This is an open letter to the people at GeekWire (Hi!). We heard about your contest to find a new headquarters and we are excited to see that Pittsburgh is a finalist. We’re BlastPoint, a Pittsburgh-based startup and we specialize in helping regular people use maps to find insights about locations. We just want to say that you should definitely choose Pittsburgh! It’s a great place for tech and a really special place to live. But don’t just take our word for it. We have data to back up why you should choose Pittsburgh over Raleigh (nah), Cincinnati (uh-uh), or Denver (our mountains are less pointy).
We would also like to say thanks to Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science for submitting a proposal on behalf of Pittsburgh. [Alumni high-five!]
To help you make the best data-driven decision you can make, we used our software to look at comparative data for Pittsburgh and our competitive cities. Borrowing some of the techniques we used to evaluate locations for Amazon’s HQ2, we can see that Pittsburgh has the edge in several categories based on our data for 30-minute drive times from each city’s center. Here’s what we found:
FOOD
Fuel for February: Shivering at the idea of coming here in winter? Fear not, GeekWire peeps, we are home to Primanti Bros. and Fat Head’s Saloon. Their sandwiches and grub will keep you warm for the month of February and beyond – guaranteed. We also have other eclectic dining experiences, such as Superior Motors, a former Chevy dealership turned into a fine-tuned restaurant in the city borough of Braddock, one of the remaining areas in Pittsburgh where an active steel mill still exists. Bon Appetit also rated our very own Morcilla one of the top 10 new restaurants in America. If eating animals isn’t your thing, we have vegetarian and vegan restaurants in most neighborhoods (we recommend B52 in Lawrenceville). Pittsburgh also has the most bars per capita in the entire United States which our boozy, busy SouthSide neighborhood can attest.
Pittsburgh beats both Cincinnati and Raleigh in number of bars and restaurants. Denver is ahead, but we bet our food tastes better anyway.
TRANSPORTATION
Cars Need Not Apply: Pittsburgh has a good public transportation system with its busway and burgeoning cycling community. Our neighborhoods are highly walkable, bikable, and connected by short bus rides. And free bus rides, too, in the Free T Zone. If you’re feeling particularly daring and energetic to explore Pittsburgh’s winter topography, buy some crampons and traverse portions of our neighborhoods using the Steps of Pittsburgh, over 700 sets of city-owned steps, some of which are actual city streets!
For their commute, Pittsburghers use the bus and walk far more than Cincinnati, Denver, and Raleigh. They also own fewer cars, at 14.8% of households not having a vehicle.
HOUSING
An American Dream: Pittsburgh is one of the handful of cities in the United States where the American Dream isn’t a contradiction. With its social mobility and affordable housing prices, Pittsburgh is one of the few cities in the U.S. where you can afford to buy a house for under $1000 a month. We can hear you crunching numbers now, thinking about all the money you can save or spend on that new Tesla or Kaiser Encore earbuds.
Living in Pittsburgh is cheap and that’s amazing. That is reflected by the fact that income and housing prices in Pittsburgh are in sync with one another, while houses in Denver and Raleigh are more pricey.
COMMUNITY & CULTURE
From Rust to Shine: Pittsburgh is one of the only Rust Belt cities to be able to revive itself from a collapsed industrial empire to a beacon for tech entrepreneurs and giants: Apple, Uber, Facebook, Google and Amazon, to name a few. This innovative embrace of modern enterprise – with the helping hand of its top-notch universities – has made the Steel City a media darling for food, culture, and affordability in the past decade. Pittsburgh’s tech ecosystem is robust and diverse with connections spanning throughout city. Bakery Square in East Liberty is ground zero for Google, University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories, and UPMC Enterprises. Lawrenceville is where CMU’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) resides along with some of the fastest-growing robotics startups in the country. Both these neighborhoods were ranked #1 by both Lonely Planet and Money magazine as the coolest neighborhoods in the nation. Think of what that industrial history meets tech and healthcare prowess does to a city – your Pittsburgh neighbors and future friends know the value of good work and a cold beer but will check in on you too when flu season hits. Pittsburghers are known for our friendly and welcoming nature – even Travel+Leisure agrees and puts us at #7!
Educational attainment levels in Pittsburgh are second only to those in Raleigh, but not by much. UPMC and University of Pittsburgh are the drivers of our large healthcare employment sector, bringing the best and brightest to our research labs where the life sciences and technology meet.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about summer. As gray as February may be in Pittsburgh, our amazing mild summers more than make up for it. Don’t think you’ll be here for the summer? We’ll see. Our world-renowned arts festival lasts three weeks and brings national and international artists to the stage every night. For free. North and South Parks each have free live music each weekend. Our AAA public radio station WYEP is a monumental resource for new and live music and they, too, bring a music festival in June – also free! And if there isn’t a baseball game with fireworks over the rivers on night, there is some kind of bridge festival going on. We have 446 of them, after all.
For the sports fans among you, Pittsburgh is home to three beloved professional sports teams (we bet you know one of them), a soccer club, and three nationally ranked college basketball and football programs. Best of all, tickets are still affordable.
So we’ll be straight with you. You come to Pittsburgh and you dig into life here, and Pittsburgh’s gonna give back to you. Know how we know? Because a lot of us came back. We left for school and jobs on the East or West Coast…and we came back. We came back to greenspace, affordable houses with backyards, dive bars next to four star restaurants, good schools, reasonable commutes, and good neighbors. But if you come, we’re going to expect you to be a good neighbor too – just like our most famous alum Mr. Fred Rogers asked of us from the time we were little. It’s a beautiful day in our Pittsburgh neighborhood.
Won’t you be our neighbor?