People Live and Work in Downtown Pittsburgh. How Can the City Get Them to Shop There?

Right now Pittsburgh is in the midst of what local leaders are calling, in capital letters, the city's "Third Renaissance." For the first time in decades, people are moving back downtown. Commercial offices are anchored there, and residential occupancy rates are touching 95 percent. In recent years the city has hosted the G-20 economic summit, been named America's most livable city, and been called one of three metros to recover completely from the great recession.

But one major piece to the renaissance puzzle has been missing: downtown retail. Lazarus struggled and finally failed a few years back, the old Lord & Taylor building never made a comeback, and earlier this year Saks Fifth Avenue closed its downtown store too. Those setbacks prompted Mayor Luke Ravenstahl to convene a task force of city officials, developers, and business leaders, that recently released a three-year plan [PDF] to change the city's retail fortunes.