This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Series Index:
Part 5: The Hill District, Continued
The entry on the Lower Hill from a couple weeks ago was really more of an appetizer than a main course, since the area discussed hasn't been a developed neighborhood since the early 1950s. Today, we'll move into the Hill District proper, discussing the neighborhoods officially designated as Crawford-Roberts and Middle Hill, which make up the bulk of the old Hill District. In future installments we'll look at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village, two project neighborhoods that merit their own discussion, and Uptown, The Upper Hill (Sugar Top), and Polish Hill, three very different neighborhoods that are on the periphery of the Hill District but are nonetheless historically bound to it.
As we discussed last time, much of the Lower Hill was razed in the 1950s for an urban renewal project that never fully came to fruition. Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus name city planners gave to the rump section of the Lower Hill that wasn't demolished wholesale. In the section on Downtown I mentioned that Pittsburgh came out of the Second World War with a serious image problem, and was desperate to shed its image as a smog-choked industrial town. Adding to the problem was that one of the poorest, most run-down and overcrowded parts of the city immediately abutted downtown to the east. When Federal money for slum clearance became available in the 1940s, the city moved forward with plans to build a civic auditorium, arts center, symphony hall, lots of tower in the park housing, and other amenities like hotels and restaurants.
In the end, it stopped with a single apartment tower and the civic auditorium, which lasted for nearly 50 years but was only briefly used for its intended purpose. The rest of the old neighborhood became a sea of parking lots. The Hill District was Pittsburgh's original dumping ground for blacks, Jews, Italians, and other undesirables, who initially settled in the Lower Hill close to Downtown, but gradually moved up the hill as they became more prosperous. By the 1950s, the Lower Hill was the poorest section but also the most racially diverse. The Middle and Upper parts of the Hill were blacker but also more prosperous—the Middle Hill was 80%–90% black by 1940, but was inhabited by industrial workers and others with steady employment. Beyond that was the small community of black professionals on Sugar Top.
During the Lower Hill redevelopment process, the black community in the Middle and Upper Hill was reasonably supportive of the Urban Redevelopment Authority' goals. There as hope that the demolition of a disreputable area would strengthen the link between the Middle Hill and Downtown, and the poorest of the poor would be moved out of overcrowded, unsanitary, dilapidated housing and into gleaming new apartment houses. That they were overoptimistic at best or naïve at worst became apparent shortly after the wrecking balls started swinging in 1956. Changes in Federal housing policy meant that the new projects had not materialized, and displaced residents found themselves with nowhere to go. The Italians went in one direction, the Jews in another, and the blacks went wherever they could. Some went to Homewood or Beltzhoover or other far-flung parts of the city, but the majority just moved deeper into the Hill District.
By the time the Civic Arena was completed in 1961, housing policy was the least of the reasons Middle Hill residents had for concern. While they may have hoped that the redevelopment of the Lower Hill would lead to a revitalization of the Middle Hill, the city fathers didn't see it that way. To them, the Middle Hill was no less a slum than the Lower Hill, and it didn't help that it was increasingly occupied by the same undesirables they had just kicked out. It turned out that selling modern luxury apartments on the edge of a black area was a tough sell to wealthy whites in the 1960s, and the benefactors of the arts didn't want to soil their shoes walking through a neighborhood that, to them, was as much of a slum as it had been years before. The center for the arts, which was to be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York and include a symphony hall, repertory theater, restaurant, exposition hall, apartment building, huge underground parking garage, and maybe even a modern art museum, was the centerpiece of the next phase of development, but the financial backers, particularly the H.J. Heinz Foundation, thought it illogical to pay huge sums for a cultural acropolis without eliminating the neighboring blight. They made it clear to the city that no more money would be forthcoming unless another 50 blocks were cleared east of Crawford St.
The city, apparently realizing that the calls for additional demolition weren't going to stop, did the private backers one better. They responded with a plan to clear an unspecified plot of land for a public park, built a wall along the western side of Crawford St. to protect cultural center patrons from disagreeable views, and build new residential high rises that would obscure the rest of the Hill and cut it off from the redeveloped area. By 1963 the total redevelopment area had expanded to 900 acres, practically the entire Hill District. While publications from the Planning Commission and URA spoke in lofty terms about the need for citizen input and community engagement, the ideas were not presented as proposals but as done deals, even though this was far from the truth. The city seemed bound and determined to clear out an inconvenient neighborhood and have a clear, glistening new corridor between Downtown and Oakland. Whatever revitalization Hill residents had hoped to see ten years earlier was now a distant memory, and they were effectively being told that revitalization was contingent on their leaving. Urban Renewal had become Negro Removal.
The community, previously supportive of redevelopment efforts, turned hard against any further encroachments on the neighborhood, and vowed to hold the line at Crawford St. As the URA sought to make the proposals official, neighborhood residents erected a billboard at the corner of Crawford St. and Center Ave. which read "Attention: City Hall and the URA, No Redevelopment Beyond This Point." From this intersection, renamed Freedom Corner, Hill district residents marched downtown despite death threats from white Pittsburghers and demanded that redevelopment stop — "Not another inch!" This sentiment wasn't limited to the Hill District; by 1965 opposition had galvanized among residents of neighborhoods throughout the city that were the subject of proposed renewal projects. But while the city may have treated these proposals as inevitabilities, the specifics presented were always vague. There were rumors, general recommendations, and the occasional artist's rendering, but these were all theoretical in nature; there was nothing close to any concrete plans or drawings for the Hill District. Despite residents' fears, any redevelopment beyond Crawford Ave. was at the bottom of a long list of projects already in the hopper. As community opposition grew, the city, while stil formally recommending slum clearance, admitted, in an apparent attempt to relieve the pressure, that the plans would take decades to realize.
One can date the end of the Pittsburgh Renaissance not just to the decade, or the year, but to the minute. At 10:30 pm on May 20, 1969, councilman and mayoral candidate Pete Flaherty was having a spaghetti dinner with his wife and two sons when he received a telephone call from his campaign headquarters that his opponent, Judge Harry Kramer, had conceded the nomination. Since the Democratic party had taken over city government in 1934, machine politics, or "The Organization", as it was called, had dominated. Flaherty won a council seat in 1965 and quickly became the heir apparent but increasingly found himself at odds with the administration. In early 1969, before incumbent mayor Joseph Barr decided whether he'd be seeking a third term, Flaherty announced he was entering the race. The Organization was stunned; if Barr retired and Flaherty kept his mouth shut, he could have had the nomination handed to him on a silver platter, but he wanted to earn it instead. More importantly, he felt reform was needed and couldn't make a credible case for it as a machine selection. With Barr deciding he was done and Flaherty turning coat, The Organization tapped Judge Kramer, convincing him to resign a cushy seat on the Probate bench for what should have been a guaranteed position as mayor.
But while Kramer's commitment to public service was honorable, his political skills left much to be desired. He had no response to Flaherty when it came to policy and resorted to incoherent personal attacks that accused him of being a far left kook on the one hand and a "Republocrat" on the other. More importantly, the city employees and councilmen who constituted The Organization's rank and file took Flaherty's concerns to heart and broke ranks. Still, Kramer's loss came as a shock. The organization that had seen the city through the Depression and World War II, and that had transformed it smog-choked backwater to one of the most beautiful places in the nation was done. The remaining loyalists were forced to back Flaherty in the general election, as any Republican would allow governor Raymond Shafer to run wild in the city. While Flaherty would see to completion the projects that were already construction, no new proposals would be forthcoming, and any existing ones would die a quiet death. To him, these were nothing more than expensive boondoggles, and he'd focus his administration on unsexy things like paving, street lighting, fiscal responsibility, and labor agreements. The era of machine politics in Pittsburgh was over.
For the Hill, though, it was too little too late. While the Middle Hill's Center Ave. business district was unaffected by urban renewal, it would not survive the riots that erupted in the wake of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. While these affected several city neighborhoods, the Hill District was the hardest hit. What was left of the Lower Hill continued to deteriorate following the initial demolition, as the promised revival never came. Without a functional business district, and with little hope of rebuilding Center Ave., the remaining black middle class decamped for elsewhere, and the neighborhood slowly began to empty. While narcotics had been an increasing problem since the early 1960s, the arrival of the crack epidemic in the 1980s brought gang warfare at a scale never before seen. The population of the Hill District, which sat at over 50,000 in 1950, had been reduced to only 15,000 by 1990. For all of the Hill's problems, overcrowding was no longer one of them.
5B. Crawford-Roberts
Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus neighborhood designation that nobody uses in real life, but it warrants separate treatment here as it comprises the rump portion of the old Lower Hill that was spared demolition. Aerial photographs show that it was starting to suffer from demolition by 1967, and by 1993 it was almost completely vacant. Suburban style split-level houses were built in the 1970s in an attempt to retain middle class residents. While this had some degree of success—these are all owned by long-time residents, many original owners—they are incongruous in an urban neighborhood close to a major downtown. While they thankfully aren't building these anymore, what's been going in instead hasn't been much better. In the late 1980s, the URA began an early New Urbanist project called Crawford Square that sought to redevelop what had been lost to blight. It was touted as a "contextualist" development that was meant to blend in with the historic character of the neighborhood. Compromises were made to "reflect the reality of the automobile", and there was no apparent attempt to obtain any variance from contemporary zoning codes. The topography made it difficult to build alleys in some places, so the result was old-style houses with front loading garages and deep setbacks. It isn't horrible, but it stands in stark contrast with the historic structures that remain. The townhomes at the heart of the development have an [antiseptic feel] that evokes a senior living community more than an urban neighborhood; I call it "soft urbanism" because it tries to conform to the large-scale descriptors of urbanism—density, traditional styles, etc.—without actually bothering to see what the existing built form actually looks like. Luckily, the more recent developments do a much better job.
One thing that has been successful is the crime reduction. The first phase of Crawford Square was finished in 1993, and in the decades since the area went from being one of the most dangerous parts of the Hill to one of the safest. This is despite half of the rentals being subsidized "affordable" units, though it should be mentioned that even the for-sale units and new single family homes are also subsidized, but in a different way—the city offers ten year property tax abatements on new construction homes in designated redevelopment areas, giving middle class people financial incentive to buy in the hood and in turn giving developers incentive to build there. For all the outward success, though, this has been an incredibly slow process. While the development was officially completed in 2000, it was only in the past few years that the URA was finally able to unload the last 6 parcels in the development area. So while the Lower Hill has been showing signs of life, the pace of construction isn't exactly frenetic, and what has been built has required significant government nudging.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. 15 years ago you could have made the argument that this was gentrifying, but that was merely in anticipation of development at the old arena site. Two things hold it back. First, the built form isn't particularly appealing. It wasn't originally designed to be trendy to outsiders but to retain middle class blacks who would otherwise leave the neighborhood; hence the concessions to the suburban lifestyle and aesthetic that is anathema to any self-respecting urban pioneer. More importantly, the old Wylie Ave. business district that was destroyed in the 1950s is still vacant, and the Center Ave. business district in the neighboring Middle Hill isn't doing too hot. Beyond that, there aren't any walkable amenities. If the arena site development ever comes to fruition and is able to attract sufficient ground-level retail, this could change, but I don't see this becoming a trendy area any time soon.
5C. Middle Hill
This was the heart of the old Hill District and remains the heart of the current Hill District. The boundary between the Lower and Middle Hill was always indistinct, but the Middle Hill starts around the beginning of the Center Ave. business district and includes everything up to Herron Ave. that isn't part of a housing project. See map. If the Crawford-Roberts area is the part of the hill that the city wants you to see, then the Middle Hill is the part it doesn’t want you to see. There is a significant amount of neglect, abandonment, and, ultimately, demolition. There are plenty of historic structures scattered throughout the neighborhood, and occasionally enough remains intact to give you an idea of what the neighborhood looked like in its heyday. There are also a couple of weird suburban enclaves like Midtown Square and Francis Court that have held up well. But this part of the Hill is mostly vacant lots, with some streets only having a single, vacant structure remaining. Keeping in mind that the Hill once had a population density of over 80,000 people per square mile, comparable to the denser parts of Brooklyn, this is an odd, sad fate. While most of Wylie and Center avenues are technically zoned commercial, there is often not enough left to tell where the business district even was, though there are plenty of businesses scattered throughout the neighborhood. While the Lower Hill is more celebrated, the Middle Hill was always more the center of black life in Pittsburgh. The fame of the Lower Hill comes primarily from its notoriety as a rowdy nightlife district, where too many jazz greats to list cut their teeth and many more played when visiting. But it was the Middle Hill where residents went to take care of the boring, functional, everyday things. While displacement of low-income residents is the big issue that’s always brought up when discussing gentrification, I suspect that a large part of the issue is also that gentrified business districts tend to cater to the kind of chi-chi things that primarily appeal to rich white people. There's some cultural signaling involved here; when the first businesses that move into a moribund area are microbreweries and art galleries, but nothing that appeals to the immediate needs of existing residents, it doesn't help them in the short term and signals to landlords that it's time to start renovating their properties and raising rents. There's some level of understanding that these kinds of things are necessary to attract business from outside the neighborhood, but they'd prefer that to happen after the business district can satisfy their basic needs.
Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Hill's decades-long grocery store issue. In the 1970s, part of the attempt to stabilize the Hill by suburbanizing it was the construction of an auto-oriented shopping plaza, anchored by a grocery store. That store was gone by the mid-80s, as the Hill continued its decline. The lack of a grocery store rose to political prominence as the plans for a new arena were coming to fruition. For all the grand redevelopment plans being discussed, Hill groups just wanted a grocery store on the site, or, barring that, anywhere else in the Hill. Most white Pittsburghers saw this as nothing more than whining, to the extent they paid attention to it at all. There was no grocery store because the Hill can't support one, and we aren't spending tax dollars to prop up an unprofitable business just so you have a shorter bus ride.
Hill House was a community organization that had existed since the 1960s to provide after school programs, music lessons, and the like to Hill residents, as well as general community activism. Changes to the nonprofit landscape had them scrambling for program funding by the 2000s. In 2008, with the Civic Arena on the demolition block and redevelopment talks in the works, the Penguins and the URA signed a community benefit agreement that included several groups, with Hill House named as fiduciary representative for the community. The deal included 1 million dollars to put toward a grocery store. They found a tenant, secured the property, and began construction in 2011.
Things went sideways almost immediately. The contractor didn't post a bond. Architectural plans proved unworkable, necessitating a last-minute redesign. Overages abounded. Hill House took out massive loans to cover fundraising shortages. Nonetheless, a Shop-n-Save opened in 2013 to much fanfare. It wouldn't last the decade. For background, Shop-n-Save is a regional chain that is more or less the marketing arm of wholesale distributor SuperValu, the stores themselves being independently owned. This is in contrast to Giant Eagle, the regional flagship, that owns the vast majority of its stores outright. Giant Eagle is perceived as overpriced by most people in Pittsburgh. Anyway, the local NPR affiliate ran a story about a year after opening that said the store was doing about $25,000/week in total sales. By contrast, a typical suburban Aldi does about $350,000/week despite a smaller footprint and lower prices. Initial projections were dependent on the redevelopment of the old arena site, and, as we saw last time, we're still waiting for this to happen.
The bigger problem was theft. It's expected that a store in a low-income location is going to have an above-average amount of shrinkage. It's not expected that the manager of the store will be responsible for most of that shrinkage. The guy was taking cases of product before it could even go on the shelves and selling it himself. Able to read the room, store employees followed suit, loading up after a shift and heading to the bars and street corners where they'd unload it at a discount to passersby. Given the general vibe of the place, there was no motivation among employees or management to prevent customers from doing the same thing; the store was a block away from a police station, the police assured the owners that they were committed to preventing theft, but no one ever bothered to report anything. Combine the theft with a small, low-income customer base and it was bound to fail.
When the Shop-n-save closed in 2019, it took Hill House down with it. The store debacle was far from their only problem, but the rent couldn't cover ongoing building maintenance. In a supreme twist of irony, the final straw came when the URA cut off their line of credit. Hill House had been borrowing money to cover maintenance costs, but the URA said that enough was enough. Hill House was able to avoid bankruptcy, but only by selling off real estate as a prelude to dissolution. Without an anchor tenant, however, they couldn't find a buyer for the shopping complex, and the URA was forced to assume ownership.
The failure of the Shop-n-Save didn't end the Hill District's bid to get a grocery store. The URA was desperate to unsaddle itself from the building maintenance, and offered 1.5 million in incentives for anyone who wanted the property, provided they had a plan for a grocery store. Four prospective bidders came forward, and the winner was Salem Abdullah, the owner of a successful Halal grocer in the Strip District. Salem's was popular but had outgrown its location. The crux of the plan seems to have been twofold. First, a destination store with an established customer base would make it so he wasn't relying on Hill residents alone to make ends meet. Second, the larger location would allow him to expand his core operations while also expanding into a full-service store. No one doubted his dedication to the project, as he sunk 5 million of his own money into it on top of what the URA gave him.
Last week, he announced that the store would suspend operations indefinitely. But this time, attitudes range from indifference to good riddance. The entire reason Hill District residence wanted a grocery store so badly was because they didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of going elsewhere to shop, and since they're a low-income community, the store would have to have competitive prices that allowed them to stretch their dollar. Salem's did neither. To the first point, although it was ostensibly a full-service grocery store, an observant Muslim isn't allowed to sell anything that isn't Halal. The lack of pork products should have been a showstopper in and of itself, but few realized how far this went. Canned soups, boxed stuffing mixes, ramen noodles, pop tarts, broth, gravy mix, wine vinegar of any kind, corn bread—and the list goes on. Other items beyond his normal scope of operations were limited and inconsistent. The produce selection was about half of a normal grocery and frequently was out of key items like apples and cantaloupe, white bread sold out quickly and was slow to be replaced, and deli selection was limited. There was no tobacco, lottery, or money orders.
In short, it was a larger version of his specialty store in the Strip with a limited selection of grocery items and a limited deli. And since he didn't have the buying power of a chain, he was effectively paying retail for everything. If people have to go to another store to get produce, or pork, or whatever, they're going to do all of their shopping at the other store. If the other store also has significantly better prices, you can't compete, period. If it's both more economical and more convenient to pay a jitney ten bucks to take you to the South Side Giant Eagle, that's what people are going to do, especially if that's what they've been doing for the past 30 years.
I don't think that Salem Abdullah is a bad dude or that this was some kind of URA cash grab boondoggle. The 1.5 million he got was mostly loans, and he put another 5.5 million of his own money into the project. His idea was bad, but it was the only one on the table that was remotely feasible. There were three other bids. Two were from idealistic groups with visions of saving the community from food desertdom by offering high-quality, healthy options. These were discarded pretty easily, since neither group had any experience running a grocery store and came across as disorganized. The other bid was from a national chain of Asian markets, who put the bid in at the last minute and didn't bother to clarify that they sold non-Asian items. Salem's was local and had the money. He just completely misread the needs of the community.
Neighborhood Grade: Ghetto. Between the urban prairie and fragmented remnants of what was once a huge business district, the area is bleak. Crime is still high, though the gang warfare is over and most of this is spillover from nearby housing projects. But the stigma is still there, and any new business has a hard time attracting customers from outside the neighborhood. Pittsburgh's ghettos are more "have street smarts and avoid known drug areas" than "make a beeline for the highway and don't stop at any red lights". It also has a prime position between downtown and the University of Pittsburgh that's had city planners salivating for decades.
That being said, there are a few factors weighing against a turnaround happening any time soon. First, the city and the URA have officially committed to developing the Hill District from "the bottom up". So far, that's meant that development has been focused on the Crawford-Roberts area and whatever the hell they're doing at the old arena site. There's been some limited development in the Middle Hill—a YMCA on Center Ave., townhomes and a senior living complex on Wylie, a few single family homes, and a new library. All this development, though, has been limited to the western third of the neighborhood. It seems highly unlikely that it will extend beyond Kirkpatrick St. in the foreseeable future, let alone fill out the neighborhood.
Adding to the problem is that the centrality of its location is deceiving. On a street map, it appears to be in the middle of everything. But it's hard to actually get to unless you're really trying. Access from Downtown is hindered by I-579 and the gaping maw that is the old arena site. The northern edge of the neighborhood is a steep hillside with no road access even possible. The only direct access to Oakland is via Center Ave., which dives into a valley somewhat apart from the main neighborhood before going up over another hill, and even then it only spits you out into an odd corner of Oakland far from the Pitt campus and main business district. Access is somewhat better from the south, but that's only by turning off of 5th or Forbes Ave. in Uptown, which is a peripheral part of the Hill with its own business district that already acts as the main thoroughfare between the two neighborhoods. And, as we shall see in a few weeks, even it has a ways to go.
And then there's the red tape. A disproportionate share of the available land is owned by the URA or the city, which means that any developer has to go through them and by extension Marimba Milliones her ilk who will insist that you provide affordable housing guarantees on the one hand but tell you they don't want a housing project on the other. What's their actual vision for the future? Based on the reports they've commissioned in the past 15 years, it's mostly a pie in the sky vision of a diverse yet African-American-centered community full of improbable businesses like an African Diaspora Food Hall, an automotive shop that gets cheap rent in exchange for motorcycle repair classes, a pop-up mini golf course, a late night music venue that looks like an unsanctioned rave even though it isn't—you know, the kind of stuff that attracts rich white people but isn't too obvious about it.
I don't think this is going to happen. What I think will happen is one of two things. The most likely scenario is that the URA's slow but steady march continues and the neighborhood continues to be a lower-income black area with newer housing and new storefronts that can't find commercial tenants. There's also the possibility that the gentrification wave slowly percolating in Uptown shoots up the hillside faster than anyone's ability to control it. I guess a third possibility is that the neighborhood eventually empties out so completely that there's no base of political power left and the URA gives developers a blank check, but I wouldn't count on that happening. The best case scenario is that Center Ave. turns into something akin to the U Street Corridor in Washington DC. I think things will eventually turn around, but I wouldn't venture a guess as to when that will happen. The only question is whether, when that day arrives, anything of the old neighborhood will be left standing.
More options
Context Copy link