Logan Byers, the 10-year-old boy from Sheraden whom I featured in my blog several weeks ago, has a new commercial for would-be litterbugs: Don’t trash my turf! It is part of a campaign of the Pennsylvania Resources Council.

 

Logan has been working with the city by adopting a 'redd-up' zone on his street. He is the conscience behind Logan's Litter League, a loose collection of neighbors and family who are making an effort to clean up his street regularly.

 

If a little boy has the gumption and initiative to undertake an anti-litter campaign, can’t the rest of us just hang onto our litter until we find the nearest trash can? Seriously.

 

The transition of Detroit's income taxes. Source: The Daily Beast

 

 

On my visits to various neighborhoods, some strike me as too far gone to save. It’s painful to think and to share this message, but back-to-nature seems to be a smart option for many parts of outlying neighborhoods given that the population growth we are seeing citywide is still too modest. Will enough people move to Pittsburgh in time to save vacant houses that are falling apart right now?  And that question presumes that newcomers would choose to move into (and save) them.

  

While riding around Wilkinsburg recently, where entire blocks of houses are empty -- or one or two households shy of being empty -- it struck me and my tour guide that local costs will continue to drastically outgrow local populations, and as they do, so will blight.

 

Why not draw circles around areas that have almost no occupants and inform the remaining people that they live in a zone that will be released to nature? They can stay, but they will get minimal service and no improvements, and when they move or die, that area will no longer be the responsibility of the municipality to maintain except as a habitat for wildlife.

 

The hue and cry would be piteous. People are tied to their places. But, as Megan McArdle points out in an article in The Daily Beast, “when a business runs into this sort of problem, we know what to do: liquidate and sell off the non-performing assets.”

 

Her article “Saving Detroit: When a Big City Stops Being Big,” is well worth reading.

 

Like Pittsburgh, Detroit has lost 60 percent of its population since its peak years. Our good news is that we are growing... a little. How do we plan for the continued growth we anticipate? How should we plan?

 

Here are some excerpts from her report: 

 

Can anyone within the sound of my voice imagine enough Pittsburgh and Allegheny County politicians manning up to even have a discussion about bringing the functioning assets of the city in closer to the core and abandoning the rest? It's hard enough to get people in an auditorium to cluster near the speaker. But it may be important to the financial survival of cities like Pittsburgh.

 

 

 

 

Some weeks back, my friend Kat said, “Let’s do the Koman walk.” I had done it with my mother way back when it was new and so horribly organized that I swore I would never do it again.

 

But 21 years is a long time. Remember? The Pirates had a winning season. Cell phones were the size of bricks. Things change. Plus I enjoy Kat; she’s fun. 

 

So I said yes and paid my $25 to register and got my T-shirt and number in the mail a few days before the race, which was yesterday. Kat drove us to Oakland, where we found a parking space almost as far from the starting line on Flagstaff Hill as the length of the walk itself. We had expected that. The P-G reported today that 25,000 people participated.

 

That’s all? I would have expected to learn that every possible stroller in the metropolitan area was on that course, along with stroller pushers who do not consider this walk a chance to exercise.

 

Kat has made this a yearly routine; she even did the one the day before with her mother in Washington, D.C. I admire her comitment. As we walked, trying to pass people who were walking five and 10 abreast , I read the backs of T-shirts, the names of people being celebrated and memorialized, friends and family of walkers who had had the big C.

 

As we walked, I thought of all my friends who have had breast cancer and survived — all of them. I thought of my grandmother, who survived it and died of a heart attack. I wish I had worn a T-shirt that named he and all my friends whom I celebrate, both as friends and as survivors. 

 

As we walked, I thought about how I don’t do pink. Except in my garden, I recoil at so much pink. Is it the color of breast cancer awareness because girls are still pink and boys are still blue? Even though men can get breast cancer? Really?  

 

I glanced at the seemingly endless ribbon of people behind us and at the seemingly endless ribbon of people in front and I thought about all the other kinds of cancer.

 

Quickly, I returned to a better mindset because after all, it was Mother’s Day. Without mothers and their healthy breasts, where would we be?

 

 

A friend introduced me to The Italian Garden Project two summers ago, when a group of us took a tour of gardens in Morningside.  Mary Menniti of Sewickley founded the Project and has turned it into a network not just of natives of Italy who garden in the old-school ways but first-generation Italians who have continued the traditions and people like me who want to emulate them and celebrate their prodigious efficiency.

 

Now I can find out all about growing figs, and you can too.

 

“Everything you ever wanted to know about growing fig trees” classes will start in June. There will be four, each month through September. The two-hour classes are $40 and 15 people can be in each one.

 

They are the following Saturday mornings from 10.30a to 12.30p, starting at the Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley and followed by a tour of a garden:  June 29, July 27, August 24, Sept 14. Reservations are required.  Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .