Oct 21, 2016 By Harry Funk 3 min read

You’ve heard of places that you’d like to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. The Pittsburgh region apparently gets it right on both counts.

“There isn’t a month that goes by where we don’t get another ranking where we’re the most livable or most cost-effective,” Dennis Yablonsky, chief executive officer of the Allegheny Conference on Economic and Community Development, told members of the Bethel Park Chamber of Commerce.

And, to his surprise:

“National Geographic ranked us as one of the top 20 places in the world to visit,” he said. “There are only two of the 20 in the United States: Sonoma and Pittsburgh.”

Yablonsky, a Collier Township resident, spoke at the chamber’s legislative lunch at St. Clair Country Club on Friday, addressing the strides that the region has made since bottoming out with an 18.3 percent unemployment rate in 1983.

“Young people are coming here now. The only reason our population isn’t growing more is that we’re still the only metro in the country that has more deaths than births, and that’s slowing us down,” he explained. “We’re going to go from being one of the oldest places in America today, in 15 years, we’ll be one of the youngest ones.”

Yablonsky’s organization focuses on creating a more competitive economic climate in Allegheny County and beyond, and apparently the endeavors are working.

“Our companies continue to vote with their checkbooks,” he said. “Last year, there were 274 public announcements by companies in the 10 counties that they were going to add jobs, invest capital and grow here.”

He credited efforts that started in the 1990s toward rejuvenating a trio of “legacy industries” – manufacturing, energy and finance – with an eye toward businesses working more closely with the “world-class research institutions” that already were in place.

The region does face challenges for the future, as Yablonsky explained:

• Lack of sufficient skills among potential employees to fill positions. To help remedy the situation, the Allegheny Conference is promoting technology education while taking measures toward retaining more college graduates in the area.

• Infrastructure, “all of those things that make commerce happen, and move goods and services and people around.” Yablonsky noted that the state Legislature is providing more money to invest in the likes of roads, bridges, and sewer and water systems.

“I view all these things as an opportunity,” he said. “It’s a jobs creator. We’re going to spend a few billion dollars fixing this. It will also improve our quality of life, and it will improve our competitiveness as a region for business attraction and talent attraction.

• Socioeconomic disparity.

“The great ‘new Pittsburgh’ story that I tell is wonderful,” Yablonsky said. “It’s true, and it should get better. But there are groups of people and physical places in this region that don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.”

As an example, he mentioned the economic hub that has developed in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood.

“Throw a stone into Homewood or Wilkinsburg, it’s a whole different place,” he said. “It’s a matter of justice. It’s a matter of economics. We have to figure out how we address those kind of issues better if we want to continue to be a world-class place.”