“The economy looks more like Boston than it does Gary, Ind.,” said George Fechter, who was chief executive of the McGowan Center for Artificial Organ Development at the University of Pittsburgh. He called the president’s comments “absolutely outrageous,” adding “he doesn’t represent the people of Pittsburgh.”

In remaking itself, Pittsburgh has benefited from resources that a struggling city like Detroit, for example, never had: flagship universities like Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, which produce their own tech entrepreneurs, medical campuses and cultural events.

Pittsburgh’s transformation from a steel town to a center of “eds and meds” has been visible even on the city’s streets.

“It’s almost like I watched soot come off the buildings — the buildings turned from black to beige while I lived there,” said Richard Florida, an urban economist who has championed the emerging knowledge economy in cities like Pittsburgh. He taught at Carnegie Mellon and lived in the city from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. “It’s not the typical down-in-the-dumps Rust Belt town. It’s still in the midst of a transformation, but it looks like it has turned a corner.”

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