The G-20 Summit is over, and the world finally knows Pittsburgh is no longer the dirty, smoky steel town pictured in the history books. Now it’s time to stop talking about how we recovered from job losses 30 years ago and start talking about how we can accelerate job growth over the next 30 years.
The fact that we’ve lost fewer jobs than most regions during the recession doesn’t mean we’ll grow more jobs than other regions when the recovery begins. In the years following the end of the last recession, the Pittsburgh Region’s economy had the 4th worst job growth among the top 40 regions. In fact, the region never recovered all of the jobs it lost in 2002-2003 before the current recession hit.