how they are already being used,” said Lee. For instance, the areas in which elders use milk crates as stools and card tables can be resourced and developed to emphasize its current functions. Lee explained that people will adapt a place based on the amount of resources in it but needs and desires for the space can still present themselves. But overall community development wasn’t the goal in the development of Bakery Square. Developing Pittsburgh’s then-budding tech sector was.
Bakery Square helped spur growth along Penn Avenue in one reimagined neighborhood after another, cascading to downtown Pittsburgh, well beyond my old running route through Karen’s old community. Chic restaurants and bars have opened where timeworn buildings and blight used to be. Driverless cars zip through the streets, made conspicuous by a spinning contraption, a lidar,13 sitting atop their roofs. Two new hotels—the notoriously hip Ace and the cool Indigo—have sprung up in East Liberty to accommodate those flying in for job interviews with Google or any number of other tech companies and ancillary businesses.
Something else is noticeable. East Liberty is visibly much less Black than it used to be. It looks more like a home for the pale male tech industry that is struggling with its lack of diversity. The online magazine Business Insider reported in 2016 that Black people made up less than 5 percent of the field nationwide.14
Uber, Amazon, Argo AI, and dozens of other tech companies have all found the Steel City accommodating in the last decade. The Pittsburgh Tribune reported that investments in the city’s tech scene exceeded $687 million in 2017, and will grow to more than $3.5 billion in ten years.15 East Liberty represents the kind of neighborhood transformation old industrial cities lust after. The town that once spun a narrative of brawn, smoke, and iron now peddles brainpower, innovation, and technology, as well as neighborhood revitalization. Bakery Square, the capital of Pittsburgh’s intellectual revolution, sits two miles from the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and Chatham University, as well as my hometown of Wilkinsburg.
The tech boom and the development of East Liberty didn’t happen by chance. Millions of dollars were invested in grouping the powerful intellectual institutions of the city, and that clustering was used as the basis for placemaking strategies for areas such as East Liberty. The city sought to develop an “innovation district,” which, according to one of its proponents, Bruce Katz, an urban scholar with Drexel University, is “a small geographic area within cities where research universities, medical institutions, and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, accelerators, and incubators.”16 Those efforts proved successful.
Clustering is another term loosely used in economic development circles. My colleagues at the Brookings Institution define industry clusters as “groups of firms that gain a competitive advantage through local proximity and interdependence … [Clustering] offers a compelling framework for local and state leaders to analyze and support their economies.”17 Black economists and business owners recognize that clustering is mostly a euphemism for some form of exclusion when it comes to economic development. Who’s included in a business cluster almost always reflects the racial dynamics of a place. Pittsburgh leaders’ clustering and placemaking efforts largely excluded Black talent, firms, and associations. The competitive advantages that are gained come at the expense of the quality of life among those who are not included. If deconstructing racism isn’t a primary goal of a cluster, then you’re more than likely going to increase inequality.
In many ways, I recognize East Liberty as everything Wilkinsburg used to be. Everything to accommodate the residents is within walking distance, built and anchored by industry. You’d think Wilkinsburg and other Black communities would be benefiting from Pittsburgh’s resurgence as a tech force, maybe even serving as home base for these businesses. Proximity to economic growth and technological expansion should increase opportunities for Black and Hispanic people.
My hometown has the history of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which was as close to Wilkinsburg’s downtown as Google is to Pittsburgh’s. Wilkinsburg has its own exit off Interstate 376, which transitions to Penn Avenue. The same two-lane bus-only highway that has a stop in East Liberty starts in Wilkinsburg. Closeness to Black and Hispanic communities should be an opportunity for disproportionately White industries looking to develop people of color. The tech industry is important because it makes up the “traded sector” of the economy, which comprises everything traded outside of the region (from raw materials and algorithms to cars and software) as opposed to skills in the non-traded sector that are related to industries that serve local residents (such as schools, construction, and healthcare). Economist Enrico Moretti found that for every high-tech job produced in this era another five is created in non-tradeable, locally serving jobs.18 However close in proximity many neighborhoods are to these booming industries, the evidence shows there are limited career pathways for low-skilled residents—at least for Black people in places like Pittsburgh. Worse, pay for low-skilled laborers may decrease from the presence of the tech industry.
In a 2019 study, researchers Neil Lee and Stephen Clarke found that high-tech industries do, indeed, have a multiplying effect.19 Using data on UK labor markets from 2009 to 2015, they found with each ten new high-tech jobs another seven local, non-tradeable service jobs were produced, six of which go to low-skilled workers. “Yet while low-skilled workers gain from higher employment rates, the jobs are often poorly paid service work, so average wages fall, particularly when increased housing costs are considered.”
Pittsburgh’s tech boom offers a cautionary tale; the median wage of Blacks in the Pittsburgh metro area from 2005 to 2015 dropped by nearly 20 percent while Whites realized an increase of almost 10 percent, according to a 2017 Brookings Institution analysis.20 Being proximate to economic growth isn’t enough.
Wilkinsburg still has potential. The assets it possessed in the past are still there: affordable real estate and ample space. Its library remains, along with parks and other amenities that all residents enjoy. But it hasn’t gotten anywhere near the level of investment Pittsburgh has, outside of organizations that seek to leverage or save aging and vacant real estate. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation has invested roughly $13 million in Wilkinsburg in recent years.21 There is a small nonprofit business incubator and a project by the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation (WCDC), a nonprofit that promotes revitalization in Wilkinsburg through business and residential development, with the aim of raising $6 million toward its Train Station Restoration Project, the largest restoration project in the municipality.22 Restoring the train station as a retail hub is an attempt to connect the local bus hub (East Busway All Stops) and Penn Avenue, “which together host over 50,000 people every day,” according to the WCDC video.23
People in Pittsburgh will say that folks won’t invest in Wilkinsburg because of the history of violence in the borough. The Larimer Avenue-Wilkinsburg gang, also known as LAW, became one of the most lethal in the entire country around the time I went to college, between 1989 and 1993. Because my home situation was so insecure during those years—a crowded house, an aging matriarch, and a fraying relationship with Mom’s son Hotsy—I found ways to do summer research projects, camps, and short-term jobs in other cities, living with college classmates.
But the streets talked. I’d get messages from my younger brother Dorian about some of my family and peers. David and Jamar Dorsey, whom Mom and Mary used to watch, were swept up by gang life and eventually found guilty of multiple crimes. Between 1993 and 1999, dozens of my former classmates and
