Old buildings get a fresh look during the Pittsburgh Festival of Lights. (Photo by Richard Dudley.)

Last month, I spent a glamorous, fun-filled, sawdust-flavored week in the city I know best as my hometown’s rival: Pittsburgh, enemy of Clevelanders everywhere. As an AmeriCorps member with Rebuilding Together — a national nonprofit that renovates and repairs owner-occupied homes for low-income homeowners — I was obligated to attend a workweek celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr, and his commitment to service. I expected to end the week with great memories and a sense of accomplishment; I didn’t expect to fall in love with the city of Pittsburgh along the way.

Our work was in the Homewood neighborhood, separated from wealthy areas like Shadyside and Squirrel Hill by an elevated busway. Cut off from the rest of the city, the early-20th-century houses dotting Homewood’s genteel streets have blighted and declined in value as residents who could afford to leave moved out. Pittsburgh has shared the Rust Belt’s general population loss, and impoverished neighborhoods like Homewood have been hit especially hard.

Rebuilding Together Pittsburgh has been in the neighborhood for a couple years now and aims to be there for many more, assisted by both public and private partners — including the Pittsburgh Project, an innovative faith-based nonprofit dedicated to revitalizing the city (which also housed us out-of-towners for the occasion), and residents like Elwin Greene, the energetic and optimistic founder of Homewood Nation.

There was a lot of work to do: Of the 70 AmeriCorps members present, some painted, some sheetrocked, some hauled trash, and many did all of the above. I spent MLK Day in a dumpster and the rest of my time on stairs — building steps to a back porch and basement, and fixing an interior staircase whose ornately carved bannister served as a reminder of Homewood’s upper-class roots. Although the staircase was beautiful once, someone had fallen through it recently, and my goal was not to restore its beauty but its safety. (Which was easily done — six years of living in California may have left me laughably susceptible to snow and cold but it has also taught me to build things to survive earthquakes — those steps are never coming down!)

Alongside decay, however, are signs that Pittsburgh is thriving. My parents drove in for a night, and my defiant, committed Clevelander of a father was entranced by the city’s relative success. We meandered across snowy hillside roads, observing enough intact housing stock to make any of Pittsburgh’s Rust Belt brethren jealous, and as we dined at a hip downtown Latin-Asian fusion restaurant, my dad quizzed our bemused busser about exurban development and average commute times. (“Less than an hour?” she responded, backing away slowly.)

I posited that Pittsburgh might have been saved, in part, by its topography: Bland, big-box redevelopment is much more difficult without flatlands, and the hilly, river-intersected natural environment might serve to protect the urban, built one.

“It’s the San Francisco of the Midwest,” my father rhapsodized as we drove back to their bed & breakfast, a stately century-old Victorian in a once-rich neighborhood that housed a grand and colorful Art Noveau wonderland — and all so reasonably priced that even my frugal parents caved in to its charms.

“They don’t like to be called ‘Midwest’ here,” my mother replied.

Midwestern or not, Pittsburgh is a far cry from the San Francisco Bay area, where I now live — and that’s a good thing, because what Pittsburgh is instead is, well, Pittsburgh. Sure, its downtown might be stocked with some trendy (and tasty) restaurants, but nestled in its snowy hills among picturesque bridges are gems of both the architectural and human variety, as gorgeous old houses sell for less than 50k and imaginative intervention bubbles in home-brewed organizations like the Pittsburgh Project.

Rebuilding Together’s base for the week in Homewood was a makeshift warehouse inside of an old Rite-Aid, and I can’t think of a more perfect demonstration of Rust Belt resilience: leveraging decay and brand-name abandonment into reinvestment and grassroots-driven opportunity.

It happens in Pittsburgh, and throughout the Rust Belt, because residents have no other choice but to use whatever they’ve got, to apply creativity and persistence to limited resources and see just what they can do. As an outsider waging a similar uphill battle in my own underdog city of Oakland (I wrote about that here), I found both hope and truth in Pittsburgh’s fight to save itself: hope in how far they’ve come already, and truth in how much Pittsburgh deserves to be saved.

Yep, one week was enough to make me a convert. Homewood — and the city in general — may have been dismissed by many, but I’m rooting for it. Just don’t ask me to root for the Steelers. I may have learned to love my Rust Belt rival, but I’ll always be a Clevelander at heart.

The view from Oakland.Photo: Sharat Ganapati

I don’t live in Cleveland anymore, but I didn’t leave because I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I was stricken with the burning need to explore, to go new places, and stake a claim for myself. And the more I travel, the more I find myself drawn back to my Rust Belt roots — not Cleveland per se, but some semblance of it elsewhere in the world.

When I graduated from Georgetown in 2005, social momentum seemed to offer two choices: Stay in Washington, D.C., or be a rebel and move to San Francisco. I chose San Francisco. It was — it is — architecturally beautiful and politically liberal; the weather was good and the vibe was exciting. It was expensive as hell, too — it would be a real challenge on my meager Americorps living allowance — but I figured that I’d get one of those fancy high-paying careers that all San Franciscans seemed to have, then settle in, build a family, and grow old.

It wasn’t long after I arrived, however, that I began to feel unnecessary. San Francisco is exciting, sure, but it’s because the city — like New York, or L.A., or other urban brands — churns along on its own rhythms, driven by the labors and commitment of the hundreds of thousands of people who have already established themselves. It seemed like every niche was filled, and usually by someone both richer and cooler than me. I moved around for a few years, bouncing between different addresses in the Bay Area, heading down to Southern California for a spell, and even revisiting Cleveland, a fancy high-paying career slipping further and further from reach as the worldwide economy imploded.

And then, in early 2009, I discovered a little patch of Cleveland in California, just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco: Oakland. Like my hometown, Oakland is ridiculed by those from posher zip codes and written off by most outsiders (and even some insiders). I came to Oakland for a non-fancy, low-paying job that I loved and found my own version of paradise, replete with affordable rents and restaurants without four-hour waits for a seat. It was just the kind of place where an urban-minded, broke-ass, fashion victim like myself could feel at home: Wearing sweatpants to the grocery store was socially acceptable, and I didn’t need an impressive job title or great condo to fit in.

Like Cleveland or any other down-and-out city across the country, Oakland is a fixer-upper kind of town, thirsty for young people, where elbow grease and commitment to place matter more than the state of one’s bank account. Since moving here, I’ve found the purpose I was lacking when I lived across the bay, and I’m gratified that my work has a real impact in the community.

Earlier this year, a friend and I co-founded Femikaze, a feminist sketch comedy troupe. (And if you don’t believe that “feminist” and “comedy” are natural allies, you should come to one of our shows!) We had our first independent production in October, a full-length show here in the East Bay that sold out three of our four nights. We’ve already scheduled three more shows for next year.

It’s the kind of thing that would have been exponentially more difficult in San Francisco, where any given Friday night offers thousands of entertainment options, including dozens of comedy shows. We’re only a few miles away from the frenzy here in Oakland, but it’s quiet enough that we don’t have to shout to get anybody’s attention. There’s room for two determined women, with no patron and no budget, to start something.

Many San Franciscans find my decision to quit the hip side of the bay befuddling. “There’s nothing there,” they say of Oakland. They’re not entirely wrong, either. There really IS less (although far from nothing) in places like Oakland and Cleveland — or Pittsburgh, or St. Louis, or Knoxville, or dozens of other underrated, underpriced, overlooked cities — than can be found in thriving urban centers like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. But that’s just their charm.

“Less” might be boring to some, but to those of us who strive to create and produce and make a difference, “less” also means fewer resources are required to start something new, and less competition comes from established entities. As someone perpetually short on cash but long on idealistic ambition, I’ve found more opportunity in a second-tier city like Oakland than I ever knew in San Francisco. And although some people out there like to use my address as the butt of a joke, I’ve found it to be a rich, fertile place to build a life on my own terms.

To recent or upcoming college graduates, I offer my own bit of meager counter-wisdom: Forget about Washington, D.C., San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and L.A. Look for a city that will value your presence and appreciate your efforts, a city that doesn’t think you’re disposable just because you’re young. It’ll be easier on both your wallet and your soul.

Sure, you might catch some flack for moving to a place where “there’s nothing there,” but take it from me — I came from the Mistake on the Lake, and to my mind, “there’s nothing there” is just another way of saying “there’s nothing in my way.”

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Rust Wire.