Prediction: City of Pittsburgh to lose much more population in the next 5 years. (Philadelphia: bus, bars)

[wood_lake]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

I can get symmetrical 1gbps fiber in the city of Pittsburgh for $80 a month. That's a significant help in working from home for me.

I can't get that in exurbs, rural areas, or even most suburbs, because it isn't cost effective to offer it there without massive government subsidies.

It's hard for the new 'work from home' paradigm to drive this supposed wave of emigration to the boondocks (that no statistics show) when it isn't really possible to effectively telework with the sort of 5mbit asymmetrical DSL you can get out there.

You do realize that internet infrastructure is much more robust elsewhere vs. Appalachia right? Small towns, suburbs and exurbs in and around other metros have had fiber ran years ago. Not to mention the rise in municipal fiber. Western PA is not a good representation of the rest of the US when it comes to infrastructure.

[Joe_P]

Urban areas and counties are going to plummet in population. Especially those with stagnant and weaker economies.

Pittsburgh has been forever stuck in a pattern of decline. And as of this response there is no evidence to suggest COVID-19 is temporary.

We don't know yet how the trends will look. The Pittsburgh area mostly already has net losses, but we don't know if WFH will accelerate that. I think that it will be a wash, with the exception of extremely high cost urban centers like the Bay area, Boston, LA, NYC etc. which already was losing people due to housing cost.

Pittsburgh is truly odd with the communities that surround it beyond the standard burbs... countless river and non river industrial towns. This may be a plus or a minus depending on one's thoughts. I believe that it is a minus because it makes the region fragmented and many of these towns are not easily accessible. They will continue to decline.

However, there are older traditional suburbs that are more walkable and include city/town amenities.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by Knepper3

I have 1gbps fiber and not in the city but not far, $80 a month. Many places Verizon has service this is available but not once you get too far. Not saying you don't need it but most people this is way overkill even if working from home w/ video conferencing. 400/400 service would be plenty and even that assumes newish devices (I have one older CPU that Ethernet port is only 100 so doesnt matter if I have anything higher).


Even for me I likely could get away w/out 1gb having 4 people, all connected all separately streaming, and all doing some type of working online but I also sometimes have data heavy GIS work I do that it makes work much easier.

Minimum federally mandated requirement to be called broadband is asymmetrical 25mbps down (no up requirement as far as I know), and a lot of rural areas don't even manage that.

At the beginning of this year I set up a Ubiquiti network at home, which comes with data monitoring, and my wife and I are using in excess of 100gb a month just on working from home, let alone personal streaming and other data needs. I'm not sure when the data was last reset, but right now I'm showing 2.45tb since I last updated the Unifi controller software.

Rural internet isn't going to manage that even with massive government subsidies. It just isn't cost effective to roll out expensive services to sparsely-populated areas.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by wood_lake

You do realize that internet infrastructure is much more robust elsewhere vs. Appalachia right? Small towns, suburbs and exurbs in and around other metros have had fiber ran years ago. Not to mention the rise in municipal fiber. Western PA is not a good representation of the rest of the US when it comes to infrastructure.

I moved here in part to work on a fiber rollout. Comcast (formerly TCI/AT&T broadband) has had a fiber infrastructure in place here since 1999.

Pittsburgh does pretty good when it comes to internet service. Turns out it's pretty cost effective to roll out internet service in a densely-populated area as opposed to, say, Westmoreland County.

Describing Pittsburgh as "Appalachia" is a bit misleading. Get on a bicycle and ride on the Panhandle Trail. You'll hit Appalachia about ten miles out. Pittsburgh is it's own thing.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by Joe_P

We don't know yet how the trends will look. The Pittsburgh area mostly already has net losses, but we don't know if WFH will accelerate that. I think that it will be a wash, with the exception of extremely high cost urban centers like the Bay area, Boston, LA, NYC etc. which already was losing people due to housing cost.

Pittsburgh is truly odd with the communities that surround it beyond the standard burbs... countless river and non river industrial towns. This may be a plus or a minus depending on one's thoughts. I believe that it is a minus because it makes the region fragmented and many of these towns are not easily accessible. They will continue to decline.

However, there are older traditional suburbs that are more walkable and include city/town amenities.

All this talk of everyone moving out to the middle of nowhere reminds me of back a few years ago when suburb boosters on the local forums were saying that the Steelers should consider moving their next stadium to Butler County.

Butler County has 187K people. There isn't enough money there to support a football stadium. The tax base isn't wide enough to fund a public football stadium option. The infrastructure doesn't exist.

This idea that everyone in Pittsburgh and similar cities is going to suddenly move to blighted exurban areas is, in much the same way, a pipe dream.

[wood_lake]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

I moved here in part to work on a fiber rollout. Comcast (formerly TCI/AT&T broadband) has had a fiber infrastructure in place here since 1999.

Pittsburgh does pretty good when it comes to internet service. Turns out it's pretty cost effective to roll out internet service in a densely-populated area as opposed to, say, Westmoreland County.

Describing Pittsburgh as "Appalachia" is a bit misleading. Get on a bicycle and ride on the Panhandle Trail. You'll hit Appalachia about ten miles out. Pittsburgh is it's own thing.

I've always found it odd that Pittsburghers have some aversion to being in Appalachia when by all measures they are in the middle of it. Yet they will take the label of "Paris of Appalachia" with open arms. I've been all over Appalachia and Pittsburgh 100% represents the culture. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by wood_lake

I've always found it odd that Pittsburghers have some aversion to being in Appalachia when by all measures they are in the middle of it. Yet they will take the label of "Paris of Appalachia" with open arms. I've been all over Appalachia and Pittsburgh 100% represents the culture. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

Having grown up in the Philadelphia area, Pittsburgh has way more in common with Philly than it does with Youngstown, Nashville, or Charleston WV.

Cincinnati and Pittsburgh are more similar than either city would like to admit, but Cincinnati really isn't much like the rest of Ohio.

Pittsburgh is it's own thing, in part because despite the loss of steel jobs and deindustrialization we never saw the widespread, absolutely crushing poverty that Appalachia has lived with for a century or more at this point. Old robber baron money kept a lot of social institutions afloat in the bad times.

[szug-bot]

Originally Posted by PghSportsGuy420

Having grown up in the Philadelphia area, Pittsburgh has way more in common with Philly than it does with Youngstown, Nashville, or Charleston WV.

how so? my youngstown experience (through close friends from that small city) is this:

Youngstown friend is irish and italian, catholic household (atypical of a lot of Pgh)
grandmother worked for a GE industrial facility. the town was heavily steel and other heavy industries for decades.
city post-WWII demographics are the same - typical european groups of irish, italians, and german descent, with still not much immigration compared to DC, and other eastern communities, and some majority african american neighborhoods.
Yngs is sort of isolated, as Pgh can be argued to be, while philadelphia is in that megalopolis chain that has since the 1940s stretched from NYC to DC, and now Boston to VA Beach before it trickles out, if it even DOES trickle out, before getting to NC.

i see youngstown as pgh's smaller version, and with a close semblance, despite the quite different topography. no doubt about it.

[Joe_P]

I've always found it odd that Pittsburghers have some aversion to being in Appalachia when by all measures they are in the middle of it.

Because it's disengious to say it. When people say Appalachia, they are not referring to the name of a geography generically, they are referring to a specific culture most often.

Yet they will take the label of "Paris of Appalachia" with open arms.

First, people don't say that.
It's mentioned in media once in a while. it's not some widely embraced thing, ffs.

I've been all over Appalachia and Pittsburgh 100% represents the culture.

LOL.

It's nothing to be ashamed of.

"Ashamed?" It's not even a thing.

[PghSportsGuy420]

Originally Posted by szug-bot

how so? my youngstown experience (through close friends from that small city) is this:

Youngstown friend is irish and italian, catholic household (atypical of a lot of Pgh)
grandmother worked for a GE industrial facility. the town was heavily steel and other heavy industries for decades.
city post-WWII demographics are the same - typical european groups of irish, italians, and german descent, with still not much immigration compared to DC, and other eastern communities, and some majority african american neighborhoods.
Yngs is sort of isolated, as Pgh can be argued to be, while philadelphia is in that megalopolis chain that has since the 1940s stretched from NYC to DC, and now Boston to VA Beach before it trickles out, if it even DOES trickle out, before getting to NC.

i see youngstown as pgh's smaller version, and with a close semblance, despite the quite different topography. no doubt about it.

I'm not concerned with ethnicity and don't think it matters much in 2020 America. Calling a city "Italian" or "Polish" is irrelevant at this point.

City design and layout, density, architecture, and general cultural values between Philly and Pittsburgh are very similar. Housing stock in the city itself is similar. Lots of cultural institutions. The cities just have a very similar feel on the ground.

When I visit Philadelphia I stay in Center City and get around via the Broad Street Line or Uber. Central North Side and Uptown are both very reminiscent of Philly's residential neighborhoods. Philadelphia's central core is very compact and encourages walking.

I very much like that Philadelphia's center city streets are narrow and discourage driving. We could use more of that here.