Joel Kotkin and Bill Steigerwald Go Off on Big-City Pols and Journos

Steigerwald and Kotkin, the gentleman whose anecdotal subscription-only Wall Street Journal column in early August spurred me to verify that “deindustrialization” is indeed a myth a couple of weeks ago, rip into politicians and the journalists who cover them with a vengeance, using Pittsburgh as his backdrop, at the conclusion of this interview:

Q (Steigerwald): You mentioned earlier you were a Pat Brown-Harry Truman Democrat. What’s that?

A (Kotkin): In other words, meat and potatoes; get the job done; that you understand that a Democrat is first and foremost a representative of a middle-class party that has middle class values and is the party of upward mobility and is willing to use the public sector where necessary to lead that charge — that’s why I’m not a Republican. But I find that Republicans at least are willing to be occasionally skeptical about some of these boondoggles, where most Democrats are in some sort of “dogmatic slumber,” as Kant talked about. You can’t say a bad word about light rail – or that maybe a bus rapid transit can get the job done for a third the price, which means the inner-city Pittsburgh person can actually get to a job in the outer areas. Instead we want to build a cute little light-rail line, so that maybe we can convince a couple yuppies to take the train to work for a couple weeks. It’s demented. Meanwhile, then they wonder why people keep moving farther out into the suburbs or other cities. They’ve expended so much money. Take the $1.5 billion they’ve spent in Pittsburgh (for stadiums, etc.) — include your stupid ($450 million) light-rail tunnel under the river. What if you had had a tax reduction for businesses? Or if you had built the best bus and toll way system, so that Pittsburgh became a great place to ship goods in and out of? Or if you built a wonderful park system, so that people would say, “I want to come live in Pittsburgh because they have the best park system”? There are a lot of ways that you could have spent or not spent that money.

Q: Instead what we have are two stadiums, a gigantic convention center that’s empty half of the time or giving away its space and a $450 million light-rail tunnel.

A: I’ll tell you the truth, a lot of the blame comes to the journalists. The journalists never ask the tough questions. They basically follow the scripts that they are given. And also part of the problem, and we’ve talked about this in general about journalism these days, you have got a bunch of young kids who are there for two or three years. They don’t understand what crap this is. To them it’s all, “Well, there’s an art museum downtown. That’ll be good for me.” If there is some “starkitect” -designed building, they say, “Wow, that’s sort of fun for me.” They don’t care.

Q: I’ve always said the newspapers of America should be indicted en masse for having countenanced 50 or 60 years of the destruction of cities. I bet 95 percent of newspapers have applauded and cheered every boondoggle, every urban-renewal project back in(to) the 1950s, every new light-rail project — no matter what it was, newspapers cheered them on.

A: And what happens if you have the temerity to suggest that this may not be the way to go? You’re “anti-city,” you’re “pro-suburbs,” you’re a “neoconservative” — like I’m Dick Cheney or something. You get name-called. And all you’re saying is, “Look, are we sure that what we are putting our money into is really what matters, given the tremendous pressing needs that every city has?”

Cincinnati echoes abound. Perhaps Cleveland too.

Many good points about the nature of and challenges in 21st century manufacturing precede the excerpted rant, so read the whole thing.