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Unemployment Down, Workforce Shrinks

by Julia Fraser

The temperature may be up, but the unemployment rate in the Pittsburgh region keeps dropping, closing the gap separating it from national rate, which it has long hovered above. Year-over-year, the unemployment rate in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area fell .9 percentage points, from 4.9 percent in July 2017 to 4.0 in July 2018. …

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Region’s Demographics Changing

by Julia Fraser
Southwestern Pennsylvania is starting to look more like the United States as the region’s population becomes more diverse, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates suggest. The demographic shifts are most significant in Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh, where the Asian and Hispanic populations have been on the rise. In the five-year period from …

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Region Adds Jobs

by Julia Fraser
Employers continue to add to their payrolls in southwestern Pennsylvania in May, although there are signs it might be slowing. The region added 12,800 jobs from May 2017 to May 2018—a 1.2 percent increase, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. “There’s been little bit of slowing over the growth rates that have registered …

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Lower Unemployment, Smaller Labor Force

by Julia Fraser
Unemployment fell in southwestern Pennsylvania in April compared to one year earlier, but the region’s labor force continues to shrink. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area decreased from 5.2 percent in April 2017 to 4.3 percent in April 2018, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Within the …

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2017 Was Good For Business

by Julia Fraser
Information technology and robotics lead the region as the most active sectors for business deals and jobs in the Pittsburgh region, according to the 2017 Allegheny Conference on Community Development Business Investment Scorecard. The scorecard is an index which considers the number of new deals in the region, capital investment, and jobs created and retained …

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Population Slips Again

by Julia Fraser
The Pittsburgh region’s population continued to slide in 2017, falling to 2,333,367 people, according to recent population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. It marked the fifth consecutive year population has declined in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area. “The Pittsburgh region is a place that has suffered from a lot of population loss for …

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Tipping the Scales

by Julia Fraser
Southwestern Pennsylvania has the highest percentage of “healthy weight” adults among the Pittsburgh Today benchmark regions, according to 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the most recent available. But here’s the catch: Fewer than 1 in 3 southwestern Pennsylvanians are a healthy weight and more than …

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Developing Young Minds

by Julia Fraser
On May 1, 1969, a western Pennsylvania native with a relatively unknown children’s program testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communication. Public broadcasting faced having its $20 million budget cut in half, and policymakers were skeptical about the educational benefit of children watching television—until Fred Rogers spoke of his year-old show and television’s potential to …

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Air Quality Regulation: A Primer

by Pittsburgh Today Staff
Air quality in the United States is governed by a complex regulatory structure that sets pollution limits and authorizes federal, state and local agencies to enforce them. The regulations which agencies enforce vary with the source of pollution, what they emit and the air quality in the region where they are located. Federal President Richard …

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Mobile Source Pollution

by Mike Wereschagin
Creeping into the Fort Pitt Tunnel, angling for space at the Parkway East’s Grant Street exit, or elbowing into a gap in traffic on the Veterans Bridge, tens of thousands of people drive or ride into and out of Downtown nearly every day. Trailing behind them are the often-invisible exhausts of internal combustion engines. At …

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Air Rules

by Jeffery Fraser
Bluer skies over southwestern Pennsylvania owe a debt to local, state and federal regulations that have evolved over decades to spur technological advancements and investment in controlling air pollutants from industrial plants to the cars we drive. It wasn’t until the City of Pittsburgh adopted its Smoke Control Ordinance in 1941 that the dense smoke …

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Up in the Air: The Final Chapter

by Jeffery Fraser
Air polllution’s place in the history of southwestern Pennsylvania is as prominent as the region’s mighty rivers and the steel industry that once crowded their banks. For nearly a century, it was a defining characteristic in the eyes of visitors, who pulled no punches when describing the grim conditions they found. “In truth, Pittsburg [sic] …

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Cokeless Steel?

by Mike Wereschagin
Power companies aren’t alone in their shift away from coal. Steelmakers, industry groups and the federal government are spending millions looking for a way to make steel without coke, the carbon-rich form of coal used to fuel blast furnaces. Like coal-fired power generation, coke production is a major source of air pollution, and its processing …

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Petrochemical Alley

by Jeffery Fraser
Shell Chemical Appalachia’s petrochemical complex has begun to rise from a dusty Beaver County brownfield that follows a slow bend in the Ohio River near Monaca. It took hefty tax incentives to secure it. The nation’s largest zinc smelter was razed to make room for it. More than 7 million cubic feet of earth were …

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Energy’s Big Shift

by Jeffery Fraser
A decade ago, as Consol Energy’s 150th anniversary drew near, top executives began to take stock in where the company stood as a leading producer of coal and where that path would take it. Coal was in what CEO Nicholas DeIuliis called a “supercycle.” It was the workhorse of the national power grid and less …

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Drilling for Answers

by Julia Fraser
Well pads, compressor stations, diesel truck traffic. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves many moving parts, some of which have the potential to vent pollutants into the air southwestern Pennsylvanians breathe. Fracking doesn’t consist of large, stationary pollution sources, like U.S. Steel’s metallurgical coke plant in Clairton, where emissions are monitored daily, the pollutants they contain …

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The Last Coke Works

by Jeffery Fraser
At the Clairton Public Library in the industrial Monongahela River valley, patrons can check out “Moby Dick,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the adventures of Curious George and any number of Nancy Drew mysteries. They can read issues of Vogue and Popular Science. They can take home the music of Elton John and Rihanna, or the …

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Living Dangerously

by Julia Fraser
Despite the improvement in the region’s air quality in recent years, southwestern Pennsylvania still fails to meet federal health-based standards for various major air pollutants, such as ground-level ozone, sulfur dioxide and fine particulates, known as PM2.5. And that regional pollution elevates risks of cancer, respiratory ailments and other serious health problems. Air pollution increases …

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Does Air Quality Matter to Young Workers?

by Mike Wereschagin
As their due date neared last fall, Ryan Poling and his wife faced a difficult decision. Did they want to raise their daughter in Pittsburgh, the city in which they’ve built a life during the last nine years, or pick up and move across the country, near Poling’s family in California? “It’s really hard to …

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Working Women: Their Numbers Rise but Wages Lag

by Julia Fraser
Deana Keenan’s career unfolds like an inspirational film. As a young woman, she left college to have children. She spent years working low-wage jobs as a single mother until she reached a breaking point when her oldest son was murdered. She picked herself up and sought out job training programs in Pittsburgh, where she found …

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Bridging the Digital Divide

by Julia Fraser
On a Tuesday afternoon in October, a dozen teenagers gathered in a second-floor room at the Carnegie Library in East Liberty. They didn’t come to check out books. They were building a haunted house based on Disney fairy tales. Two 17-year-old sisters, Hope and Honesty LeGrande, cut giant feathered wings for the costume they designed …

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Toxic Chemical Emissions: The Region’s Top 10 Air Polluters

by Mike Wereschagin
Although the region’s air has improved dramatically from the height of Pittsburgh’s industrial past, southwestern Pennsylvania remains home to factories and power plants that release millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency uses Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data to track toxic chemicals released into the air, water and …

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