Once you cite a list in an article, as I often to, PR folks tend to send you all the lists in existence. If you zoom out and look at them all together, they sometimes tell a coherent story. Often, they don’t. This is the latter.
- Want to buy a house? Pittsburgh ranks as the No. 4 buyer’s market in the country, where home buyers have the most negotiating power. YES, I FEEL THE (NEGOTIATING) POWER COURSING THROUGH MY VEINS.
- Pittsburgh’s renters are shrinking. (For a second there, I thought that meant we were getting an influx of tiny people — gnomes or elves or something. Well, we do have plenty of weird little houses for sale). It actually means that homeownership is skyrocketing: “Pittsburgh’s Millennial renter base fell 10.5% while homeownership climbed 49.3% between 2018 and 2023.”
- Pennsylvania is ranked the 9th-best state to live in. I mean, OK, but Pennsylvania is really about 3-4 different states glommed together into one arbitrary rectangle. Ever cheered for anything that happened in Philadelphia? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
- “Pennsylvania records 249.06
- searches per 100,000 residents monthly, placing the state 14th nationally and 20 points above the national median of 228.66.” Old houses have some downsides.
For sale: 3936 Kleber St., Brighton Heights. $265,000.
If you look at Zillow’s charts of home price appreciation, they tend to move steadily upwards until about last year, and then the line jumps around like crazy like an EKG for a patient so dire that they’re calling Dr. Robby in, and he barely has time to scream in the bathroom mirror first. This three-bedroom with a nice backyard on a cobblestone street in Brighton Heights just dropped a little, but that doesn’t seem beholden to any sort of pattern.
For rent: Terminal 21, 615 1stAve., Downtown. $1,269/month.
This is a pretty peculiar part of Downtown, which may explain the low price. Yes, your closest neighbors are likely incarcerated, but let’s be honest, they weren’t going to invite you over for nachos and Nintendo anyway. This is one of those old warehouse conversions that did a stint as dorms (for the late Art Institute), and it would be great if we had 10 times as many. Our once-inexhaustible supply of aging industrial buildings isn’t gone entirely, but it’s getting closer to extinction every year.
For sale: 733 Highview Rd., Overbrook. $260,000.…