Memo to Remote Workers Looking to Pittsburgh
To remote-work carpetbaggers fleeing soon-to-be-socialist New York and other failing cities who are looking to take advantage of Pittsburgh's developing-economy prices, I have a simple message that I’ve adapted from remarks given by former Vice President Kamala Harris: “Do not come. Do not come.”
For me, the last straw was when one of these newly-arrived folks – a software engineer acquaintance of mine – referred to the Burgh as a nice “starter city,” a place to save a little money before he returned to a real metro somewhere else. Though a decent enough person, that proud owner of a $500,000 Lawrenceville property bought via cash sale got it precisely backwards. This city is a finisher and always has been, as dead an end as you'll find anywhere. My dad and uncle are my only two family members who haven't died here, and my uncle only couldn’t because he expired in 2015 while on a diplomatic mission to Russia.
The Post-Gazette's recent coverage of Pittsburgh's affordability misses the forest for the trees. Yes, homes here are cheaper than San Francisco. But when service industry workers earning $28,500 to $32,200 annually face home price-to-income ratios of 7.8 to 8.8 times their salary – nearly triple what's considered affordable – the math tells a different story. Even office workers earning $47,440 find themselves priced out at 5.3 times income. For a retail worker, mortgage payments on a median-priced home would consume 66% of their income, which is well more than double the recommended 28%.
I know plenty of hard-working University of Pittsburgh secretaries and even full-time lecturers paid far less than $40,000 a year who are forced to watch homes in Polish Hill list for $700,000. Pittsburgh workers earn 8% less than the national average, yet median home prices have surged to between $250,000 and $275,000. Restaurant workers can afford only 24.4% of homes for sale, while even teachers can afford just 64.2%.
Meanwhile, the local schools of this affordability paradise continue hemorrhaging students. Pittsburgh Public Schools enrollment has dropped below 20,000 for the first time, falling to just 18,650 in 2024-25. The district projects losing another 5,800 students by 2031-32, bringing enrollment to 12,800. Fourteen schools face closure, with 10 facilities permanently shuttering – from Friendship to Manchester to Spring Hill, including the one a block from our house.
This is plain and simple displacement, not natural decline. Pittsburgh's under-18 population plummeted 17% in the last decade even as overall city population supposedly stabilized. While families flee, remote workers from New York, Washington, and Philadelphia flood in. Approximately 50% of property website views come from outside Pittsburgh. These arrivals drove Pittsburgh home prices up 22% from February 2023 to February 2024, making it the fastest-growing market nationally. In hot neighborhoods, 35% of homes sell above asking price. Research has shown a mere 1% increase in remote workers correlates with 0.93% additional house price growth.
"Own a home. Work in tech. Move to Pittsburgh." That's what Duolingo plastered on a billboard along Highway 101 in San Francisco back in 2019, right where all those Mission District tech workers could see it during their soul-crushing commutes. The language-learning app got about fifty calls from people ready to trade their $4,000 studio apartments for actual houses with yards. One new hire reportedly bought a home "almost immediately" – something that would've been a pipe dream in the Bay Area.
Many of these well-to-do carpetbaggers are young, childless, and, like my friend, happy to pay above market rates in cash for homes that once sheltered families. They're turning Pittsburgh into their personal playground while our homegrown kids – the city's actual future – disappear. My wife and I have a 5-year-old. We want to raise her here, give her a Pittsburgh life, hope she can have one. But how, when schools close and neighborhoods transform beyond recognition?
The regional brain drain will certainly continue unabated – not just the handful of local kids made good but whip-smart international PhD. students headed back to exotic locales that are enjoying actual authoritarian regime-powered renaissances such as Saudi Arabia and the People’s Republic of China. State flagship universities like Pitt and top research institutions like CMU “have greater out-of-state migration” as their reputations attract students who then depart for meaningful opportunities elsewhere. And despite $1.3 billion spent on R&D between 2009-2018, Pittsburgh has 7% fewer high-tech jobs than in 2000. If tech employment matched university research, we’d have 9,000 more software jobs.
Pittsburgh's stuck-in-place inclusionary zoning efforts face fierce resistance from developers who claim each affordable unit costs them $250,000-$300,000. Since 2019, the pilot program produced exactly one completed project: 35 affordable units out of 343 total. The Builders Association sued in federal court, claiming the modest 10% requirement violates the Constitution. Years earlier, East Liberty demolished hundreds of affordable units at Penn Plaza to make way for Google and “five of Pittsburgh's 33 best restaurants.” Why build for secretaries earning $40,000 when tech workers pay $150,000+ cash?
During former mayor Bill Peduto's “Most Livable City” era – when he struggled to lift trash cans on Undercover Boss and The Economist ranked us 2nd nationally and 32nd globally – Pittsburgh lost 10,660 Black residents, a 13.4% decline. The city's Gender Equity Commission found “third-world” infant mortality rates in our black communities.
Pittsburgh's history reveals this pattern repeatedly. The 1950s “Pittsburgh Renaissance" demolished the Lower Hill District, displacing 8,000 mostly African-American residents and 400 businesses. Compensation proved too small to buy homes elsewhere, “contributing to the proliferation of opportunistic slum landlord domination.” Promised replacement housing didn’t materialize until 1993-2000, nearly four decades later.
Today’s Lower Hill redevelopment repeats the cycle. After 15 years of promises, developers failed to deliver the Ammon Recreation Center, job training, or cultural partnerships. As one East Liberty resident said after hanging a “Black Homes Matter” sign that “no one paid much mind" – “not enough of us care anywhere,” as poet Langston Hughes wrote a century ago.
When service workers face 8:1 price-to-income ratios, when schools empty as childless millennials buy family homes, when “Most Livable” coincides with an inability for black population loss because they simply have no way to make a living, we see the crisis clearly. Sure, Pittsburgh is affordable, but for whom? Pittsburgh lifer and Democratic nominee for mayor Corey O’Connor needs to remember that livability starts with the people whose families have spent multiple lifetimes building this flawed, wonderful place.
