I love Pittsburgh. It’s my hometown and still the closest major city to where I live. For my entire life, I’ve been a part of it, and it is a part of me. So, when I tell you Pittsburgh never looked better, I’m proud of that, but I’m also somewhat disgusted.
The NFL Draft is in town, and it’s not “kind of a big deal” — it is a big deal. My colleague Scott Pinsker wrote a very good VIP piece on how much the NFL draft is over-hyped, and I have to agree. Even now, after seeing the impact the draft is having on this region, I’m still puzzled by all the fuss over something that used to be handled quite well in a single hotel ballroom.
And as Scott argued, the real news value of a draft is who gets picked and where they’re going. You never know how good a draft was until many years down the road, by which time you can bet your last dollar that absolutely no one will care.
People do care on draft day. Fantasy football nuts, bettors, Las Vegas, the legal gambling industry, and some mob boss in New Jersey — they all care about the draft. In some way, it has a direct impact on them. But for those who don’t make money off of NFL Draft wagering, the event is mostly a curiosity.
To give you an idea of what the NFL Draft has become, this is Pittsburgh during the first round of this year’s draft.
Pittsburgh broke the all-time round one attendance record with 320,000 fans tonight, topping the 275,000+ who attended in Detroit in 2024, per the NFL. pic.twitter.com/0LmwpCCkL9
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 24, 2026
That’s the home of the Steelers, Acrisure Stadium, in the background. In the foreground is a portion of the crowd, most of whom came to Pittsburgh from elsewhere. This isn’t just a Pittsburgh thing. While there are hundreds of thousands of people from the region getting in on the action, hundreds of thousands more made the trip to Pittsburgh for this event. Football tourism.
Economically speaking, the event will be great for the region, even though it is just a one-off. Hundreds of millions of dollars will benefit Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas, thanks to hotel stays, restaurants, and all the usual tourism economy drivers.
For its part, the city has decided to put on its Sunday best. It has worked pretty steadily over the past year to get ready for its moment in the NFL Draft sun. The city paved roads; cleaned up graffiti and litter; moved the homeless (temporarily); beefed up a police presence downtown, where most of the action is happening; spruced up signage and traffic paint on the roads; painted bridges; added lighting where there wasn’t light; and worked really hard to fill empty storefronts in a downtown that has been a veritable ghost town ever since the county’s Democrat executive and the state’s Democrat governor instituted unforgiving lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In short, if you’re in town for the draft, this is not the same city it was four weeks ago, and it’s not the same city it will return to being in the next four weeks.
Those empty storefronts will remain. The homeless will return. The graffiti artists will be back to deface bridges, walls, and any flat surface they can find, all without any real consequence. The region is run by Democrats, after all.
Pittsburgh is like every other blue city in this way. Its county executive is a socialist by the name of Sara Innamorato, who technically is a Democrat. Before she entered the race for the office she now holds, she was a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Recently, she helped lead the way in Allegheny County’s decision not to cooperate with federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
She’s just the current in a long line of Democrat leaders in the region. Allegheny County includes the City of Pittsburgh and the immediate suburbs around the city. The county constitutes the core of the Pittsburgh region and the Pittsburgh metro media market.
The current and relatively new mayor of Pittsburgh is another Democrat named Corey O’Connor. He’s young, but still, he’s somewhat of a throwback to the kind of Democrats this region used to like. Unlike his predecessor, he’s more likely to try to do something about the streets and neighborhood crime. But he’s still a loyal Democrat, and he will likely follow the Democrat Party’s national lead on issues like homelessness, law enforcement and crime prevention, and DEI.
People who live in the region know this all too well, which is why this post on the X platform got ratioed like it did.
This is awesome: The Pittsburgh government is cleaning up the streets for the NFL draft this week.
— Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) April 22, 2026
Crews are painting over graffiti, making electrical repairs to the enhanced lighting system and picking up litter.
Allegheny County is doing it right 👏pic.twitter.com/Ku2H5pDSRJ
The last time Pittsburgh had a Republican mayor was 1934. Ever since, the Democrat machine has governed the town the way Democrats do. When the city hit its toughest times in the 1970s and 1980s after the steel mills closed, it had Democrat and leftist policies to blame.
Greedy leftist labor unions refused to budge on contracts with the steelmakers, making cheaper Japanese steel look much more attractive to Detroit carmakers and cost-conscious American car buyers. Weak corporate leadership appeased those unions until it just didn’t make sense to make all their steel in this region.
To reinvent itself, the city turned to technology, healthcare, and academia. Not sure if you noticed, but if your economy is resting on these pillars, they don’t pay a lot of local taxes. Hospitals, colleges, and universities, technically, are nonprofit organizations. Sure, their doctors and professors park their Mercedes in town during the day, and they drive them to their million-dollar homes in the suburbs at night. But a huge percentage of the city’s real estate does not contribute tax revenue to the city.
Add to this that most of the more well-to-do people in these fields vote blue, and so, while they don’t have to live among the homeless, they keep politicians in power who tend to do nothing about homelessness, crime, and more. And the cycle continues.
Pittsburgh is showing the world this week that it can shine if it wants to. But in the coming weeks, the region’s Democrat leadership will show that it has no desire to do so. It will never do the permanent things it would need to do to be a 'shining city in the hills' all year round. That would mean adopting a more conservative approach to governing, and they will never do that.
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