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Tuesday, 04 October 2011 10:57

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

Chris Briem, Walkabout's official demographer at the University Center for Social and Urban Research at Pitt, has shared some information from the September Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly that reiterates other data that have reported Pittsburgh's youthful trend.

The percentage of people over 65 has come down since its 1990 peak to join national levels. The national levels are up from 1950, the year when the city and the nation’s 65+ population were last similar.

UCSUR's research found that the number of young adults in the city  between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 17.2 percent, or 8,334 persons, from 2000 to 2010, and that the number of residents 65 and older dropped by 23.4 percent, or nearly 13,000 residents, between 2000
and 2010.

Chris’s colleague Sabina Deitrick noted that this is not the Pittsburgh Woody Guthrie sang about in “Pittsburgh Town” —  “Pittsburgh Town is a smoky old town.”

“We lost the smoke some years ago, but we may now have lost the ‘old’ as well,” Chris wrote in an email. He continued:

"Coupled with the growth of young adults in Pittsburgh between 2000 and 2010 and the decline in steel decades ago, can we now change the great Woody Guthrie’s first line from Pittsburgh Town to Pittsburgh (was) a smoky ol’ town?”

I’m familiar with Woody Guthrie’s songs but hadn’t known that one. So there have been songs written about Pittsburgh. Just not one that calls it a helluva town or one in which you left your heart or one that has my kind of people too, people who smile at you.

Oh well, I’ll take young news over a glowing song any day.

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