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A couple months ago I spoke with a friend who is a city planner for a top firm and earned his master's from [one of] the top planning schools in the country. He

A couple months ago I spoke with a friend who is a city planner for a top firm and earned his master's from [one of] the top planning schools in the country. He knows some people involved with this project, and apparently those in charge decided to just wing it rather than hire a professional planning firm. Imagine all of the data you must consider when trying to develop a decent-sized city not only for today, but for 30 years into the future. It's a tremendous undertaking and to just skip out on planning sounded to me like it was a significant contributing factor to the demise of this urban renewal. creating a tech hub that could drive the economy, much in the same way startups are now thriving in places such as Pittsburgh This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. Do you want to program in Java and C++ in a cubicle? That's the nature of Pittsburgh's "tech hub." Pittsburgh's economy is driven by education, medicine, banking, steel/glass/aluminum/natgas. Pittsburgh, for instance, has Carnegie Mellon, which has focused on turning campus ideas into new businesses This is why I have to seriously question articles and stories about fields in which I'm not informed. This is absolutely not true. CMU is a joke with regard to startups. DuoLingo, Yinzcam, and Shoefitr are perhaps the only notable ones. There are some robotics startups no one has heard of, but a Stanford English major has a better likelihood of even creating a tech startup than a CMU CS grad.

bsder 12y ago
> This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. This wasn't always true in the past. Sadly, the demise of Westinghouse hurt badly. In addition, the upper managers of companies want to be in Cranberry Township, but that's too far away from the colleges. One thing that seems to be common about tech hubs is having the schools and the businesses close to each other. Stanford is buried in Silicon Valley. UT Austin is a quick bus ride from downtown. Boston universities are all over, and it has a very good subway system.
crapshoot101 12y ago
That's absolutely false. To take one example, ModCloth came out of CMU. Way back in the past, Lycos came out of CMU (a multi-billion $ exit back in the old days). More recently, something like Anki is a bunch of CMU engineers; GroupMe's co-founder was a CMU grad. Also, Google has a big hub there, Uber just opened a robotics research facility, Steel is a legacy of Pittsurgh's past, not its current. You're free to complain about Pittsburgh, but some data would be nice.

bsder 12y ago

> This isn't even remotely true. Pittsburgh has very little in terms of successful startups. This wasn't always true in the past. Sadly, the demise of Westinghouse hurt badly. In addition, the upper managers of companies want to be in Cranberry Township, but that's too far away from the colleges. One thing that seems to be common about tech hubs is having the schools and the businesses close to each other. Stanford is buried in Silicon Valley. UT Austin is a quick bus ride from downtown. Boston universities are all over, and it has a very good subway system.

crapshoot101 12y ago

That's absolutely false. To take one example, ModCloth came out of CMU. Way back in the past, Lycos came out of CMU (a multi-billion $ exit back in the old days). More recently, something like Anki is a bunch of CMU engineers; GroupMe's co-founder was a CMU grad. Also, Google has a big hub there, Uber just opened a robotics research facility, Steel is a legacy of Pittsurgh's past, not its current. You're free to complain about Pittsburgh, but some data would be nice.