What did Pittsburgh do right that Detroit did not do?
The steel industry went downhill a long time back....
Had a better football team?
But, basically, it has been transformed from a steel city into a city of colleges and hospitals. With the exception of the Mon Valley most of the ring counties still have a lot of small manufacturing and fabrication establishments making everything from high tech medical equipment to auto parts.
It’s because after 1981, there was nowhere to go but up. About 250,000 manufacturing jobs went away, starting when Mellon called their note on Mesta machine. (The Mellons were trying to get liquid so they could get into the oil business back when the price of oil was even more outrageous than it is now.)
The population of the city Pittsburgh itself has contracted 50% from its peak back in the early 60’s. It’s down 10% in the past decennial.
The metro area has had sustained but not such an extensive outflow.
Vigilanteman is right that medicine and higher ed are the drivers. Health Insurance - Highmark is a big employer downtown. Banking is too - BNY, PNC and Citizens being the biggest.
Steel is still around - somewhat. The Mon Valley works of USS and a bunch of specialty makers like ATI. Marcellus is booming too.
However, the commies in the government have been unrelenting in their drive to destroy the economy. City council issued a proclamation siding with the Occupiers against the biggest employers in Downtown. All of the municipalities are fighting to enact drilling bans and demonizing fracking. The Amercian Lung Association and every leftist pressure group is fighting to shut down the coal-fired powerplants that give the region a competitive advantage on energy costs (Asthma! It’s for the Chillrun!). And striving to implement the end state of Obeyme Care - gobmint ‘healthcare’ which will kill the advanced medical research and care and put the insurers out of business.
If it wasn’t for them, the region’s economic output would be twice what it is. How do they stay in power? Too many folks around here are congenital Democrats. The ‘Republicans are for the rich’ meme is encoded in their DNA. This is starting to change, though, as evidenced by the Westmoreland County stunner.