My hometown has the history of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, which was as close to Wilkinsburg’s downtown as Google is to Pittsburgh’s. Wilkinsburg has its own exit off Interstate 376, which transitions to Penn Avenue. The same two-lane bus-only highway that has a stop in East Liberty starts in Wilkinsburg. Closeness to Black and Hispanic communities should be an opportunity for disproportionately White industries looking to develop people of color. The tech industry is important because it makes up the “traded sector” of the economy, which comprises everything traded outside of the region (from raw materials and algorithms to cars and software) as opposed to skills in the non-traded sector that are related to industries that serve local residents (such as schools, construction, and healthcare). Economist Enrico Moretti found that for every high-tech job produced in this era another five is created in non-tradeable, locally serving jobs.18 However close in proximity many neighborhoods are to these booming industries, the evidence shows there are limited career pathways for low-skilled residents—at least for Black people in places like Pittsburgh. Worse, pay for low-skilled laborers may decrease from the presence of the tech industry.
In a 2019 study, researchers Neil Lee and Stephen Clarke found that high-tech industries do, indeed, have a multiplying effect.19 Using data on UK labor markets from 2009 to 2015, they found with each ten new high-tech jobs another seven local, non-tradeable service jobs were produced, six of which go to low-skilled workers. “Yet while low-skilled workers gain from higher employment rates, the jobs are often poorly paid service work, so average wages fall, particularly when increased housing costs are considered.”
Pittsburgh’s tech boom offers a cautionary tale; the median wage of Blacks in the Pittsburgh metro area from 2005 to 2015 dropped by nearly 20 percent while Whites realized an increase of almost 10 percent, according to a 2017 Brookings Institution analysis.20 Being proximate to economic growth isn’t enough.
Wilkinsburg still has potential. The assets it possessed in the past are still there: affordable real estate and ample space. Its library remains, along with parks and other amenities that all residents enjoy. But it hasn’t gotten anywhere near the level of investment Pittsburgh has, outside of organizations that seek to leverage or save aging and vacant real estate. The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation has invested roughly $13 million in Wilkinsburg in recent years.21 There is a small nonprofit business incubator and a project by the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation (WCDC), a nonprofit that promotes revitalization in Wilkinsburg through business and residential development, with the aim of raising $6 million toward its Train Station Restoration Project, the largest restoration project in the municipality.22 Restoring the train station as a retail hub is an attempt to connect the local bus hub (East Busway All Stops) and Penn Avenue, “which together host over 50,000 people every day,” according to the WCDC video.23
People in Pittsburgh will say that folks won’t invest in Wilkinsburg because of the history of violence in the borough. The Larimer Avenue-Wilkinsburg gang, also known as LAW, became one of the most lethal in the entire country around the time I went to college, between 1989 and 1993. Because my home situation was so insecure during those years—a crowded house, an aging matriarch, and a fraying relationship with Mom’s son Hotsy—I found ways to do summer research projects, camps, and short-term jobs in other cities, living with college classmates.
But the streets talked. I’d get messages from my younger brother Dorian about some of my family and peers. David and Jamar Dorsey, whom Mom and Mary used to watch, were swept up by gang life and eventually found guilty of multiple crimes. Between 1993 and 1999, dozens of my former classmates and friends were sent to jail on racketeering, murder, and kidnapping charges. At least sixty of my friends (yes, sixty; I counted) got caught up in the drug game, and dozens of those were killed. Many are just now being released from prison. What seems like a lifetime ago was my hometown’s twenty-five-year rush of violence compounded by economic and social depression.
Just as Wilkinsburg showed a sustained period of relatively low levels of violence between 2010 and 2014 (figure 1-1), as did in the entire city of Pittsburgh, my hometown made national headlines in 2016 for an incident dubbed the “Wilkinsburg massacre.”24 That spring, Cheron Shelton and Robert Thomas opened fire on fifteen people during a backyard party and killed five people and a pregnant woman’s fetus. In response, a local broadcaster and Emmy Award–winning anchor Wendy Bell, of the television station WTAE (located about a quarter of a mile away), offered this commentary on her Facebook page, before any arrest was made: “You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday,” Bell posted.25 “They are young Black men, likely in their teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested.”
WTAE’s parent company Hearst Television fired Bell, saying in a statement that her comments were “inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards.” Bell and Hearst reached a financial settlement, but the deficit thinking inherent in her commentary is shared by others throughout the region, particularly among those involved in economic development. This downward, nihilistic gaze is what educators call “the deficit perspective”—the conscious or unconscious belief that members of a disenfranchised cultural group don’t have the skills to achieve because of their cultural background, or, in plain terms, that they’re not White or middle-class enough.
The deficit thinking inherent in Bell’s mental sketch of the killers is a significant reason why resources that are requisite for economic growth never get to the people who need the boost. The mental sketch of the killer isn’t dissimilar to a description of Black young people who had nothing to do with the murder. In general, investments are made in assets as well as problems in which there is a potential for a positive return; however, they are not made in people who are perceived to be problematic or who aren’t expected to add value—my friends and family in Wilkinsburg.
FIGURE 1-1. DECLINING CRIME IN ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PA. VIOLENT AND PROPERTY CRIME RATE PER 100,000, 2010–2014.
SOURCE: UCR crime data estimates.
Today’s East Liberty would be indistinguishable from Wilkinsburg if no one had thought to invest in the people of Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh, Google, and the assets in that section of town. Economic development has always been chiefly about people—except when it comes to Black people in Black neighborhoods. When it comes to Black people, economic development becomes about investing in inanimate objects, like buildings in which Whites are the assumed beneficiaries. Phrases such as urban development and urban planning are misnomers, because in practice they are mostly real estate deals that aren’t substantively connected to the Black and Hispanic business and homeowners (or potential owners) closest in proximity. As a result, many affordable housing and tax incentive programs in inner cities facilitate White people’s growth and end up displacing Black residents in the long run.
Many of the academic institutions and businesses that regularly receive investments in the Pittsburgh area have no deep ties to Black communities. Consequently, those dollars