During the past 20 years, immigrants and young people have transformed
the demographics of urban America. Now, they’re transforming its politics and
mapping the future of liberalism. Harold Meyerson
Pittsburgh and Seattle faced the crisis by moving left. When will
Sacramento?
Pittsburgh is the perfect urban laboratory,” says Bill Peduto, the city’s
new mayor. “We’re small enough to be able to do things and large enough for
people to take notice.” More than its size, however, it’s Pittsburgh’s new
government—Peduto and the five like-minded progressives who now constitute a
majority on its city council—that is turning the city into a laboratory of
democracy. In his first hundred days as mayor, Peduto has sought funding to
establish universal pre-K education and partnered with a Swedish
sustainable-technology fund to build four major developments with low carbon
footprints and abundant affordable housing. Even before he became mayor, while
still a council member, he steered to passage ordinances that mandated
prevailing wages for employees on any project that received city funding and
required local hiring for the jobs in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ new arena. He
authored the city’s responsible-banking law, which directed government funds to
those banks that lent in poor neighborhoods and away from those that didn’t.
Pittsburgh is a
much cleaner city today than it was when it housed some of the world’s largest
steel mills. But, like postindustrial America generally, it is also a much more
economically divided city. When steel dominated the economy, the companies’
profits and the union’s contracts made Pittsburgh—like Detroit, Cleveland, and
Chicago—a city with a thriving working class. Today, with the mills long gone,
Pittsburgh has what Gabe Morgan, who heads the local union of janitorial and
building maintenance workers, calls an “eds and meds” economy. Carnegie Mellon,
the University of Pittsburgh, and its medical center are among the region’s
largest employers, generating thousands of well-paid professional positions and
a far greater number of low-wage service-sector jobs.
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