The region demonstrates a heavy emphasis on employment in museums, theater and dinner theaters and music.

See New Data

Longer term indicators, on the other hand, continue to find Pittsburgh trailing most benchmark cities. This is because the housing boom that began in the early 1990s and continued up until last year's collapse largely passed this region by.

See New Data

I am not of a mind to argue with their conclusions, only to call your attention to this piece from their web site. Also read the remarks from the Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board on the same subject and then look at the indicators themselves with the annotated text.

Then judge for yourself whether pay levels in the Pittsburgh region are or are not a proper subject for further comment and examination.

How is the data compiled?
The data utilized is housed at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and is part of the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) Program. The OES program produces estimates of the number of people employed in certain occupations and the estimates of wages paid to them for over 800 occupations.

The data can be broken out to national, statewide, metropolitan, and non-metropolitan levels. The OES is a semi-annual mail survey and surveys approximately 200,000 establishments per panel (every six months), taking three years to fully collect the sample of 1.2 million establishments. The May 2007 OES estimates referenced on the Pittsburgh Today website are benchmarked to the average of the May 2007 and November 2006 reference periods.

What is included in the data?
The OES data includes all part-time and full-time workers who are paid a wage or salary. Self-employed persons are not included in the data. The occupations that are highlighted were chosen as a result of TRWIB’s prior research and recommendations of the Pittsburgh Today Economy committee. The occupations are categorized using a Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system used by federal statistical agencies to classify workers into occupational categories. All workers are classified into one of 820 occupations according to their occupational definition. On the Pittsburgh Today website, you will find 18 of those 820 occupations and their wages.

What are next steps for the Pittsburgh region?
An article written by David Guo in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on June 17th starts, “Pittsburgh employers wondering why jobs in finance or nursing go unfilled may need to look no further than one fact—poor pay.” It is true that of the 18 occupational wages TRWIB compared across cities, Pittsburgh does not fare well. At the highest end of the scale Pittsburgh comes in fourth for family physicians and general practitioners, fifth for hotel clerks, and sixth for plumbers.

So what does this all mean? In a region that has more out-migration than in and has 50,000 more older workers and 50,000 few younger workers than other cities, it could mean everything.

As a region, we have to be realistic in what we are and what we are not. We will never rival LA, New York, or Washington, DC, because of the plethora of opportunities available there that we can’t produce here. A lot of attention has been paid to the region’s efforts at attracting and retaining young talent. Young people do and will continue to leave for a particular city that has a willingness to hire fresh-out graduates and offers high wages. We are told this repeatedly through surveys and through the amount of young people leaving our region.

For some young people, the “cost of living” is a vague concept in deciding where to live; other amenities are more important. Low wage offers in a city that struggles with diversity and risk is not the most attractive choice. However, efforts are being made to better connect students, both high school and college, to career opportunities in our region.

Tying what youth learn in school to real life career opportunities in our region is one way to step up the talent attraction and retention goal. Organizations like Smart Futures, Youthworks, Junior Achievement, Urban Youth Action, The Boys and Girls Clubs of Western PA, Allegheny Intermediate Unit, The Consortium for Public Education, Allegheny Conference, Coro Center for Civic Leadership, and TRWIB have all made career education for students a priority.

TRWIB alone, through the Employers and Educations Engaged for Excellence (E4) program, has already assisted 4,601 students with career exploration/interest assessment activities. In addition, the Pennsylvania Department of Education has created the Career Education and Work Standards to ensure each youth has a career exploration journey prior to graduation.

Career education and showing students the opportunities available in southwestern PA will not stop them from leaving completely, but it is a way to engage them in what we have to offer and if they see something they like, they just may decide to stay.

Kelleigh Boland
Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board
Research and Planning Coordinator

Ron Painter
Three Rivers Workforce Investment Board
Chief Executive Officer

On the other hand, the robust job growth that has been a characteristic of the Pittsburgh region took a significant hit in May and eight regions added jobs at a higher rate in May than did Pittsburgh. Educational and Health Services and Professional and Business Services continue to be strong regional job sectors.

See New Data

Over an eight-year period ending in 2006, burglary, robbery and murder rates per 100,000 population in the 14 benchmark cities ranged between 1.3 and 5.5 times the regional rates. The ratios in Pittsburgh for the three crimes were, respectively, 2.2, 4.1 and 3.6, reflecting the very low crime rates in western Pennsylvania outside the core city.

See New Indicators

The victimization report is based on a semiannual survey (National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS) of about 60,000 households and is intended to learn about individual victimization experiences, and particularly those experiences that did not get reported to the police. In order to protect the privacy of the individual respondents, the results of the victimization survey are reported only for the nation as a whole with no local disaggregation. Thus, one turns to the UCR to develop crime rates for individual cities or MSAs.

The UCR reports on crime rates for seven specific types of crime designated as Part I crimes. These include the violent crimes of murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and the property crimes of burglary, motor vehicle theft, and larceny. In our report we focus on three of these crime types: murder (obviously the most serious and the best reported), robbery (taking of property from an individual by force or threat of force), and burglary (breaking and entering into private property).

We chose these because they are seen as serious and are well-defined offenses (in contrast, for example, to aggravated assault which requires subjective judgment to distinguish “aggravated” from “simple”) and they are reasonably well reported (in contrast, for example, to forcible rape, which is poorly reported and whose reporting rate could fluctuate from year to year or from jurisdiction to jurisdiction).

Motor vehicle theft is well defined and well reported (largely because insurance coverage requires the reporting and recovery of the stolen vehicle is most likely to be achieved by the police), but is seen as less serious than burglary. Larceny is a wide ranging form of theft that includes shoplifting, bicycle theft, theft of hubcaps, and many other forms of theft that do not involve force or invasion of private property.

One important feature of the geographic distribution of crime is the recognition that most crime occurs in “hot spots,” typically neighborhoods of significant social disadvantage, including single-parent households, low income, high unemployment, high mobility of residents, high vacancy rates of residences, and other factors of disadvantage. These neighborhoods are most often in the central city and represent small geographic area of the individual cities and so an even smaller part of MSAs.

It is often of interest to know something about the demographic characteristics of both victims and offenders. This is of interest because there are strong demographic correlates of offending, with offending being most prevalent by males, young people, and racial minorities. Demographic information is available from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports or SHR, which involve a compilation by police departments of detailed records of individual homicides containing information on the victim characteristics, the perpetrator characteristics if known, victim-offender relationship, circumstances surrounding the homicide (e.g., argument, drug involvement, gang involvement, etc.). For the other Part I crimes, demographic information is available only on the basis of arrest. Such arrest information is available also for the 20 or so Part II crimes, which cover a broad range of offenses including other property or violent offenses, drugs offenses, and a wide variety of public-order offenses like prostitution and other vice crimes, vandalism, and disorderly conduct.

The Part I crimes were chosen partly because of their seriousness and partly because they were likely to be reported to the police; according to the recent Crime Victimization report, victims report robbery 57% of the time and burglary 50% of the time. The Part II crimes are generally seen as less serious, many involve no particular victim who would report it (e.g., drug crimes and public-order crimes), and often are established as a crime only when an arrest occurs.

National crime rates tend to move together but often show striking divergences. Most crime rates reached a peak in 1980 as the peak of the baby boomers (the 1960 birth cohort) moved out of the high- crime ages of the late teens and early 20s. The subsequent decline was interrupted by the violence associated with the crack markets, and especially by the recruitment beginning in 1985 of young people into those markets. Between 1985 and 1993, there was about a 25% increase in murder and robbery, and this increase was widespread across the nation. Following a peak in about 1993 associated with the decline in demand for crack, there was a decline of over 40% in murder and robbery until 2000. In contrast, burglary declined fairly steadily throughout that period. Since 2000, national crime rates have been impressively flat albeit with considerable variation across individual cities, with some going up, others coming down, and still others up and down or down and up. Thus, the common national trend of the 1990s has been replaced much more by local conditions. This makes the benchmark study particularly important as a means of exploring those individual city differences.

Alfred Blumstein is J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of urban systems and operations research, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University. Among many honors, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and awarded the 2007 Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Dr. Blumstein was chairman of the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, 1979-1990 and a member of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, 1986-1996.

Hee Jun has worked with Dr. Blumstein examining disproportionate minority representation in the criminal justice system, while earning a MS degree in Public Policy and Management. She will join the US Office of Management and Budget in the fall.

Alfred Blumstein
The Heinz School
Carnegie Mellon University
ab0q@andrew.cmu.edu

As of May, 2008, there were 3,200 more jobs in the Pittsburgh Region compared to a year ago (May, 2007).   In the earlier part of the year (January through April) we were up between 7,000 and 9,000 jobs each month.  Our rate of job growth (0.28%) was only half or less what it has been for the past year, so that's a very significant slowdown.

However, we're not alone in experiencing a slowdown; the U.S. job growth rate is only 1/10 of what it was at the end of 2007, and all but 3 of the top 40 regions have experienced reductions in their job growth rate.   Pittsburgh's job growth, although lower than it has been, was three times higher than the U.S. job growth rate (0.28% vs. 0.08%) in May.

Most striking, though is the fact that 14 of the top 40 regions have fewer jobs today than they did a year ago.  It's not just places like Cleveland and Detroit, which have been losing jobs for the past two years;  San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, and Tampa all lost jobs over the past year.  The Pittsburgh Region had the 23rd highest job growth rate among the top 40 regions in May, higher than Orlando, Chicago, and Cincinnati, as well the regions that lost jobs.

Why are we doing so well?  One out of every 5 jobs in our region is in health care or higher education, and those are reasonably recession-resistant industries.  (By way of comparison, only one out of every 14 jobs in Las Vegas is in health care or higher education.)  And while we're continuing to lose manufacturing jobs, we're holding on to them better than many other regions are -- we lost 1.3% of our manufacturing jobs over the past year, while the U.S. as a whole lost 2.5% of its manufacturing jobs, i.e., almost twice as many.

The next few months will likely be critical.  If the U.S. economy recovers, Pittsburgh's recesssion-resistance may enable it to ride out the dip without actually losing jobs.  If the U.S. economy worsens, then we may well start to lose jobs, too, as more and more sectors are affected more and more severely by economic woes.

(The May job numbers will be posted on PittsburghToday next week.)