A couple interesting articles from City Lab:
First, a round up from Richard Florida of data adjusting job compensation for cost of living:
https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/09...laries/597376/
The high level takeaway is something like this. Unadjusted compensation typically favors the big coastal cities, but then cost of living takes it all back and then some--and as usual, that is mostly a housing cost issue. However, where the "sweet spot" ends up being depends on the type of job and level of compensation.
For high-compensation tech and professional jobs, the sweet spot is more bigger non-coastal cities--so, not surprisingly, Pittsburgh ends up on the list of cities with highest COL-adjusted compensation for tech jobs.
But for lower-compensation jobs, the sweet spot is more much smaller cities than even Pittsburgh--assuming of course you can find the work. So Pittsburgh is NOT on that list--you are talking more places like Huntington WV, or Toledo and Canton in OH.
Thinking about that in terms of things like local development--we definitely have to keep developing both employer and residential space for the higher-income tech and professional fields in order to keep us highly competitive in terms of rents (again, I think this is true for both such employers and their employees). But it is ALSO true that cities even like Pittsburgh are already experiencing a COL crunch for lower-income workers, who are just as necessary for economic growth. And while I doubt it is as bad as in the big coastal cities, nonetheless we also have to be thinking in terms of making it affordable for such workers to live in order to sustain economic development.
Part of that is a wage discussion that is well outside the scope of our topics here. But another part is housing policy, and here I will just repeat the answer is never to try to stop adding more high-income units--both because we need them for the reasons above, and because that actually just means more existing low-cost housing will be converted to high-cost housing anyway. Instead, we need more of both--more high-income and low-income units wherever convenient for commuting to work.
And the third aspect to consider is transportation policy. You can make it easier to provide a lot more high and low income housing convenient to work IF you provide a robust and rapid peak-time transportation system, thereby opening up a lot more land area for that sort of use.
And while if you have kicked around urban planning and transportation circles long enough, you have probably seen most of this before, here is a very nicely presented summary of how what is feasible in terms of urban transportation and therefore urban living has always been a technological question:
https://www.citylab.com/transportati...istory/597055/
I note it ends on a very grim note--the thesis of the article is we have discovered the technological limits of the expressway through hard experience, and new rail (its predecessor) is too expensive, and there are no other technologies on the horizon, so we are now stuck with an increasingly bad situation as we are out of good options. We can only try to densify cites within the existing transportation network's limits. And although this article alone doesn't make this point, you can combine it with the article above to suggest that densification plan may work OK for higher-income workers, but is manifestly failing lower-income workers.
At least as applied to Pittsburgh, though, I am not sure that claim about technological alternatives not being available is correct.
Again, I think at least some use of urban gondolas would help, not least in Pittsburgh where travelling as the crow flies on the surface is frequently not possible. Urban gondolas are not inherently fast--something like 15 MPH is a practical top speed--but using the 30 minute rule in the article, that means you can hope people would travel around 7.5 miles on urban gondolas for a regular commute. And 7.5 miles as the crow flies from Downtown, Oakland, or other central jobs centers could take you pretty far out.
And then there is BRT. BRT is interesting because you can pick and choose when and how much to use on any given route or part of an overall network. So when mixed-use roads and expressways are not typically congested, you don't have to use much or any BRT technology. But when you get to peak-time bottlenecks in the road system, THEN you can use BRT technologies--up to and including Busways--to bypass those bottlenecks and maintain speed.
Buses are fundamentally much faster than gondolas, so in theory this allows for a far, far larger potential service area within the 30 minute limit. But, buses in Pittsburgh can't travel as the crow flies, and further really high end BRT technologies like Busways are way more expensive than gondolas.
But I do think a mix of at least these two technologies could help enormously in Pittsburgh, not least in terms of helping to keep it affordable for workers both higher and lower income, and therefore helping keep it competitive in the current economic era. Fundamentally, the point is really the same in each case--if most of the problem with commuting is peak time congestion on expressways due to their low peak capacity limits and high cost of construction, then the practical solution is to provide alternative means of commuting around those expressway bottlenecks at a far lower cost per additional unit of peak capacity. Gondolas and BRT can do that, and so we should be using them where appropriate to address that problem.
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