So Pittsburgh beat Los Angeles yesterday…

…and no, not in sports.

According to the latest American Lung Association report - “State of the Air 2008″ - that determines the nation’s most polluted cities, Pittsburgh has been named the “sootiest in the nation.”

Wow, what an honor.

What is this, the 1970s all over again?

The category Pittsburgh claimed top spot in measures short-term particle pollution, or ’soot.’ However, Janice Nolan, the assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy for the ALA, said that “it’s not that Pittsburgh has gotten worse; it’s that Los Angeles has gotten better.”

Small comfort, that.

Oh, and she said that “if the trend continues, Pittsburgh will top two lists, and LA will only be leading the nation in ozone.”

I see. So if the Steel City just keeps status quo, then we can’t make fun of LA-ites any more for being smoggy people. Great. Not to mention that everyone else in the country will revert back to the post-70’s assumption that Pittsburgh was a dirty, polluted city.

Guillermo Cole, a spokesman for the Allegheny County Health Department, told the Post-Gazette that Pittsburgh didn’t deserve the ranking as the high soot readings come primarily from emissions from U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works. “The fact of the matter is that the ranking only applies accurately to the Liberty-Clairton area, and Pittsburgh, the rest of the county and the surrounding counties have much better air,” Mr. Cole said. “Liberty-Clairton is a unique situation. We have a large source, the coke works, sitting in a river valley, so it’s a real challenge. There’s no other area of the U.S. like that.”

The Liberty-Clairton area does not meet federal air quality standards for soot by far, but neither does the surrounding five-county metropolitan area - though soot levels are lower. Plans are in place, however, to improve the city’s overall air quality, especially for the Coke Works.

U.S. Steel has a $1B upgrade in the works for the site which will put the Liberty-Clairton area into attainment by 2015. The rest of the region should hit attainment by 2010.

Even if the area surrounding the Coke Works was removed from the data, Pittsburgh would still rank in the Top Twenty - 16th, to be exact.

So while the news is indeed hard to swallow, remember this: in traffic and commute, Pittsburgh is the fifth BEST city; L.A. is the ninth WORST. And when it comes right down to it, Pittsburghers get more quality time at home and not lodged on the Parkway inhaling exhaust. (Well, except when the “tunnel monster” is running loose.)

Commute vs. pollution? Yeah, I think Western PA wins that round.

Blast furnaces and iron ore at the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation mills, Etna, Pennsylvania (LOC), courtesy of The Library of Congress

I’m back to writing after taking a few weeks’ break due to travel and a knee injury that’s still being worked up by my fine colleagues at UPMC. To start back up, I’m coming back to a topic that had just hit the front page when I left: air pollution. More specifically, the suggestion from Dan Onorato that Allegheny County could stand to drop our air quality program and let the state’s Department of Environmental Protection take over. THe basic argument is that A) it’s slower than the state would be and B) it’s driving away business by making regulations tougher than they need to be.

As far as part A, follow-up articles suggest that the county agency is about the same speed as the state. So what about part B? Are we being too stringent? Could DEP do the job more efficiently? Well, according to one (admittedly biased) source, PA is currently among the worst states for hazardous pollutants and particulates. As of last year, Pittsburgh continues to lag behind other cities on multiple air-quality metrics. In other words, our state has a problem, *and* Pittsburgh/Allegheny County’s problem is even worse. A county-level agency with a mission to fix our air sounds like the sort of thing we should be paying more attention to, not trying to fob on off the state.

I cannot help but agree with the first letter-writer in Saturday’s PG. Luke Ravenstahl may not have been my first choice for Mayor, but he’s doing a lot of things right in between the PR slip-ups, and overall, I’m still considering letting him have another two years. Or at least, I would be if his friends at the State Democratic Committee would leave me the [beep] alone. There were quite literally three straight days of pro-Ravenstahl/anti-DeSantis postcards yesterday. One card I can tolerate. Three in three days is an annoyance and a sign that someone in Harrisburg doesn’t particularly care about my time or about the number of trees killed in the name of Democratic victory.

Mr. Mayor: the people who Mark DeSantis is trying to peel away are generally the more progressive Democrats/Independents. Most of us are also at least vaguely environmentalist, and we dislike junk mail in all forms. Your State Committee colleagues are hurting your cause, not helping, and it’d be in your best interests to call them off.

The comments that followed the LA Weekly story about parking policies in downtown LA were a lot more thought out than the original piece. Hopefully people won’t mind me pasting in some of the best ones. Obviously, I think the issue is of universal interest and highlights an issue we will have to face. Follow this link to read all the comments. Needless, to say the fact that a much higher percentage of our parking lots are filled with non city taxpayers makes it even more important for us to think about.

“If, for just a few minutes, we turned and shifted perspectives, another story would come from this issue. I disagree with the author that taking away parking is a bad thing; I think this is okay. I think this because it is not about parking - it is about shifting one’s attitude and lifestyle in order to make things better, *in the long run*. My fear right now is that many Angelenos, and Americans in general, only live “in the now” and have a very hard time peering into the future and understanding what our actions today will mean tomorrow. If small villages (per the Gail Goldberg model of planning she created for San Diego) are created throughout our city, then people will (should) no longer have the need to drive 5 miles to a grocery, a cafe, the gym, etc. They would have the opportunity to bike or walk there because those services are just down the street or a few blocks over. Furthermore, if, as our current City Officials hope, neighborhoods become places where mixed incomes live, then more people will be working where they live, and again the need for driving is reduced. In January, I moved from 6 miles away to work to one block. I moved into a place with a co-worker, so we took 2 cars off the road. I bought a bike. I live in Culver City - this neighborhood has EVERYTHING! (the commenter who works here as well can validate that) - and I barely find myself driving at all. If more people had that opportunity and were open enough to changing their lifestyle and understanding the long-term impacts of their decisions, then taking away parking spaces is a non-issue.”

Posted on Friday, August 31, at 10:07 am by Sigafoos

“S.L. Morris sounds like Zahniser now. Since when did my forward-thinking LA Weekly become so repugnantly conservative and West LA centric? It’s embarrassing, actually. Our city is choking on too many opportunties to park and too few opportunities to live, work and recreate. We need less parking and (within walking distance) more services, more amentities, more housing opportunties, more jobs located in the immediate area of where we live, more places to purchase essential services, more public places to spend outdoors. The reason you need to get in your car in the first place is to drive somewhere that is too far to walk. Imagine if instead of having a parking lot twenty feet from your door, you actually had a market located their to buy your groceries. Our open space has been squeezed out to the hills to make room for parking. We work in small cubicles of 25 sq.feet while our cars have 80 to 100 sq. feet of premium real estate to be parked at all day. Many of us are appreciative that we have a civic leadership that is progressive and willing to establish/institutionalize policy that will eventually make for a more sustainable and more livable City. I encourage LA Weekly readers to visit www.parkingdayla.com to see how the other half thinks. Less parking means more parks! Less parking means more opportunities to access just about everything that you otherwise would need to drive to. For all of us out there who are not scared of change, we look forward to a City that becomes more accomodating to people and less accomodating to our machines. Morris’ and Zahniser’s myopic focus on the fact that we have a anemic transit system is misleading. It’s not about the need to get on a bus or a train, it’s about the desire to walk down the block and find what it is you are looking for - a community of people instead of a wall of cars.”

Posted on Friday, August 31, at 11:20 am by W. Wright

“I don’t think the author is realizing the inherent problem with parking. San Francisco’s Planning Department website does a good job of explaining: http://www.sfgov.org/site/planning_index.asp?id=25135 The brief synopsis: 1) It degrades the quality of urban places. 2) It GENERATES traffic. 3) It takes up valuable space. 4) It makes housing less affordable. “No great city is known for its abundant parking supply. If we had to rebuild a place like North Beach (in SF) under today’s parking requirements, as much as a third of the space where people live would be given up for parking. We would lose much of the street life–the shops and cafes, the vendors and the stoops–that make areas like North Beach vibrant and interesting. We don’t build places like these today because we require so much parking. There are plenty of examples of the kinds of buildings our parking requirements result in. We just need to imagine a city composed entirely of these buildings, and ask ourselves if this is the kind of city we want in the future.” I hope this helps to make my point.”

Posted on Friday, August 31, at 4:15 pm by NM

“It’s no wonder LA’s a mess. Los Angelenos like the author of this editorial are completely backwards in approaching city building and transportation planning. Removing parking requirements is “social engineering”? What a birdbrain. Parking requirements ARE social engineering. They subsidize automobile ownership. Do you really think developers are going to not provide ANY parking? Umm.. have you peaked your head outside of that dense layer of brown smog? Most cities that don’t have parking requirements actually have parking maximums because developers choose to provide not just some, but however much parking the public demands. Traditional city planning as we know it has screwed up this city. For once, city planners are taking a step in the right direction by eliminating a huge automobile subsidy.”

Posted on Tuesday, September 4, at 10:57 pm by Jayson

It seems like one of the major qualifications for a career in politics is the ability to seem shocked and surprised at the self evident effects of one’s decisions and by that measure we have some pros here.

“Quite frankly, we aren’t pleased. We need to work more diligently to come up with a design that’s satisfactory to our design experts and the community and the task force,” he said.

Mr. Ford said after yesterday’s task force meeting that he is concerned about the impact the huge block-like garage, with more than 3,800 spaces, could have on views of the city skyline from Mount Washington and the Fort Pitt Bridge.

“We probably have one of the most scenic vistas and gateways into our city in the entire country. I don’t want a garage of that size to be plopped on our landscape to be visible now for the next 50 years. That’s something that is unacceptable,” he said.

“We’ve got world-class facilities over there. We don’t want any of those to be obstructed or detracted from by a 3,000- or 5,000-space parking garage.”

Nothing will speak more eloquently of what Pittsburgher’s think of their city and it’s potential than looking down one this sea of ugly garages and empty holes on some of the cities most valuable land. At least in this case, there is a chance for the casino to not be a tax hole as well. For the record, a Lower Hill location would have been even more damaging.

It’s amazing the attention the town of Youngstown, Ohio has been getting recently, for what seems to me to nothing more than taking a common sense approach to it’s current reality. Pittsburgh never fell as hard as Youngstown, and has an array of assets that bode well for a revival of growth. However, the current situation is that the region is both shrinking in population and consuming more land, infrastructure and resources at the same time. It seems to be politically unable to face change of any kind.

I found what seems to be one of the best laid out essays on Youngstown,few of the others go into as much detail.

“How to implement it is the difficult question. The long-term vision is to target the city’s efforts and resources to bringing back a dense, vibrant urban core and to eventually return some of the emptiest areas of the city to green space. In the short term, it means hard choices. For example, the city used to offer housing rehab grants to low-income residents on a first-come-first-served basis. But now they have decided not to approve them for the most devastated areas, targeting their limited resources to areas where they are more likely to have a bigger effect. For Youngstown and other shrinking cities, these hard choices are putting a new twist on the challenge of balancing the needs of places and people.”

To do that one has to face down decades of government policies that pump in new homes regardless of an areas prospects.”Trying to revitalize a city that has contracted this far can be a daunting task. Joe Schilling, of the National Vacant Property Campaign, recounts how community developers in Cleveland came to see that they were bringing 200 to 300 new housing units on line every year, but losing about 1,000 to foreclosure and abandonment. Property values in the most depopulated areas have often dropped so far that remaining owner-occupants are trapped.”

“In some neighborhoods, you could channel public dollars into those neighborhoods from now into the future and not have the kind of impact you were hoping to see,” says Schwarz. Building new low-income housing in these areas may only serve to trap people in areas of concentrated poverty.”

A big part of the concept has to do with setting aside property for park or other limited uses until actual demand for development shows up.”Youngstown, too, recognizes that it can be generous with its land. It is even looking into offering land to companies that need to create new wetlands to mitigate development elsewhere. “Maybe 10 or 15 years from now, as a neighborhood heals and the land heals, there might be an opportunity to transfer some of this green infrastructure back to housing or neighborhood commercial,” says Schilling.

A lot of this means making very hard choices about providing infrastructure to failed and isolated neighborhoods. History often shows that just trying to to deny that failure is a lot more cruel. Saying for example that, a small number of isolated houses in a fairly remote area will get the same police protection as central, populated places is either a lie or a promise that’s not realistic to keep.

The amazing and sad story in Pittsburgh is that it has policies that destroy development prospects in the core areas of the city like the Lower Hill and North Side and consign them to be little more than parking lots.

Even in the rain, the Flow Fest on Washington’s Landing today was a delight. Sponsored by PA CleanWays of Allegheny County, it’s a free art/music/eco festival celebrating Pittsburgh’s Rivers and it’s going on until 5:00 today. Great music, people to talk to, and hands-on art-making for all ages.

The City Paper printed my rant about the city’s poor record of urban planning. It’s the kind of negative stuff they sort of eat up.

I sort of feel the need to say a few words in the city’s defence. It really has done many things that most American cities have, the problem is that the city’s very small size and geographic limitations have made the effects so fatal. Also, the dark polluted industrial history of the city makes it the least likely place to have developed a pro-urban culture.

So where does your drinking water come from?

As a water main break in Oakland this afternoon disrupted water pressure in parts of Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, and Greenfield, I began thinking about the urban watershed and where my water comes from. According to the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority’s website, there are over 1200 miles of pipe carrying water around the city. I live in Friendship, and I think we’re connected to the Garfield Heights reservoir, but I’m not certain. I’d love to see a color-coded map, showing how the water gets distributed around the city.

[Update - historical context: a map showing the affected areas when the water main broke near the same intersection, seven years ago. I imagine that similar areas are affected this time.]

I got a hold of this fictional report from a future world from a great blog called, I will Shout Youngstown. The rosy picture it paints is sort of possible, if highly unlikely. It should be understood, however that the historic trend in development before the mid twentieth century was generally sustainable, so this would be just a reversion to the norm.

It starts like this.

“Last week, the EPA released its annual data on US greenhouse gas emissions. For the fifth time in a row, they announced a substantial reduction–to levels not seen since the population stood at half its current size. This represents a remarkable turnaround, one that has confounded all predictions of how catastrophic climate change would be averted.

Technology has not been the main solution–most cars still run on internal combustion. Nor have emissions declined because of widespread economic hardship–real median income has never been higher. Instead, the threat of global climate change has been met by an even more powerful force: a seismic shift in the American Dream.”

“Americans began driving less and living closer together. The ideal of a ranch home with a two-car garage and a spacious lawn gave way to something more sociable and intimate. More and more people began settling in places with a strong sense of community, where daily amenities could be found within walking distance. Somehow, the public realm had been elevated over private luxury.

As a result, many cities and towns are virtually unrecognizable compared to their former selves. Houston, to name a widely-cited example, is now served by more track-miles of light rail than lane-miles of highway infrastructure. Once known for its reflective skyscrapers financed by fossil fuel profits, it is now most famous for Discovery Green–a public square in the heart of downtown–and the dozens of smaller public spaces that have cropped up throughout its neighborhoods.”

A bit further on

“Your street network, your public institutions, your retail businesses, your waterfront, your parks and greenways–none of these exist in a vacuum, and they all converge at physical places. So once you change the frame of reference and start thinking about interconnected places instead of separate systems, then you can start shaping cities in ways that very tangibly improve many different aspects of people’s lives. And once you’ve shown people what that looks and feels like, they want more of it; they want to become part of the process.”

“The widespread appeal of this approach to building neighborhoods, towns, and cities is quickly apparent in maps of settlement patterns around the world. The unmistakable trend for the past five years has been the growth of population centers and the decline of spread out development. Not all of these new concentrations are mega-cities. In fact, most are small towns and suburbs that have shifted away from the old sprawling forms and towards something more city-like, where walking and transit are the preferred modes of transportation. You can credit new laws and regulations for bringing this change about, but the truth is it never would have happened if most people didn’t want it to happen.”