Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH
I definitely understand your perspective.
Part of the challenge for me is I do think making Chateau into a neighborhood perceived as cool/valuable would help other nearby areas be perceived as cool/valuable, and all that would be good for a variety of public policy reasons.
But cool/valuable can take a lot of forms, and maybe in my ideal world Chateau's path would look different.
But on the third hand, I am not offering up over half of billion to fund an alternative approach.
We have discussions like this in some form all the time. Which is a good thing, I think. Because I think pushing to get the best local bang for the buck is important. But I also think we need to actually get the investments and reinvestments we need to be a healthy, thriving urban area.
So on the fourth hand--maybe there could be better steering of critical public funds, in ways that can help make private investors more comfortable about taking risks, doing things that would be more unique, doing things that would better leverage our existing history and topography and built environment and so on.
But that is a political question, and across multiple levels of government, and it might take a lot of work to get all those levels reoriented in a way that makes a critical difference.
And yet I would like to believe that reorientation will not only be possible, but inevitable . . . . eventually.
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To me, the biggest failure for Pittsburgh development is how these developers "squat" on giant pieces of land. At this point we've seen it over and over. A company announces some overly ambitious development to "wow the crowd" (blue lagoon? ferris wheel? multiple 20+ story towers?). Then reality hits. It sits there for 5 years while they don't allow anyone to touch any part of it....because
they must protect the grand plan. Then we get an update after year 5. The towers are now down to 1 or 2, and they're in the 5-10 story range. The lagoon is gone. They've dropped the renowned architect and dumbed down the designs. The land sits for another 5 years, untouched. We've now reached a decade with zero movement. You see these projects all over the city: Esplanade, Almono, Hill District, North Shore stadium areas.
There is a better way. You know what the average lifespan of a GOOD creative hospitality, nightlife or arts project is? Probably 5-10 years, and that's if it's a
really good one. And these are projects that wouldn't take a lot of cash to get off the ground in the grand scheme of things. During this 10-year development "crawl", open your spaces and property to creative proposals. Set aside a
small amount of budget to back these ideas. Put these places to work while you continue to work on the larger idea. Some of them will surely fizzle out, but there are probably 1 or 2 jewels that become city institutions. You never know where these things will go. And that's all super low-cost publicity and momentum for the area. Hell, something so amazing might organically grow out of it that they could gain a nationally recognized anchor to their future development by the time they're ready. The best part being that it is a home-grown project, not a national chain they blew time and money trying to lure. Something really unique.
You see this kind of stuff all the time in European cities like Berlin, Amsterdam and even London. But you also see it in the states, too. LA, Denver, a lot of western cities. They give people a runway to test ideas and keep the ones that succeed. The slow pace of Pittsburgh development is well-suited for this, and we have such a large pool of young people here with ideas to tap (but no money). Why the fixation on these giant, top-down development plans? It's not like our economy is exploding like a western boom town. Give Pittsburgh room to be Pittsburgh, get organic things happening quickly, and watch what happens while you figure out your ferris wheel!
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