ABSTRACT
Pittsburgh has been in decline for the past fifty years, mainly as a result of a massive loss of jobs. From 1958-1987 manufacturing employment plummeted by 69% (Barrett and Greene, 1993); approximately 100,000 jobs were lost in the 1980s alone (Brokaw and Lahvic, 1992), when the collapse of the already declining steel production industry (the mainstay of the city’s economy) exacerbated the previous employment losses. The city still has a critical need for job creation: The current job market is characterized by high tech and medical jobs at one end of the spectrum, and low-wage dead-end jobs at the other (author’s interview with Dowell and Smith, 1996).
