University Times

A Pittsburgh City Council member is calling for representatives of the University and Oakland community organizations to join with city officials in developing a new 10-year master plan for Oakland.

Bill Peduto, who represents parts of Oakland, said, “I want to talk about what I call ‘2020 vision.’ Not [as it relates to] eyesight. In about 11 years it will be 2020. We really need to think about what Oakland will be like, and what is it we want to see here. We have the opportunity to start to put into place a new master plan. Not a master plan that’s based on institutions only, but a master plan based on what we want to see in the next 10 years: What are the infrastructure improvements, what are our visions? Let’s go beyond the basic master plan that looks at zoning and other issues, and let’s talk about creating an entirely new, community-based green development for the Oakland neighborhood.”

Peduto was one of several speakers Oct. 23 at the three-hour University Senate plenary session titled “Quality of Life in Oakland: Investments in University and Community Partnerships.”

He was joined by Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, who provided a condensed history of Pitt’s 100 years in Oakland; faculty members Wesley Rohrer and Edward Galloway, co-chairs of the Senate’s community relations committee, which organized the plenary session (see Sept. 11 University Times); leaders of seven Oakland community organizations, who described what their groups do (see story beginning on page 11), and fellow City Council member Bruce Kraus, who also represents parts of Oakland.

Senate President John Baker presided over the plenary session, and Provost James Maher provided concluding remarks that included a word or two of caution to the area’s stakeholders.

The speakers were followed by roundtable discussions where groups of Pitt administrators, faculty, staff and students intermingled with Oakland community representatives and residents to brainstorm on recommendations for Oakland’s future. (See related story this issue.)

Chancellor Mark Nordenberg

The chancellor pointed to the 100-year anniversary of Pitt’s 1908 move from Downtown to Oakland, when it joined landmark institutions already in place — Phipps Conservatory, the Carnegie Institute, Schenley Hotel and St. Paul Cathedral, as well as those that followed soon after: Montefiore Hospital and Soldiers and Sailors Memorial — as the backdrop for the growth of Oakland into the state’s third-busiest commercial center.

“That incredibly rich collection of well-targeted investments dramatically transformed Oakland within a compressed period of time and provided the foundation for the community that exists today,” Nordenberg said.

More recently, new Pitt facilities such as the Petersen Events Center and the Biomedical Science Tower 3, he said, “have afforded new opportunities for education, research and recreation, and also have brought new jobs to our neighborhood, which can be fairly described as the educational, medical and cultural capital of western Pennsylvania.”

Health/education now is this region’s top employment sector and the only sector that has added jobs in each of the last dozen years, Nordenberg noted.

“Over the course of time, Oakland also has become an even more attractive and inviting place,” he said, citing Schenley Plaza, the green gathering space in the heart of Oakland that is the product of an extensive University-community-city partnership.

“An important addition of another type is Pitt’s Public Safety Building, built near the Forbes Avenue gateway to Oakland, which serves as a visible sign of the University’s commitment to the broader community,” Nordenberg said. “Public safety not only in our community but in the broader Oakland community could not be as effectively maintained without a substantial Pitt presence and without close and cooperative working relationships between the University of Pittsburgh police and their City of Pittsburgh counterparts.”

Other examples of successful University-community partnerships, according to the chancellor, include:

• Pitt’s longstanding membership on the Oakland Task Force, a partnership of Oakland institutions, businesses, community groups, public agencies and city government that is focused on improving Oakland and is chaired by Pitt’s vice chancellor for community initiatives, G. Reynolds Clark.

• Pitt’s commitment of $250,000 and in-kind construction project management to support the Hometown Streets project, a collaboration between Pitt, the Oakland Transportation Management Association and the city that is aimed at enhancing pedestrian safety at 11 intersections along Fifth and Forbes avenues.

• “Keep It Clean Oakland,” a partnership between Pitt, the Oakland Planning and Development Corp., the Oakland Community Council and other community stakeholders. “Since 2003 the effort has recruited more than 8,700 volunteers and collected 4,300 bags of litter and debris from Oakland streets,” Nordenberg noted.

• Pitt’s partnership with the city, under Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s administration, in addressing substandard housing issues and code enforcement.

• The University’s commitment to augment on-campus student housing, which has resulted in an increase of 2,000 beds in the last decade.

• The recent establishment of a housing law program, part of Pitt’s Community Economic Development Law Clinic, which now is working with the city to draft up-to-date housing code enforcement legislation.

• Pitt’s new focus on providing better training and counseling to students living off campus.

“These and many other University-community partnerships bring to mind an Irish proverb: ‘It is in the shelter of each other that the people live,’” Nordenberg said. “For a century the people of Pitt and the people of Oakland have been living and working and playing shoulder to shoulder. As we have made more determined efforts to focus on our shared interests and work together, we have begun to accomplish far more than any of us could have done alone. I have no doubt that the existing culture of cooperation will continue to produce mutual benefits for many years to come.”

City Council member Bill Peduto

“Ten years go by so fast,” Peduto said, “and there are so many different potentials that Oakland can be. No neighborhood in the city has as much potential as Oakland, and with it comes our responsibility to create the western Pennsylvania of tomorrow. You should understand we’re standing right now at the very epicenter of the 21st century, not just for Oakland, not just for Pittsburgh, not just for the county, but for all of western Pennsylvania. If this region is going to sustain itself and grow and create a new economy, it’s going to happen right here in Oakland.”

The latest economic projections say that technology spin-offs that result from university-driven research will require 3 million square feet of office space over the next five years, he said. “If we try to put it in all in Oakland, we’ll crush the very thing we’re trying to promote.”

Instead, plans are needed for a fixed-line transit system that expands Oakland’s reach “river to river, into places like Hazelwood and Lawrenceville,” Peduto said.

“We also need to create new models of transportation that make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists who want to live and work here.”

Other agenda items he said that a master plan for 2020 should address include:

• Converting the coal-burning plant in Panther Hollow into a renewable energy facility within 10 years. “We should put the same pressure on other energy companies within western Pennsylvania to start to wean ourselves from coal-burning energy facilities, but let’s make the changes start happening here first,” Peduto said.

• Benchmarking Oakland against successful models, such as Cambridge, Mass., Boulder, Colo., and Burlington, Vt. “Those are places where people want to live, where they want to go to school and where they want to set up their companies afterwards,” Peduto said. “We’ve got to create that same type of living within Oakland. If we look at green facilities as an example of creating not just what other cities have done but well beyond that, we will be able to draw people in. We need to listen to the tech firms and the young people who are starting to create those firms and ask them what it is they need.”

Peduto concluded: “If one thing came out of this forum today, it’s that the community and the institutions would agree in 2009 to create a one-year process to develop a community-driven master plan that reaches far beyond what master plans usually do. And then to hold us — the city, the county, the state, the federal government — accountable to make that plan become reality. Ten years is going to come so very quickly. Let’s prepare for it today.”

City Council member Bruce Kraus

Kraus, who is 10 months into his first term on City Council, said he was surprised to learn of the breadth of programs in place at the Oakland community organizations.

“I’m happy to speak about the initiatives that are being put forward to enhance the quality of life in Oakland and my experiences working with [community organizations], and the initiatives coming out of my office by way of legislation that I hope will complement the efforts of these organizations in reaching their goals,” Kraus said.

In 2007, Kraus noted, the Oakland Task Force adopted “the greening of Oakland” as one of its highest priorities. “Their efforts are working to educate students, faculty and staff of the importance of responsible stewardship of our natural resources and the environmental initiatives that currently are underway in Oakland,” he said. “Those include a comprehensive recycling program, a green building initiative, toxic waste and hazardous material remediation, planting of street trees and community gardens, and the distribution of 10,000 re-usable bags to encourage their use in place of plastic.”

He also praised the Oakland Business Improvement District, which he supports renewing for the next five years, and the graffiti task force. “With assistance from legislation introduced by myself, additional fines and penalties are now in place for offenders that go toward the cost of graffiti abatement,” Kraus said.

The Oakland Planning and Development Corp. provides a mechanism to encourage investment, commercial revitalization and home ownership, as well as assisting in the Keep It Clean Oakland campaign, furniture recycling and the Adopt a Block program, he noted.

He praised the Oakland Community Council for its role in housing code enforcement, and the University for sponsoring the Oct. 18 student-driven Pitt Make a Difference Day, which resulted in finding 156 code violations in Oakland neighborhoods and registering 373 complaints from Oakland residents.

He further lauded the Oakland Transportation Management Association for providing information on parking, traffic, construction and related transportation issues; Community Human Services Corp. for its role in aiding the homeless, and “Peoples Oakland as the regional leader in helping people recovering from persistent mental health and substance abuse problems.

“With the many resources of the Oakland Task Force, the dedication and support of the University of Pittsburgh and the commitment of time and resources of my office, we are on a solid course toward keeping our Oakland neighborhood the home of great medical and educational amenities — truly the crown jewel of Pittsburgh,” Kraus concluded.

Provost James Maher

“I always enjoy making concluding remarks, but maybe never more so than today,” said Maher.

“I like this idea of a 2020 vision. It’s exciting. It gives us the opportunity to have an impact on the quality of our own neighborhood and our own institutions as we go on into what we hope will be a wonderful future. It’s remarkably consonant with all the things the University of Pittsburgh has been trying to do the last dozen or so years in advancing the quality and the impact of the University to the limit of its resources and its talents.”

But in discussing plans, he said, it’s important to remember the limitation of predicting the future. “One of my favorite quotes I heard from Peter Drucker, who was a well-known guru on issues of community and organizational development. He said, ‘You cannot predict the future. But if it’s raining in the Himalayas, the Ganges is going to flood in two weeks,’” Maher said.

“We have to maintain an attitude that we’re ready to deal with whatever the future will bring us. But some things are predictable and they are not really different in kind from what” has been said at the plenary session, he said.

Maher offered three “take-home points” from the forum.

The first involves the issue of transportation, he said. “A remarkable fraction of the opportunities for economic development during the last 10-15 years have grown out of Oakland-based institutions or else major employers who would like to put something in Pittsburgh if they could get it acceptably close to the Oakland-based institutions,” Maher said.

While the place of Oakland as the center of those opportunities is good for both the University and the community, “a lot of our aspirations for Oakland could be threatened if transportation is handled wrong,” he said. “It would be crazy to throw away the area’s main opportunities for economic development. The key has to be: How do we get people in and out of Oakland and that includes for the University, which is operating significant programs in about six buildings down at the river level already. We’ve had a terrible time getting our people back and forth.”

Points No. 2 and 3 work in tandem, Maher said. “None of us knows what’s going to happen in the coming years to the American economy. But the last year and a half haven’t been too encouraging and the last week and a half have been even less encouraging,” he said. “We’re determined, and I hope I can speak for all of us, but certainly the University of Pittsburgh is determined to maintain momentum. We’ve been making a lot of progress and we will continue to make progress through every resource, either economic resource or talent, that we can bring to bear on a problem.”

But even more limited financial resources potentially on the horizon could cripple Pitt’s efforts, he said.

“For the people who are neighbors and our community partners in organizations that we’ve been working with so effectively have to realize that we can be fragile; we can’t do everything. We will be good partners no matter how tough things get. We will try to make Oakland better. But we may have our problems if the economy gets bad.”

Those who work at Pitt should realize that, even in a time of constrained resources, “we cannot allow our commitment to the neighborhood we live in to be downgraded because of this,” Maher said. “It has to stay up there among our other really high priorities as we keep the University moving through what may become a very challenging period of time.”

—Peter Hart