some notes on the extent to which football is among the region’s thriving investments. A wall map shows the location of the many local quarterbacks exported to the professional ranks. I marveled at finding names like Dan Marino, George Blanda, Joe Montana, and Jim Kelly in places that once produced things like barbed wire.

My Pittsburgh touring ended in nearby Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in homage to quarterback Joe Namath (of the New York Jets), who grew up on several of its gritty streets. A steel products company still operated in the town, but the mill appeared to be closed. Beaver Falls lives on the fumes of a community college and its sporting legends. In his memoirs, Namath writes that the area is “the home of more All-Americans per square mile, I’ll bet, than any other section of the country.”

I found the houses where Joe Willie grew up, including rooms over a bar & grill then called the 1223 Club, which may explain Joe’s remark that he liked his girls blond and his Johnny Walker Red. Inside the bar both are still available.

On the way back to the station, I drove past the location of Fort Pitt, the battles for which, as Fort Duquesne, had ignited the global Seven Years War (1756 - 1763) between the English and the French. A young officer, George Washington, conducted a blundering campaign against the then-French held fort, but his reputation survived.

In the 1750s, Pittsburgh was the heart of the New World, as it was later the industrial capital of an industrial nation. Today, the only wars being fought around the Ohio Valley relate to foreign trade and the Super Bowl.

Pittsburgh Steelers Photo by pitt6rng

Is Pennsylvania History?

Matthew Stevenson — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:06 -0400

On a recent whirlwind through Pennsylvania, I thought of James Carville, who popularized the notion that “It's Philadelphia on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle.” It’s a clever line, but between the Ohio and Delaware rivers he is missing a great American tapestry: the wreck of the Penn-Central, United flight 93’s final frantic moments, the social history of the Johnstown flood, and whether a state of steel and coal is past or present.

Pennsylvania also reflects some broad truths about the nation, in particular, that stimulus plans can take forty years, the Amish have it right, the Civil War remains a personal wound, and Amtrak will never be the agent of high-speed rail.

My first stop was Harrisburg, and I got there on a train that crossed through Amish country. I would imagine that as a community the Amish have the lowest debt-to-equity ratio in the country. There is something timeless and inspiring about their red barns and silos that flickered across the train windows, and no one needs to exhort the Amish to “Go Green.”

In Harrisburg, as if a character in a novel by Theodore Dreiser, I walked with my grip from the station to a restaurant in the shadow of the state capitol. Later that evening I went to a high school graduation in the Concert Forum Hall, an elegant rotunda that was finished in the depths of the Depression.

Around the circular walls are huge maps and timelines of world history. I passed the slow moments of the ceremony following Hadrian on his way into the Syrian desert and Marco Polo to the court of the Great Khan.

Will the current stimulus money produce any buildings of such greatness? Somehow I doubt it. When the train went through Philadelphia, I saw a cheerful sign in an empty rail yard, with wording to the effect that the hot government money would get Americans back to work. The boast sounded unconvincing, as if everyone knows that stimulus money will end up funding deficits, national security advisors, and weapons contractors.

General Robert E. Lee thought so much of Harrisburg and its strategic rail bridges that twice he embarked on campaigns to cut the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and twice he failed, first at Antietam and then Gettysburg. The bridges over the Susquehanna remain, and their stone arches echo Avignon. The downtown — which looks in need of some stimulus — recalls the urban loneliness of Edward Hopper.

From Harrisburg I drove west to Chambersburg and Mercersburg, strategic hamlets in the Civil War, but now a long way from the information superhighway. In 1864 Lee's general, John McCausland, burned Chambersburg to the ground when the citizens failed to post his demanded ransom, which was $100,000 in gold, or $500,000 in currency (even terrorists are leery of inflated money); later, Chambersburg was the only northern town razed during in the war.

President James Buchanan grew up in Mercersburg, a sleepy town notable today for its distinguished prep school. The log cabin in which he was born is now on the campus of Mercersburg Academy, and a nearby plaque notes that Buchanan served as U.S. Senator, ambassador to Russia and Great Britain, and Secretary of State before becoming the fifteenth president, impressive achievements for someone whose presidency is remembered as a failure, ruined by the Dred Scott decision and the drift to Civil War, which he did little to prevent.

In a more recent conflict, United flight 93 crashed west of Mercersburg, near Shanksville, which echos the lonely farmland over which so much of the Civil War was fought. Conspiracy theories (a rare American growth industry) postulate that no plane crashed at Shanksville or that the one that did was destroyed by a missile, perhaps on orders from the trigger-happy Dick Cheney. (President Bush was finishing up My Pet Goat with the school kids.) Other theories claim that engine parts were found eight miles from the crash site and no plane debris larger than small fragments were located.

A visit to the temporary Flight 93 memorial, however, puts to rest these and a number of other 9/11 conspiracy theories. About eighty percent of the plane was found at the site, although much of its was buried in the soft earth that had been strip mined; many local residents saw the plane hurtling intact toward the ground; the only debris found miles from the crash site was paper; and one of the engines flew several hundred yards — not miles — from the impact crater.

The memorial to the victims of Flight 93 is budgeted to cost about $50 million, some of which has been privately raised. In design, it looks like the Vietnam Memorial in the middle of nowhere. No doubt it was a flush Congress that authorized the expenditure, even though the temporary memorial, a simple American flag at the crash site and a makeshift observation deck, looks like a better use of government resources. (Think of American tragedies remembered only with a statue in a traffic circle.)

Forty Americans died at Shanksville. The death toll at Johnstown, just up the road, was more than two thousand when in 1889 a dam above the city broke and a wall of water washed over the gritty mill town. The tragedy is recalled in a series of memorials around the Little Conemaugh River Valley, and at a flood museum in Johnstown, which more recently has lost most of its steel production and its jobs.

Not even the local filming of the 1977 movie Slap Shot with Paul Newman could save the economy of Johnstown, now laced with boarded storefronts, although it’s fun in the main square to imagine the presence of Coach Reggie Dunlop and the Hansons (“They brought their fuckin' TOYS with 'em!”).

A morality tale as well as a local disaster, blame for the Johnstown flood falls on The South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club, a mountain retreat of the super rich — Carnegie and Frick were members — that callously ignored warning signs that its South Fork Dam might give out. No wonder its so hard to win as a Republican in central Pennsylvania.

I spent the night in Pittsburgh, no longer a steel city, but one given over to the service economy: in this case, sports stadiums, universities, finance, and hospitals. Old America made steel rails; new America entertains the masses.

I left Pittsburgh on the The Pennsylvanian, Amtrak’s daily service to Philadelphia and New York, a remnant of the Pennsylvania Railroad, once the largest corporation on earth. After the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the New York Central in 1968, the combined company failed less than three years later. The writer L.J. Davis said “it was more a death watch than a merger.” Penn-Central was the Enron of the 1970s. When it failed, it was the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Here’s an overlooked cautionary tale about the delayed time reactions of government’s economic interventions: played out over thirty years, the Penn-Central merger was a big success. It took, however, the deregulation of the freight railroad business and the sale of the assets of Conrail (the successor to the bankruptcy) to the Norfolk Southern and CSX. When the dust settled, Penn-Central left the Northeast with two privately-owned railroads that are everything the shareholders had hoped for in 1968.

On my return trip east, the train crossed the Allegheny Mountains on the Horseshoe Curve, ambled through Altoona and Lewistown, and then paused for almost forty-five minutes in Harrisburg and Philadelphia—an odd schedule for a railroad now talking up high-speed rail. Keep in mind that all the rail stimulus billions will bring is a return to the train speeds reached in the 1920s… the perfect metaphor for the illusions of government investment.

What makes me hopeful about Pennsylvania’s future? I see optimism in the Amish red barns, the three rivers in Pittsburgh, the endurance of Johnstown, the four tracks of the main line, the federal-era houses in Harrisburg, the life of the Susquehanna, and the roadside markers like one in Chambersburg that reads: “On June 26, 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee, and staff, entered this square.”

What’s not to admire about a state that keeps its history so alive? I only wish it still had a steel industry and the Broadway Limited.

Flickr Photo by Runner Jenny: 155th Pennsylvania Zouave Monument, Little Round Top, Gettysburg.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited, winner of Foreword’s bronze award for best travel essays at this year's BEA. He is also editor of Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine. He lives in Switzerland.