It’s around 245 miles by car from the Pittsburgh’s Public Source newsroom in Uptown to Pennsylvania Avenue, but this year it often felt like the White House and Capitol were our noisy rowhouse neighbors.
Executive orders, funding cuts and policy shifts rippled out from the Beltway, met by a countercurrent of lawsuits, protests and eventually a government shutdown.
Perhaps you’d rather not be reminded of the federal government, which is now trusted by just 17% of Americans, per recent polling. So let’s start closer to home — where, now that we think about it, the news was no less heated.
As a forthcoming book will remind us, Pittsburgh was once U.S. Steel’s town. President Donald Trump came by to tell us that the withered descendant of Andrew Carnegie’s empire is now owned by Japan’s Nippon Steel. Less than three months later, we were tragically reminded of both the age of the mills and the perilousness of the metals industry when an explosion killed two workers in Clairton.
Nippon’s new asset and other polluters have to pay higher fees meant to keep Allegheny County’s Air Quality Program aloft.
Record heat this summer cast a spotlight on local climate impacts, with those earth-baking days doing little to ward off downpours and floods seen in Oakdale and elsewhere. A trio of flood-prevention champions warned that our region is underprepared for the increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Local fracking giant EQT entered 2025 confident of favorable federal headwinds as they sought “to compete and win in the global energy arena” while the incoming president chanted “Drill baby drill.” Hopes of reduced federal scrutiny, though, did not translate into a pacified public in New Freeport, where a study tied the company’s fracking operations to water contamination.
Bright spots for the region’s environment include a resurgence in appreciation for North America’s largest native fruit and the related return of a once-decimated butterfly species.
Winning 2025’s prizes for both passion and wonkiness: inclusionary zoning. The concept of compelling developers of new housing to include affordable units gave us an 11-hour Pittsburgh City Planning Commission meeting and other marathons of public participation before ultimately ending in … a promise of another commission meeting.
“IZ” was hot because housing is increasingly pricey, whether you prefer to rent or want to own. Pittsburgh’s legendary homeownership affordability is rapidly fading into myth and among the solutions is — say it isn’t so! — imitating Cleveland.
For now, more of us are unhoused and the crackdown on tent encampments puts the least fortunate between a rock and a hard place.
Perhaps because of proposals like IZ, Mayor Ed Gainey accumulated some important foes, many of whom coalesced around Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor. In May, O’Connor won the Democratic primary over the incumbent mayor. The General Election proved to be a chip shot for the former city councilor and golf coach.
Pittsburghers want a lot of things from their new mayor, and he promptly trotted out his pick for police chief. Gainey’s last spending plan, meanwhile, drew jeers and a tax hike proposal from City Council, and O’Connor can push for revisions in January.
Winning support for a plan to close schools was always a tough ask. But even after the PPS board delayed said plan in March, nearly all primary election candidates — including five incumbents — acknowledged some closures would be needed.
When President Gene Walker narrowly survived a primary challenge from a critic of the plan, the administration may have snatched a breath of relief. By December, though, the chorus of complaints caught the ears of a board majority, who sank the proposal, and with it two years of work.
Now, even a tax hike won’t close the district’s deficit, and it remains unclear when, if and how school leaders will revisit the thorny topic of closures.
Higher up the educational ladder, Oakland didn’t see tent encampments this year, but did see vigorous defenses of campus expression. A Trump visit led to fierce debate over Carnegie Mellon University’s Fence. The University of Pittsburgh maintained that disappearing DEI language was probably just a coincidence, lost in court to Students for Justice in Palestine and argued that employed graduate students didn’t qualify for academic freedom.
As one Pitt prof put it: “I mean, in general, figuring out how to be a great university under the political situations we’re in, with so many pressures from the federal government — it really is a tough time.”
As new research suggested that involuntary mental health commitment often causes harm, Allegheny County contemplated an alternative: assisted outpatient treatment. Though arguably less disruptive than “302s,” AOT raised concerns about racial disparity. The county decided in late December to implement AOT in 2026, pledging safeguards.
Other efforts to address rising behavioral health concerns proved much less divisive. Witness attention to the mental health workforce and the needs of stressed out students. Some of the region’s most vulnerable populations, though, found anxieties mounting as funding spigots turned this way and that.
This year, Public Source created something you could hold — three print zines featuring journalism that feels less like a distant broadcast and more like a long walk or a conversation on your stoop. Each mixes reported stories with visual glimpses of daily life, illustrations of key spots, timelines and data. Among our finds:
- On the North Side, neighbors weigh a community farm and affordable housing, while a high school shows off drama of the best kind.
- In Oakland, long-timers brush up against transient students while all find belonging in third places — the barbershop, the skate park, the community center.
- And in Brookline, Carrick and Overbrook, relatively affordable homes reshape communities strengthened by evolving faith identities.
All three zines include memories of growing up in the neighborhoods and residents discussing what they worry about and what they love.
We can’t avoid D.C. and its reverberations forever. But before we look east, let’s revisit the furthest westerly journey Public Source has taken.
That’s right, we sent two journalists to Western Australia to investigate a unique political agreement that’s made North Shore-based Alcoa a major player in the homelands of the Noongar.
The resulting three-part series weighed competing claims about the company’s land restoration, which a top scientist says threatens total collapse for the world’s only jarrah forest. It looked at towns confronting dust, disturbance and health complaints from the beneath shadow of sprawling refineries. And it examined the agreement between the Pittsburgh company and the Australian state granting access to ore with little regulation for six decades – though it may now be changing.
A deluge of public comments opposing the company’s latest expansion plans aligned with a transpacific trip by Alcoa’s CEO for meetings with stakeholders including Western Australia Premier Roger Cook.
It took about a week after the Jan. 20 inauguration to realize that this time around, Trump would shake even the local news ecosystem in ways unequaled by any recent chief executive — even the first-term Trump.
From January on, the administration’s many policies and the opposition some have generated brought to the Pittsburgh region:
- More immigration arrests
- Fewer international students
- Higher fees on talent from abroad
- Food aid anxieties
- Vaccination hesitation
- Colorful protests and officeholder countermeasures
- Gender-affirming care denials and remarkable reactions
- Artificial intelligence initiatives
- Medicaid and supplemental nutrition program changes
- Withering of green initiatives
- Tariff-driven price increases
- Education and community service funding scrambles
- Research funding shifts
- Disappearing diversity, equity and inclusion language.
It’s been a lot, but we’ve been honored to continue listening, researching, investigating and sharing with this community.
Want to help us to keep it up in 2026? Tell us what you’d like to learn more about in the new year by emailing to info@publicsource.org. And thank you for your readership and support.
Rich Lord is PublicSource’s managing editor and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
Halle Stockton is the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of PublicSource. Contact her at hstockton@publicsource.org.
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