Remember when the Trib reported that the
Marcellus Shale Coalition threatened to boycott business within the city limits of Pittsburgh if they pushed ahead with legislation unsupportive of drilling within the city? Seems to me that since then City Council has pushed ahead much further than they were planning to back then with the proposed ammendment to the city charter on all of this. The boycott must be on don't you think? I mean, if they wanted to boycott the city before, they must really want to now?
Boycott is such a harsh word; makes me think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. To be fair the article says "industry officials said they could take their non-drilling business elsewhere", so it is all hypothetical though still very threat-like.
At least to date, there does not seem to be much impact from a
story today in the PG on local commerical real estate demand. While it gets into some suburban developments, the article focuses on the rapidly tightening Downtown real estate market. The irony is that I suspect many of the new property assessments for commercial property Downtown will actually be decreasing no matter. More some other time on the impact that is likely to have for residential property taxes.
But despite a lot of popular belief to the contrary, the ability of the City of Pittsburgh to attract and retain jobs has almost never been problematic. If you ever hear someone talk about folks taking business out of the city because of (fill in the blank: taxes, politicians, crime, traffic, ???, oh and don't forget the potential of regulations on gas drilling that does not exist), you should call them on it. They may have an anectdotal example for sure, but for every job 'fleeing' the city for some suburban location, some job is being created elsewhere in the city.
I've said this before, but time series of jobs located in the City proper are about as stable as any economic metric in the region, or in any other Northeastern US urban core, over many decades. In 1958, the late Edgar Hoover and his team studying the Pittsburgh economy counted 294,000 jobs located in the city proper and 107,000 in the Golden Triangle specifically. 1958! So well before the collapse of heavy industry in town. Those numbers are virtually identical today which tells me there is a certain limit to how many jobs can efficiently be located in what are some relatively (very) constrained areas. So those jobs 'forced' out of the city are if anything, being forced out by the jobs that want to be located here, or are fairly immediately replaced. Not exactly a bad situation to have and one that has persisted through some very good and very bad economic times for the region.
More recently, and with some more specific data here are the trends in jobs located in the city of Pittsburgh this is what you get:
So there is not more recent data for that, but if you believe the story today the recent trends are as positive as they have been in decades so there is no reason to think the fundamental picture has changed.
If you think the city is retaining lower paying jobs while the 'better' jobs are the ones fleeing to the suburbs you would be wrong again. From the same data as that chart, the average annual income for jobs located in the city proper compared to the remainder of the MSA:
Average Annual Pay | | |
| | | |
| Pgh (City) | Rest of MSA | Ratio |
1991 | $35,119 | $29,122 | 1.21 |
2007 | $47,669 | $35,715 | 1.33 |
It seems that the pay premium for jobs located in the city of Pittsburgh proper is well ahead of where it was 20 years ago. Go figure. Looking at the ratio should get you past any inflation factors which you would think would apply equally to city and suburb within a region. Again, I would just speculate that more recent data is only expanding the divergence of pay at city-proper and suburan jobs within the region.
So I dunno... since I don't see any retraction of the MSC's threat against the city, one might presume they have pushed ahead with their intent to disuade members from business in the city. Maybe the annual
Furrie (Furry) convention makes up for the lost business.