CHRISTOPHER BRIEM | PHOTO BY LAURA PETRILLA

If you want to talk about where Pittsburgh’s been or where Pittsburgh’s going, Christopher Briem is the guy to call. And he’ll give it to you straight.

Briem, 56, has been a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research for nearly 30 years, with a focus on regional competitiveness.

He studies issues including economic growth, population shifts, neighborhood demographics and affordable housing. He can just as easily talk about the evolution of Lawrenceville over the last 30 years as he can about the history of his former office building, which used to be a part of Western Psychiatric Hospital. In February, he will publish his first book, “Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation.”

“The story of Pittsburgh is still talked about,” he says. “People put Pittsburgh into a pot with other Rust Belt places, Detroit and Cleveland, and that’s all fair, except people don’t quite realize that the scale of shock here in terms of job loss with the steel industry collapsing is actually worse than those places.

“This is a place that suffered a tremendous amount of economic change. The book sort of captures how much.”

While the book is more than 300 pages, you can find insightful snippets anytime on Briem’s frequently updated X account. There, he has shared a graph he created comparing the start of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ season with previous years, a list of obscure local museums and Robert Moses’ plan for the Point in 1939.

In July, he shared a screenshot of the Borough of Haysville’s website with the caption: “Your annual reminder that Allegheny County, PA has an incorporated borough with a total population of 81 people … complete with elected officials, a mayor and [its] own zoning.”

Also this summer, he posted a reply to Pittsburgh’s Public Source story about Penn Plaza: “And the bulk of the real estate remains fallow” with a photo of the empty field across from Whole Foods at Penn Avenue and North Saint Clair Street.

“I think there’s pros and benefits to engaging on social media,” he says. “We’re in this very focused, applied world — these things are happening now, so it makes sense.”

For all of his insight, Briem has only about 3,800 followers.

“To me, he’s a part of the legends here — and a lot of people don’t probably appreciate it because he’s a fact-based guy,” says Audrey Russo, president and CEO of the Pittsburgh Technology Council. “He’s a deep-data guy at a time where, very often, people are just extracting information that’s very superficial. And Chris is not that guy.”

Briem, who holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in Public Policy and Administration from the School of Public and International Affairs at Columbia University, was born at the former St. Francis Hospital in Lawrenceville and grew up in Bloomfield and on the South Side. His career path started in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a defense analyst in the early ’90s, just as the Cold War was ending. He says the time and place naturally led to work examining small-scale issues in development.

“There was actually a pretty big economic contraction in the world of defense analysts,” he says. “Instead of thinking about big global defense things, I moved down … By the time I was done [with grad school], I was sort of studying garbage collection in New York City.”

He moved back to Pittsburgh for graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and began working at the University Center for Social and Urban Research; he’s been there ever since.

Since Russo started at her job 17 years ago, Briem has been the one she bounces ideas off of as she helps the Pittsburgh Technology Council in its work attracting businesses to the region and keeping them here.

“It’s really important for us to understand factually, factually, what’s going on, whether it’s economic indicators, whether it’s … the population and people that are in the region, the jobs that we have.

“The last thing I need is another version of Pittsburgh nice,” she says. “I’m trying to help make Pittsburgh better and great. And if there’s someone who has a whole bunch of perspective and deep experience in policy and data and trends, and has done deep thinking on that, lots of reading and writing, who better to extract that from?”

Lauren Davidson is a former associate editor at Pittsburgh Magazine and has covered the region for nearly 20 years. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she lives in Swissvale with her husband, four children and one cat.