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Comment by cfallin | Hacker News Reader

> EVERY "up and coming" city [ ... ] Detroit, Baltimore, Philly, Raleigh, New Orleans, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha, Miami [ ... ]

One unique factor about Pittsburgh is its academic presence, in both CS/engineering (Carnegie Mellon) and medical fields (University of Pittsburgh). At least CMU has spawned off a number of research startups, has created a burgeoning robotics community (NREC, etc), and has attracted major tech companies to create offices here: Google, Facebook, Uber, Apple, etc. I'm not sure you could say that about many of the other second-tier cities on your list. Human/intellectual capital is a big part of city momentum.

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Pittsburgh is also dirt cheap; there are entire neighborhoods that are essentially abandoned. You can buy a house in decent structural condition for under $50,000. And it's been so depressed for so long that there's an enormous amount of infrastructure that essentially sits unused. Companies can use that to externalize costs, which makes it very attractive IMO.

I can say the same for Baltimore and Philly. In fact, Pittsburgh is much the same as most cities that used to be the leading innovative areas during the Industrial Revolution and Gilded Age.

Pittsburgh doesn't have the crime / corruption problems (largely the same IMO - you can't expect citizens to follow the law if the politicians don't) that Baltimore and Philly do.

Philly and Baltimore (and Maryland) also have ridiculous taxes. City wage taxes and business revenue (not profit) tax, and relatively high state taxes. You would have to be insane to locate your new business in the city of Philadelphia, for example. The Delaware Valley region is fine, but not the city.

Most of the old northern industrial states and cities are so riddled with taxes and regulations and union corruption it's hard sell to start up a business there. You'd be better off carpet-bagging to business friendly locales.

People are moving in large numbers to Florida and Nevada for sound reasons.

I can equally name a bunch of other cities with similarly well-positioned academic instituions. That doesn't make it unique. For example, look at the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina. Not one, or two, but at least three or four major world-class institutions: Duke, UNC, NC State, Wake Forest, and others. With tons of research and supporting institutions. And a cost of living very comparable to Pittsburgh.

Or how about Philadelphia with Penn, Temple, Drexel, and more? Or Baltimore with Johns Hopkins? And of course, Boston with its concentration of dozens of the top-rated schools in the world (Harvard, MIT, Tufts, BU, BC, and on and on).

So in what way is Pittsburgh unique? It's not -- it's just like many of these former rust-belt cities with world-class institutions and a startup economy that's interesting but not on top.

Boston is in the next tier, I agree, but from a CS perspective, I would take Pittsburgh over Philly, RTP, or Baltimore in a heartbeat. We're the only city outside of SF/NYC/Boston/Seattle to have a top-five CS school and local offices (of nontrivial size, at least in Google's case) for most of the major tech firms.

City-wise, I think many underestimate our post-Rust Belt rebuilding: we're often held up as an example of how to build a new post-manufacturing economy (see e.g. [1], seven years old but still representative, and [2] as well).

I don't think anyone is saying that Pittsburgh is the sole city "on top", as you argue against. I just think it's unfair to knock the city down as another unremarkable steel belt town. It's more than that.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/business/economy/08collaps... [2] http://www.npr.org/2010/12/16/131907405/from-steel-to-tech-p...

It's a factor, but it's not a unique factor. A lot of second-tier cities have elite institutions driving similar growth. Here in St. Louis we have Washington University (and, perhaps more important, its medical school). Unsurprisingly, much of the startup/tech activity here is centered around the school (both geographically and intellectually).

The story is the same in any number of other old U.S. cities.

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