Most Pittsburgh-area communities are losing residents – here’s why that might be OK

Few city planning concepts are as sacrosanct as the idea that growth is good and decline is bad. For cities and counties, population growth is universally seen as a metric that defines success. Even stable population trends can be cast as stagnation to be avoided at all costs. The Pittsburgh region illustrates the problem with that thinking. Between 2020 and 2025 the city of Pittsburgh added more than 4,500 residents – the highest numerical gain of any municipality in Pennsylvania, and its first sustained growth in roughly 70 years. That’s a success story, if you keep your focus narrowed on Pittsburgh. But that optimistic view falls apart if you zoom out to the eight-county metro area: The region lost nearly 35,000 residents over the same period. Growth concentrated in a few communities is complemented by declines elsewhere. The painful demographic reality is that for an ever-growing number of places in the United States, population growth is slowing. Must that mean the region’s communities are failing to compete for residents and businesses? I’m an economist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of the new book “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation.” My research focuses on how cities adapt…

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