Richard Florida agrees: Pittsburgh is increasingly a hub for creative talent

Following its global recognition as an “emerging” startup ecosystem, Pittsburgh ranks high on a new talent report authored by a prominent national urbanist. It’s a boost likely fueled by a pandemic-prompted rise in remote work and an increase in locally headquartered tech companies.

Heartland Forward, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on improving the economic performance of the center of the United States, recently published a report called “Heartland of Talent: How Heartland Metropolitans are Changing the Map of Talent in the U.S.” Led by CityLab cofounder Richard Florida, the report details the geography of talent in America over the past decade. Data analyses center on “educational attainment and the share of the workforce engaged in knowledge, professional and creative occupations,” per the report.

Pittsburgh came in second for creative class growth rate and within the top 20 metros for growth in college grads from 2010 to 2019.

Read the report

The creative class is what drives the talent pool and economic opportunity for tech hubs, the report said, pointing to findings that “more than half of workers in leading metros are members of the creative class, while in lagging metros less than 25% are.” Pittsburgh came only behind the San Francisco Bay Area for growth in that class of workers, at a rate of 6.5%, far above that of established tech hubs like Austin, Boston and New York.

Though Pittsburgh still ranks behind those hubs in terms of creative class population share — coming in the 18th spot with a 41.6% creative class share — its growth rate is a sign that efforts to market the city as a fast-emerging tech hub are paying off.

“While coastal superstar cities and leading tech hubs still dominate, heartland metros like Columbus, Nashville, St. Louis, Cleveland and Cincinnati have seen significant growth in their shares of both college grads and the creative class; heartland college towns like Ann Arbor, Madison, Iowa City, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, rank as talent stars alongside places like San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C.; and older industrial metros outside the heartland metros like Pittsburgh have become significant attractors of talent as well,” the report said.

The report also found that Pittsburgh ranks within the top 20 large metros for growth in college grads, coming in at the 10th place spot with a rate of 6.8%. That once more beat out the same metric for established tech hubs like Austin, Boston and New York as well as similarly emerging ones like Baltimore, Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Though Pittsburgh didn’t rank within the top 20 for the share of college grads in its population in 2019, there’s good reason to believe it’s become more competitive in that statistic since then.

The onset of remote work over the last couple of years paired with a number of office construction projects for tech companies that have established a permanent presence here have boosted Pittsburgh’s tech industry even during the pandemic.

“These shifts in the geography of talent are likely to be accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic rise of remote work,” the report said. “Remote work gives talent greater choice of locations, and smaller cities and metro areas have worked to bolster their amenities and appeal to this footloose talent.” That doesn’t mean established tech hubs won’t maintain and attract their own strong pools of talent — simply that “smaller and medium size heartland metros and rural areas across the country can be players in this new geography of talent.”

And these encouraging new findings don’t mean that cities like Pittsburgh can rest on their laurels, either. Especially as in-person activities begin to resume once more, there could be a renewed attraction to large metro hubs, particularly among young talent.

To preserve and increase the growth rates in creative class members and college graduates, Pittsburgh will need to continue investing in research universities, community colleges, anchor institutions and workforce training systems, the report said. Alongside those efforts should also be ones to increase the quality of life, through natural amenities, arts and culture resources and more that will attract young talent.

Sophie Burkholder is a 2021-2022 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.