Articles Archive - Page 117 of 157 - Pittsburgh Quarterly

It’s a Saturday night in early November. A jazz band plays near a rocket simulator in the Carnegie Science Center where a line snakes toward the bar. People in cocktail attire chat over hors d’oeuvres. It’s not often that city public school teachers are at the center of a gala celebrating their work. But these …

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Regional Annual Report

College Graduates Increase But Region Still Lags

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Earning a high school education is the building block of success. Southwestern Pennsylvanians shine in that regard. Where they come up short is in building on that foundation. And the consequences of not earning a college degree can be significant, local survey data show. Only 7.5 percent of residents aged 25 or older don’t have …

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Regional Annual Report

Badly Needed Reinvestment Expected Soon

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The long-awaited reinvestment in transportation statewide can’t come too soon in southwestern Pennsylvania, where neglected roads and bridges leave no doubt there is plenty of work to be done with the region’s share of the $2.3 billion in state transportation funding approved more than a year ago. The Federal Highway Administration reports that 24.4 percent …

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Regional Annual Report

Low Crime Rates Are a Trademark of the Region

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Crime varies by neighborhood, but southwestern Pennsylvania’s overall crime rate is the envy of Pittsburgh Today benchmark regions. And only Boston has a lower crime rate than the City of Pittsburgh in the ranking of benchmark cities. Crime rates in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area fell across every major category except rape and motor …

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Regional Annual Report

Land Banks Emerge with Hopes of Turning Back the Tide of Vacant Properties

by Jeffery Fraser

They were aware of the problem. How could they not be? The ghostly abandoned houses and weedchoked vacant lots in their municipalities numbered in the thousands. Vacancy, tax delinquency and blight had emerged as widely recognized cancers exclusive to no neighborhood. The crisis even resonated in Harrisburg, where lawmakers were drafting legislation to help fight …

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Regional Annual Report

Slow, Steady Growth is in Line with Tradition

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The region’s housing market is anything but dramatic. It has long been the tortoise in the race: Slow, but reliably steady. Little has changed in a year’s time. Third-quarter 2014 housing prices, for example, rose 4.3 percent over the previous year, a rate slower than seven of the 14 Pittsburgh Today benchmark regions and below …

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Regional Annual Report

In a Fragmented Region, Big Problems Encourage Cooperation

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Few regions have as many disparate local governments as southwestern Pennsylvania. While that is not likely to change soon, recent approaches to several chronic problems suggest an era of cooperation is rising among cities, boroughs and townships that lack the means to solve them on their own. In Allegheny County, nudging some 83 municipalities to …

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Regional Annual Report

As Demand Rises, Food Banks Face the Challenge of Change

by Julia Fraser

No one waiting at North Hills Community Outreach’s food pantry in Hampton wore dirty or tattered clothing. The children playing in the parking lot while their parents lined up for a few bags of groceries attended stable suburban schools. Several of the adults visiting the food pantry that October evening had at least a part-time …

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Regional Annual Report

Allegheny County Health Department Takes a New Approach to Solve Old Problems

by Julia Fraser

Dr. Karen Hacker arrived at the town hall meeting in Turtle Creek to find it crowded with TV news crews. The director of the Allegheny County Health Department had come that October evening to discuss the state of chronic disease in the community, which includes high rates of obesity and heart disease. Reporters came for …

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Regional Annual Report

When Better Is Not Good Enough

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Last spring, the shenango, inc. coke plant on Neville Island was fined $600,000 for 330 air pollution violations and ordered to fix the problems that led to them. It was a familiar pattern in southwestern Pennsylvania in which pollution violations are detected, fines negotiated and fixes ordered—a process that has helped reduce pollution over decades, …

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Regional Annual Report

The 2015 Economic Outlook

by Stuart Hoffman

Southwestern Pennsylvania is in solid economic shape entering 2015. Employment is holding near all-time highs, and the seven-county unemployment rate has fallen to just under 5 percent—with the historic low of 4.1 percent in sight for 2016. But stalled labor force growth since late 2012 should temper excitement regarding the unemployment rate’s descent, as a …

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Regional Annual Report

Population Shifts Again with Aging Baby Boomers

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Southwestern pennsylvania’s demographic landscape is once again changing in profound ways. After decades of slowly recovering from the exodus of young adults in the 1980s, the region is again seeing older adults command a growing share of the population as more baby boomers age. More people moved into the region than left to live elsewhere …

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Special Reports

Pittsburgh Today and Tomorrow 2015

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

The 2015 Pittsburgh Today and Tomorrow report, produced by Pittsburgh Today, analyzes recent data to assess the Pittsburgh region’s standing compared with 14 other regions in 11 categories. Also included are numerous in-depth reports focusing on the most important issues facing Greater Pittsburgh. To view a PDF version of Pittsburgh Today and Tomorrow 2015, click …

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Special Reports

The State of Aging in Allegheny County

by Pittsburgh Today Staff

Older adults are growing in number and influence across the nation. “The State of Aging in Allegheny County” provides a comprehensive analysis of that population in a county long ranked among the oldest in the nation. The report, published by the University of Pittsburgh University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) and Pittsburgh Today, …

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Opinion

Trees and Time

by Douglas Heuck

There is nothing quite like working among trees in the dead of winter. We walk, my sons and I, through the dense forest of white pine. The only sounds are the muted swoosh of the wind and the occasional snap of a twig underfoot on the soft, pine- needle floor. The boys are home for …

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Opinion

Stocks & Pedestal, Winter 2015

by PQ Staff

In mid October, the Carnegie Science Center unveiled an extensive survey of local parents, educators and businesses on their attitudes about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education.Funded by Chevron and Nova Chemicals, the survey revealed that business leaders and educators are well aware of STEM’s importance in meeting Pittsburgh’s future workforce needs and improving …

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Arrivals

McLay, Johnston, King, Maziarz, Gillespie, McGovern, Lau

by PQ Staff

Cameron McLay is Pittsburgh’s chief of police. He comes to Pittsburgh from Madison, Wis., where he served as a leadership development consultant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police after retiring from his career as a captain of the Madison Police. McLay has a master’s degree in organizational leadership from Colorado State University and …

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Profiles

Ted Pappas, Impresario

by Jeff Sewald

How did I find myself in Pittsburgh? That’s a complicated question. I was born in Tampa to Greek immigrant parents, so my first few years were spent in Florida surrounded by a very Greek community. (There are more Greeks there than you might think.) Then we moved to Gary, Ind., where my father worked as …

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Sports

The art of contrition

by Marino Parascenzo

There once was a “golden age” in sport, the glorious time of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey and all the rest. Today, we are in the Mea Culpa Age, in which frolicsome, rich athletes turn to passionate, broad-spectrum apologies, seeking forgiveness for such foibles as juicing, gun-toting, wife-beating and the like. Great penitents such as …

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Books

The road back

by John Allison

Jennifer Matesa, a writer living in Friendship, was a well-dressed, middle-class junkie. She didn’t score from shady dealers in back alleys, though. Her supplier was the pharmaceutical industry. Starting about 10 years ago, this self-described “white soccer mom” got hooked on pain-killers after seeking legitimate treatment for chronic pain. Vulnerable from a family history of …

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Birds

Wintering in Pittsburgh

by David Liebmann

It may be funny to think of Pittsburgh in the same geographic thought as, say, Miami, but for dark-eyed juncos, which spend many months to our north, we’re all sand and sunsets. Juncos “fly south to winter in our north, so making a sort of Florida of our best blizzards,” wrote Robert Francis, disciple of …

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Food & Wine

Bon Bouquet

by Sherrie Flick

As last year’s polar vortex blew in its snow dumps and sub-zero temps, I huddled inside by the wood-burning stove. When the spring thaw came and I ventured out into the crispy, frosted mornings, I was reminded that nothing is forever. My lavender plants were toast, along with the tarragon and sage. I expected the …

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