It's hard to understate this point. Compared with San Francisco, Pittsburgh is much more visibly green. There are trees everywhere, grassy areas abound, and the city itself is nestled in green hills.
San Francisco is full of concrete. The Bay Area is still really brown from the recent droughts. There are certainly people who can overlook this and live perfectly contently. But in Pittsburgh, I don't have to give up the greenery for a city life.
BTW, it doesn't apply to the foothills, nor does it apply farther south (past Cupertino or so). So Rancho San Antonio is still brown in summer, ditto Lexington Reservoir, The Dish, San Jose foothills, etc. San Lorenzo valley is green year-round, though.
Moreover, after growing up in Pittsburgh and living in Seattle, I can tell you that Seattle definitely has less sunlight (it's not even close) than Pittsburgh. So much less that my doctor had to prescribe my Vitamin D to address a deficiency I had when I moved there (after living in Pittsburgh my whole life, no problems).
[1] "California is home to eight of the 10 cities in America where air pollution is worst" https://qz.com/963089/california-is-home-to-eight-of-the-10-...
As for your linked article, that seems irrelevant. Nobody thinks Hanford, CA is an upcoming tech hub.
Rank City Annual % sunshine 164 PITTSBURGH, PA 45% 165 SEATTLE C.O., WA 43%
Often remarked that we had less rain than Portland, but also less sunny days.
Portland lacks anchors like the one put down in Pittsburgh by robber barons. Later philanthropists like Vollum of Tektronix in Portland weren't nearly as effective as Carnegie. Silicon Forest turned out to be a bit of a volatile dud compared to Silicon Valley.
Pittsburgh, on the other hand, has great universities in CMU and U Pitt. Portland's equivalents PDX State, erstwhile Oregon Graduate Institute, and OHSU never reached the heights of CMU or UPitt as they lacked the deep and broad foundation of Pittsburgh's universities.
I like both cities, but just on the basis of Shadyside-Oakland-Lawrenceville-etc. and the intellectual atmosphere there, I love Pittsburgh much more.
Disappointingly, in Portland there's no intellectual atmosphere of any sort.
I was born in Pittsburgh, and I have some experience with towns in the region and other rust belt river towns. Maybe I'm biased, but I'd say that Pittsburgh, in its good parts, looks better than most in the region. Also, I'm old enough to know the benefits of the Clean Air Act on that town. Once, you could literally smell when you were getting into Pittsburgh, and the sulfur from coal burning literally made it smell like excrement! (Not exactly, but it was a smell in the same family of smells, due to the sulfur.) Today, there's not a trace of this!
Short YouTube video: https://youtu.be/tbFJMgfMCAs?t=1m12s
https://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+pollution+photos&...
They'll be very representative of the top of the hiring pool with deep connections to D.C.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+pittsburg...
- Two big, well funded, well respected schools cranking out talent. CMU is one of the top schools in the world for CS.
- Cheap rent
- If you want to buy a house, some really beautiful neighborhoods
- SEI - lots of cyber security talent
- Great food and activities, it's not hard to find plenty of things to do, some innovative areas that are turning around dead warehouse and industrial areas
- Some parts of the city are really beautiful and nice places to be, lots of great parks and so on
But there's some realities that I don't think limit what can come from the city, but rather shape what kinds of businesses should set up shop there.
- Geographic isolation
- Parts of the city can be pretty rough still, rougher than what you might find elsewhere
- hard to bring in quality talent if they aren't being sourced from the schools
- Non-tech talent comes from completely different industries
So I think that if you can shape a business that targets a large domestic market and solves real problems, even non-sexy B2B ones, you can probably grow a thriving business there. You probably won't end up hitting it big on social media, but many B2B problems are billion dollar businesses.