The 'Mayor of Rust'

Another splash of good news from Pittsburgh, where daughter Simone has officially accepted a summer internship as a project manager with Allegheny County Economic Development, the lead economic and residential development agency serving 130 municipalities in western Pennsylvania.

She'll be in the office of Business and Community Development, doing project management in the areas of streetscape design, engineering and construction, vacant lot reclamation and real estate development, in addition to research, analysis and implementation of specific community initiatives in the Borough of Swissvale, a town of about 10,000.

I share in her excitement as she applies much of what she's learned in her first year at Carnegie Mellon to the real world.

Speaking of Carnegie Mellon and economic development, I remember Simone telling me about a recent guest speaker they had there in the school of management and public policy: John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, an old, dying Rust Belt community just 10 miles east of Pittsburgh. (Yes, that's the mayor in the above photo.)

Pittsburgh has won a lot of praise for its economic revitalization efforts in the post-steel era. Braddock, though, continues to suffer mightily. Recently, it too has received some positive press, primarily because of Fetterman, a Harvard-educated guy in biker boots who's championed land-banking and urban agriculture and recruited artists and young creatives in trying to breathe life into his adopted community, a place that's one-tenth the size of its peak population (about 21,000 in 1920) and today has a median household income barely above $18,000.

As a recent piece in the New York Times Sunday Magazine ("Mayor of Rust") makes clear, "Mayor John" has a formidable challenge. Author Sue Halpern caught up with him at last summer's Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

It was four days into the weeklong festival, and Fetterman, a 41-year-old, 6-foot-8 white man with a shaved head, a fibrous black beard and tattoos up one arm and down the other, was presenting a slideshow about how art could bring social change to a town where one-third of its 2,671 residents, a majority of whom are African-American and female, live in poverty. Fetterman projected pictures of old, bustling Braddock, which  steel made until the middle of the 20th century and unmade throughout the rest. Its main street was packed with shoppers, its storefronts filled with wares. Then he turned to Braddock as it is today.

“We’ve lost 90 percent of our population and 90 percent of our buildings,” he said. “Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill. So we took a two-pronged approach. We created the first art gallery in the four-town region, with artists’ studios. We did public art installations. And, I don’t know if you consider it arts, exactly, but I consider growing organic vegetables in the shadow of a steel mill an art, and that has attracted homesteading.”

Fetterman displayed a picture of a furniture store, which the nonprofit he founded bought in 2009 for $15,000, and an abandoned church, which is being turned into a community center, and former building lots that are now green spaces, and an outdoor pizza oven, made with bricks from a demolished building, and a house belonging to two of the homesteaders who have moved to Braddock from “all over the country.”

“They bought this house for $4,300,” Fetterman told the crowd, “and put in a lot of sweat equity, and now it looks like something you’d see in a magazine.”

That glossy intro leads into a sobering discussion of various issues that stand as barriers to a quick turnaround. Not everyone in Braddock is fond of the new mayor and his ideas, and at least some of the criticism seems valid. It's a magazine article, so be prepared for a lengthy piece.

Related reading from the NY Times: "Braddock Journal -- Rock Bottom for  Decades, but Showing Signs of Life." 

Photograph by Gillian Laub for The New York Times