FIRST PERSON
Noah Theriault on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. Theriault moved to Pittsburgh in 2017. (Photo by Kimberly Rowen/PublicSource)

Not good enough for whom? Pittsburgh is a place worth fighting for

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Compelling personal stories
told by the people living them. Pittsburgh is cheap, but it stinks. Or so says Google engineer Dennis Towne, whose recent PublicSource essay laments the city’s noxious pollution problem and urges tech workers to stay away. So bad is the smell, Towne observes, that he and a number of his colleagues are “transferring” elsewhere, even if it means they can no longer afford to walk to work. My reaction to Towne’s essay was equal parts recognition and outrage.

FIRST PERSON
Dennis Towne (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)

When better isn’t good enough: Why I tell my Google co-workers and industry peers to avoid Pittsburgh

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Editor's note, Jan. 11: Google issued a statement in response to this first-person essay. Compelling personal stories
told by the people living them. In 2017, I was working for Google in the Bay Area of California, lamenting the ever-rising cost of housing, when a co-worker mentioned he was moving to Pittsburgh. I talked it over with my partner, and we did some basic research.

SOCIAL JUSTICE
Patrice Alaquiva takes notes under a tree outside of the Cathedral of Learning (Photo by Jay Manning/PublicSource)

I’m a third-generation Black female living in this Pittsburgh nightmare.

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Compelling personal stories
told by the people living them. When I was 6 years old, I sat cross-legged in my grandmother’s living room. My hands framed my face as I hung onto her every word. She told a story highlighting horrific ways human beings treated each other, and she described juxtaposed realities of the people who lived in the same town. I thought it was the next installment in a series of fables she was telling.

FIRST PERSON

Yes, Pittsburgh; it’s racism.

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Since Tuesday, the airwaves and Twittersphere have been full of Pittsburghers discussing the newly released report entitled, “Pittsburgh’s Inequality across Gender and Race.” After spending the last 10 months getting the most up-to-date, comprehensive data, developing a brand new methodological approach and writing a 96-page report about the current status of Pittsburgh’s gender and race inequality, I am glad radio hosts, TV news anchors, newspaper reporters and city residents are engaging with our findings. Yet, it is simultaneously infuriating to hear these same Pittsburghers attempt to rationalize the observed inequities and claim they are not “racism.”

FIRST PERSON

My preference for buses puzzles some people. But consider the benefits of ditching your car.

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Compelling personal stories
told by the people living them. Each weekday, I wake up in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, take two buses to reach Moon Township and walk about half a mile to get to my workplace. The whole commute takes between 60 and 90 minutes, and it perplexes just about everyone. My parents tried to talk me out of taking the bus; one of my coworkers has called my commute a trek; and, in the early days of this “trek,” my friends often asked me how my commute was going right after or instead of asking, “How are you?”

Why should the way I get to work garner so much attention? Though my parents often bike around my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, they drive when they need to make longer trips.