Redevelopment Perspectives: New Orleans and Pittsburgh by David Lessinger, New Orleans Redevelopment Authority

Originally posted by David Lessinger on NORA’s website.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Pittsburgh and see for myself its redevelopment challenges and successes. What I didn’t realize until I arrived was that it was also a trip to see family, of sorts. Pittsburgh and New Orleans could be sisters, so similar are their histories and conditions.

Like New Orleans, Pittsburgh owes its very existence to the rivers it was settled upon. It’s an industrial town, a football town, with a familiar back story – critical to the modernization of America, a key locale in the development of Jazz, depopulated by job loss and sprawl, plagued by blight and vacancy, and now reinventing itself as a vibrant place to live and work in the new economy.

Thanks to the generosity of the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, the guidance of the Center for Community Progress, and the hospitality of the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh (URA), I learned about the redevelopment projects that are re-making the city.

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