Jeffery is Pittsburgh Today's senior editor, a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Pittsburgh Quarterly. In his past life, he was a reporter and editor for newspapers large and small, only one of which is still in business. His magazine and newspaper reporting has won numerous awards.

Efforts So Far Haven’t Worked

Another year has passed in which more southwestern Pennsylvanians moved out of the region than newcomers arrived. The decades-long trend continues to slowly drain people from the region and frustrate ambitions of boosting its population. Southwestern Pennsylvania is a chronic loser in the flow of people between states that offer consistently warmer weather. And the …

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Pittsburgh’s Immigrant Puzzle

Allegheny county’s small population bump from 2010 to 2020 owes much to a spike in the number of immigrants who decided to make it their home. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the 27,000 residents the county added overall. Without the gains in foreign-born residents, southwestern Pennsylvania as a region would have been …

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Shelter from the Storm

Southwestern Pennsylvania boasts many attractions, but its weather usually isn’t one of them. In fact, a longstanding population trend is the annual exodus of residents who choose to resettle in Florida, the Carolinas and other warmer climates. But when Jordan Fischbach moved his family from Los Angeles 11 years ago, it was the climate that …

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Pittsburgh Passport

Even before the pandemic, economic development officials worried the western Pennsylvania labor force was lacking the volume of workers necessary to fuel aspirations of sustained economic growth and increased global competitiveness among the region’s businesses. How to boost the labor force was a tough question to answer. The region’s population had flatlined, having risen only …

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Unlike Pittsburgh, Detroit is Waging an All-Out War Against Blight – AND WINNING

Her city was in trouble when Tammy Daniels joined the Detroit Land Bank Authority in 2015. Detroit’s population had cratered 65 percent from its peak in the 1950s. Well-paying jobs had melted away when the auto industry that defined the city contracted. Foreclosures reached a crisis following the Great Recession. Vacant properties claimed as much …

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Opportunity Awaits, but…

Kendell Pelling knows vacant and blighted property. For more than 15 years he was in charge of land recycling at East Liberty Development, Inc. There, he saw how, even in a real estate market that was heating up, new houses priced to sell couldn’t find a buyer when blight was nearby. But once the abandoned …

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Infrastructure Bonanza

It promises to be a busy couple of years for Vincent Valdes. As the federal government begins to pump $1.2 trillion into the nation’s infrastructure, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission he leads is in the thick of discussions around how to spend the region’s share, which will be counted in hundreds of millions of dollars and …

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Pittsburgh City Council Wants a Year to Look into Annexation

Wilkinsburg residents will have to wait another year to learn whether they’ll get a chance to vote on the future of their borough. Pittsburgh City Council leaders said Wednesday that they won’t approve annexing the boroughthis year. Instead, they pushed the deadline for the decision to 2023 to give them more time toinvestigate the implications …

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Facing Facts and the Future

Another year has begun with uncertainty clouding the future of Wilkinsburg, where residents wait to learn whether their borough, beset with high property taxes, severe population loss and scant prospects for reversing either, will remain independent or be annexed as a new neighborhood of the City of Pittsburgh, its more stable neighbor. Vanessa Buffry sees …

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What the New Mayor Faces

Sophie Masloff became mayor as the city of Pittsburgh was mourning the death of her popular predecessor, Richard Caliguiri. Tom Murphy was elected to the office in 1994, when the city teetered on the brink of financial calamity as the region scrambled to reinvent itself after the collapse of its steel industry. The mayors who …

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Post-Pandemic Education Survey

More than a year after COVID-19 disrupted the education of 115,000 elementary, middle and high school students in Allegheny County, residents are concerned that it has impeded their progress and favor rethinking the way public schools go about teaching them. According to the results of a new survey, schools generally earn passing grades for the …

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Survey: Businesses Can’t Find Workers

Southwestern Pennsylvania businesses are navigating a rough patch in their recovery from the disruptions caused by the COVID pandemic, with many delaying plans for returning to normal operations and most reporting trouble finding workers to fill open positions, a regional survey suggests. The findings reflect problems reported across the U.S. as the Delta variant of …

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Pittsburgh Gets High Marks as a Place for Innovation

Pittsburgh has one of the world’s top emerging startup ecosystems from which companies are born from new ideas, talented innovators and investment in their development, according to a new report. California’s Silicon Valley is still far and away the best ecosystem for startups, followed by London, New York City, Beijing and Boston. But Pittsburgh is …

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The Perfect Antidote

Bob Phillips was in Chile fly fishing with a group of clients in early March of last year. For 10 days, he’d been in places that the news of the world didn’t reach. It wasn’t until he boarded the plane for home that he knew something wasn’t right. “Everyone was wearing masks,” he said. “What’s …

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Virus Still Seen as Threat; Consumer Optimism Slows

Southwestern Pennsylvanians don’t believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is over, but continuing to wear a mask is something fewer and fewer are willing to do, a new survey suggests. Meanwhile, consumer confidence in the local economy dipped in June and optimism among residents about their personal financial situations fell for the first time this year. …

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Pandemic’s Disruptive Path Still Haunts the Unemployed

Fallout from the pandemic is discouraging a significant number of unemployed southwestern Pennsylvanians from looking for work, even as businesses reopen and COVID cases decline, according to a recent survey. Caring for children, dependent older adults and others was the most common reason for not looking for work that was given by unemployed workers who …

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‘I Am What You Make Me’

The American flag has flown on the moon proclaiming the nation that dared to walk on its surface. It was cheered in European cities and towns liberated from Nazi occupation by American soldiers during World War II. And it has been burned in protests against U.S. policy at home and abroad. It’s draped on the …

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Pandemic Population Shifts, Favoring Affordable Places

Stephan Whitaker listened as speculation that COVID-19 might kindle a profound exodus from urban America intensified as the pandemic dragged on. After all, tens of millions of people were forced to work remotely, leaving them less tethered to the workplace than ever before and freer to move. Whitaker, a policy economist at the Federal Reserve …

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Vaccinations, Fewer Cases Brighten COVID Outlook

Last month saw more encouraging signs that southwestern Pennsylvania is turning the corner in the battle to regain normalcy after a year of living under the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 2 of 3 people have been vaccinated against COVID in Allegheny County, one of the highest rates in Pennsylvania, according to state Health Department data. …

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Consumer Confidence Trending up in Region

Confidence in the economy and their personal financial situation is rising among consumers in southwestern Pennsylvania as pandemic restrictions on businesses ease and the COVID vaccine reaches more people. But confidence in the local economy and their own employment outlook remain much lower than before the pandemic, despite the recent surge in optimism, according to …

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Municipal Time Bomb

The fear was real last spring as local taxes—the lifeblood of boroughs, townships and cities—were trickling in. The COVID-19 pandemic was closing or impairing businesses in southwestern Pennsylvania, the state and nation. The U.S. unemployment rate soared to nearly 15 percent. “We worried that our revenues would collapse,” said Scott Andrejchak, the municipal manager of …

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Wanted: More People

Southwestern Pennsylvania staggered into 2020 in need of people, again. It was coming off of yet another year when deaths outnumbered births and the number of newcomers couldn’t keep pace with the number of residents moving somewhere else. The COVID-19 pandemic likely makes the already-long odds of a quick rebound in the region’s population even …

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