Remaking cities:

...With two-thirds of all housing consumption dollars going to repay the principal and interest on loans, it becomes the only alternative to enable people to obtain housing and make livable communities more than a slogan...

...Advancing this goal in the Mon Valley is a coalition of community and union activists, elected officials, and church people who have formed the Tri-state Conference on Steel (TCS...

...Chester Hartman, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, told a conference workshop that "There is cynicism among many poor people toward the public-private partnership concept because of the performance history of many of those corporate and financial participants...

...He was communications director of the United Steelworkers of America for nearly a decade.rs of America for nearly a decade...

...The valley is post-industrial, with town after town still in aftershock from the shutdown of Western Pennsylvania's steel industry that began in the 1970s and has only hit bottom in the past year...

...The projections of high technology, health care, and finance as the growth sectors for the post-industrial states have proved a new tech bubble: finance is anything but a growth industry since last October's crash...

...An alternative network of non-profit participants must be established in housing," said Hartman, "with government capital grants replacing loans to low- and moderate-income people...

...The excessive profits of land speculators, high-profit contractors, high-interest lenders and brokers contribute to the dilemma of bringing affordable housing to the growing number of Americans reduced to marginal incomes in the so-called rust belt...

...Mary Ann Smith O'Nan summed up a major theme that came to be reiterated throughout the conference...

...Community groups who have been active in efforts to secure and retain some industrial base in the Mon Valley were visibly disappointed...

...It is shuttered mills and storefronts covered with plywood...

...Air travelers who approached Pittsburgh a decade ago would point out the red sky above the Mon, the fires from the blast furnaces and shops lighting up miles along the river...

...With the possibility of enforcing eminent domain, SVA has forced USX to declare its intentions to include a manufacturing sector in any redevelopment of the Homestead site...

...The inevitable cycle of shutdown, disinvestment, and loss of income is coming back to confront directly those who would remake our cities...

...Surprising to some, Prince Charles himself gave credence to the cause of citizen participation in the process of rebuilding...

...Cleaned up, "smoky Pittsburgh" became an attractive center for many of America's corporate headquarters...

...health care has too few well-paying job categories...

...The concept of remaking cities has a wide appeal...

...He made references to "community architecture" and "citizen architecture" which were unsettling to many traditionalists...

...Pittsburgh Plate Glass constructed a glass replica of the Gothic Houses of Parliament...

...Urban planners and regional developers are eager to get on with the post-industrial boom-whatever it might be...

...Steel (now USX, seeking in anonymity to escape its failure) built the largest skyscraper between New York and Chicago...

...Seemingly ignored have been the proposals to bring back some steel and other manufacturing to the region and to rebuild a base of workers with living wages and benefits that characterized the steel industry of the past four decades...

...The Monongahela Valley was the hub of the region's steel industry...

...Citizens must be enfranchised to determine policies and guide plans that affect their local communities...

...Chester Hartman reminded the conference that almost one quarter of the 30 million renting households in the United States spend over half of their disposable income on housing, "an intolerable situation for millions...

...The post-industrial legacy of abandoned mills, slums, polluted rivers, and declining downtowns was only a prelude to the social consequences of unemployment, broken families, suicide, and home loss-plenty of case studies for the conference planners, who declared that "as we move to the twenty-first century, we must have a clear vision of the quality of urban life we seek to build...

...Pittsburgh was a logical selection for an assessment of a large city built through industrial power and money, but which in the past decade has sustained massive assaults on its traditional manufacturing base...

...He noted that some of those players who have been involved in plant shutdowns leading to the destruction of the local tax base and who have fought real tax reform, now want to manipulate the public sector in redeveloping the prime industrial sites they have abandoned...

...Not only that, but Prince Charles was coming as the honorary chairman of the "Remaking Cities Conference" (March 2-5), an event sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and its British counterpart, the Royal Institute of Architects...

...A critic of postwar British architecture, he declared that "the most essential feature of this debate is how to recreate communities...

...It created a nation of stable homeowners and consumers, and sent two generations through college...

...And community groups, born in the War on Poverty and nurtured by the open hostility of the Reagan years, have established their participation turf in the plans to revitalize the rust belt neighborhoods and adjacent mill and factory properties...

...The business and financial establishment of greater Pittsburgh is all for rebuilding, while residents in the depressed neighborhoods wish to improve and even restore their former quality of life...

...The next generation to populate the Mon Valley faces the prospect of not living as well as its parents, and of surviving only with two wage-earners to a family...

...Two decades ago more than 200,000 were employed in the greater Pittsburgh steel and metals industries...

...Ghosts of the depression haunt the downtown business stretches of Homestead, Braddock, and McKeesport, where few businesses have survived...

...We believe," she said, "that a healthy manufacturing base is necessary to generate adequate wages and incomes so that families and communities can thrive...

...The Mon" is the Monongahela River Valley, a stretch of twenty miles snaking southeasterly to where it meets the Ohio River and glass skyscrapers and art deco exteriors of renewed downtown Pittsburgh...

...Will our industrial heritage disappear and our towns and Pittsburgh become the urban equivalent of Appalachia's abandoned coal patches...

...While the realities of a global economy cannot be denied, neither can the fact that America's postwar prosperity grew out of a solid and vigorous industrial base...

...Beyond "community architecture," however, others questioned the process itself of building and rebuilding within the traditional structures of maximizing profits for landowners, lenders, developers, and those who seek to control the partnership between the unhampered private sector and the various levels of government...

...Pittsburgh, in many ways, is a contradiction to the cycle of urban decay attendant to the decline and shutdown of traditional manufacturing industries...

...RUSSELL W. GIBBONS Russell W. Gibbons, a previous Commonweal contributor, is with the Philip Murray Institute of Labor Studies in Pittsburgh...

...The group's president, the Reverend Garrett Dorsey, says that the potential for a revitalized metals industry in the valley exists, but that priorities have so far been misplaced...

...Tri-state and SVA officials contend that Homestead and other facilities could be part of future demands for steel, especially in light of the acknowledged need to rebuild the area's bridge, waterway, and underground utility infrastructure by the turn of the century...

...In advance of the conference and the royal visit, a group of economists, planners, developers, and architects formed a Regional and Urban Design Assistance Team that studied the socio-economic erosion of the Mon Valley and made specific recommendations...

...The expected ballyhoo of the prince's visit provided a public theater that both brought attention to and, in the eyes of many, trivialized the problem in the adjacent Monongahela Valley...

...We want to prevent speculators and developers from coming in and selling off what is left of the mill machinery and tearing down the remaining structures for scrap before all the options are exercised for metals production again," says SVA member Charles McCollester...

...Unemployment centers are virtually the only areas of activity...

...Applauded for holding public hearings and preparing an "action plan," the team found little enthusiasm in the valley for its proposals: an international "garden festival" to be built on the site of the presumed-to-be-demolished Homestead Works, a huge "flea market/trade mart" in a million-square-foot building in McKeesport's National Works, and a trash recycling plant at the Duquesne Works...

...In February, a study commissioned by the county and Pittsburgh had recommended the South Side facilities of LTV Steel as the site for a start-up of existing electric furnaces, which would create 350 jobs...

...Styled an "international forum on urban futures," the conference addressed the reality that according to its sponsors, "the industrial revolution is dying...

...asked Mary Ann Smith O'Nan, a member of the Carnegie Mill Group, an effort to acquire the Homestead Works and retain heavy and light industrial as well as commercial development...

...Mill towns that were prominent in much of the history of the working people and their unions for half a century were social, economic, and political centers of a rich steel worker culture, entwined with the European immigration of the turn of the century...

...and the same goes for high-tech start-ups which involve only small numbers of people...

...There was no projection of how many jobs above those of the minimum-wage service sector would be involved in the proposal...

...The old center city was essentially rebuilt in the 1950s in a marriage between Democratic Mayor David Lawrence and the Mellon family, which led the city's Republican corporate, commercial, and financial power...

...All but three of the United States Steel plants are closed, including the once proud Homestead Works which employed 15,000 during World War II, and which had more than 8,000 employees just eight years ago...

...Homestead, Duquesne, Braddock, Clairton, and McKeesport had huge plants that employed almost 50,000 people in the decade after World War II, the high-water mark of American dominance of the global steel market...

...But remaking cities is an extension of remaking policy...

...Smokestacks are coming down and the global economy is emerging...

...And the "Valley of the Mon," with its desolation following the collapse of steel in the region, has brought diverse forces to the surface which suggest that the old top-down way of regional and inner city redevelopment may not be workable in the twilight of the twentieth century...

...Even while the mills were being shuttered up in the eighties, the downtown maintained its glitter...

...The press corps from the United Kingdom was in Pittsburgh not so much to analyze the social anthropology of the American rust belt as to see what was new in the business of rebuilding cities...

...Today an eerie darkness engulfs the region...

...TCS, however, has succeeded in having a "Metals Retention Study" completed by the city and county, and in establishing a unique Steel Valley Authority (SVA...

...Down the Mon it is quite different...

...Real income, income distribution, and the loss of the wealth that was once created by the manufacturing base that has virtually disappeared was a thread that wove through much of the four-day conference...

...Coal, glass, aluminum, and the corporate infrastructure that made them work were central to Pittsburgh life...

...On a day when the sun bounces off the skyline, it offers onlookers the sensation of a "city on the hill...