In 2000, Lawrenceville resident Joseph Zmenkowski passed away at the age of 81. He had owned his home on Denny Street for 50 years. A year later, a small real-estate company called Wylie Holdings bought his home through an estate sale for $1,000. Sixteen years later, the property is listed on Wylie’s website as “ready for renovation” with an asking price of $165,000.
Pictures on Wylie’s website show walls covered in chipped paint, a kitchen with ancient appliances and an attic filled with holes and rotted wood. Also, Pittsburgh City Paper couldn’t find any renovation permits for the property listed in the records of Pittsburgh’s Department of Permits, Licenses and Inspections.
The process of buying a property cheaply, waiting and making no improvements, and then selling high is known as land speculation. Free-market proponents say it’s the benefit of entering a risky market early; critics say the tactic can inhibit the equitable, community-minded development neighborhoods try to achieve.
For Wylie, land speculation is just one part of a mixed real-estate portfolio. While Wylie’s management team of Joe Edelstein and Ron King have been a force in helping Lawrenceville’s Butler Street transform from grubby streetscape to Pittsburgh’s hippest business district, their record as landlords has drawn strong criticism from tenants. And while Wylie has won more than 30 awards for preserving historic buildings, some community-oriented developers say Wylie’s development tactics also help to spur gentrification and, at times, can hold properties hostage in the name of earning profits. Financially, Wylie has become wildly successful, cashing in on the rapidly changing housing market in Lawrenceville and beyond. But what does this mean for the neighborhoods it works in?
Rick Swartz, of the community-development organization Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., says residents who are concerned with rising home prices and rents have little ability to keep their neighborhood affordable.
“The community has no leverage, either legal or moral, that it can use to stop that from happening,” says Swartz. “What it obviously does, is it raises the stakes of the people in the community that are trying stay.”
Starting about 20 years ago, in a small office on Butler Street, Wylie began scooping up properties for cheap, mostly in Lawrenceville. It purchased lots and homes, sometimes for only a few hundred dollars, through private estate sales and from the city of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Since then, Wylie has bought and sold hundreds of properties. Some properties it remodeled and sold within a couple of years, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, while creating homes Wylie is proud of.
“We saw potential where others didn’t,” wrote Wylie business manager Joe Edelstein in an email to CP. (Wylie would only agree to answer questions for this story by email.) “There were few, if any, other interested buyers, and it was a risky business strategy that involved buying hundreds of small properties with hopes of spurring revitalization in the long run.”
With dozens of these properties, Wylie made no improvements and sold them for amounts that were sometimes more than 20 times its original investment. The company is currently employing this strategy on a lot in Bloomfield, which it purchased in 2014 for $6,800 from Bank of New York Mellon.
The gravel lot is next to the new 39-unit affordable-housing building for veterans on Penn Avenue and Mathilda Street. Affordable-housing nonprofit Action Housing developed the property, and its director, Linda Metropulos, says Action tried to purchase the adjacent, Wylie-owned lot twice to use as an extra parking lot for tenants (initially for $32,000 and later for $52,000). Wylie refused, and the gravel lot, originally listed at $300,000, is currently under contract.
According to a review of Allegheny County property-record data, when factoring in purchase and sale prices, as well as renovation costs listed in Pittsburgh’s permit department, Wylie made more than $3 million in profit from property sales and flips in 2016. Of this $3 million, $1.6 million was earned from land speculation alone. Since 1998, Wylie has purchased 171 properties, mostly in Lawrenceville, and has sold 54 of those so far.
Swartz says this puts those who want to create equitable development in neighborhoods behind the eight ball. “The private market is going to do what it wants to do,” says Swartz. “As long as it’s not illegal and conforms to city code, there is not a whole lot people can do to deflect the trend, other than outrun it.”
But that strategy likely won’t work for Lawrenceville. Most of Wylie’s properties are in that neighborhood, and the company has had a presence there since the beginning of the neighborhood’s revitalization. For its part, Wylie contributed to Lawrenceville Corporation’s goal of transforming Butler Street by renovating retail spaces along the corridor, which helped attract the hip retailers and restaurants that dominate there today. Swartz says this strategy helped light the fuse for a development explosion, which has contributed to high rents and expensive home sales.
Lawrenceville Corporation, a community-development group, has taken steps to address affordable housing over the past couple of years by establishing a Community Land Trust. In it, seven homes will maintain affordability from owner to owner in perpetuity, but Swartz says Lawrenceville Corporation has a long way to go to catch up to Wylie and similar developers. (Wylie recently sold an unrenovated house on the far edge of Lawrenceville, past 57th Street, for $300,000.)
“Someone fired the starting pistol, and all the other horses were released from the gate, and [Lawrenceville Corporation] are still back in the gate,” says Swartz.
A 2009 study from National Bureau of Economic Research shows that groups like Lawrenceville Corporation may now have a steep climb. The study compared buyers in the housing market with those in the stock market. It showed that small companies like Wylie can have an oversized effect on housing prices, and can drastically increase home prices in neighborhoods, even if it purchases only a small percentage of the overall housing stock. “In the housing market, a market where volume is much lower than in the stock market, optimists can drive up the price while spending much less wealth and obtaining a far smaller market share,” the study found.
Swartz says this is good and bad for long-time homeowners. Some will benefit from selling their homes for significant profits, but others wishing to stay will likely face rising property taxes. And renters will have to deal with higher and higher rents.
One of those renters is Cora Vercellotti. She says “all you need to do is take a walk in Lawrenceville” to see people being pushed out. She cites the new construction of sleek, modern homes on almost every block, and moving boxes in front of older homes as signs of a changing neighborhood.
In addition to land speculation and home-flipping, Wylie also maintains a number of rental properties. Lawrenceville’s Vercellotti rented a Wylie-owned apartment beginning in December 2013. She was 22 years old and working her first job in the finance industry. She wanted a nice place of her own, so she inquired about a one-bedroom Wylie listing in East Liberty. It was still under renovation, but the $850 rent was too good to pass up.
When she moved in, the renovations were done and the place looked great. However, she says, it soon became obvious those fixes were only cosmetic. The exposed-brick wall had holes that leaked puddles of water into the apartment. The heat and hot water didn’t work, and Vercellotti says the utility company couldn’t turn them on because both the furnace and water heater had “do not operate” tags. “I was 22, I did not know to check if the place was livable,” she says. “Why would they rent it out if it wasn’t?”
After sending numerous emails and making many calls complaining about the unit, Wylie let her out of the lease several months early, in May 2014. However, when it came time to return her $1,200 security deposit, Wylie only gave her $200, citing the damage to the unit.
But Vercellotti says the damage was caused by the leaky wall and other issues with the unit that were beyond her control. “All the damage was their fault.” But she didn’t have the energy to fight for her deposit.
“Do I want a grand, or do I want to spend 40 hours of my life arguing with rich people who have lawyers?” she says. “Why [did they] need my $1,000 so badly. I don’t understand the greed.”
Anna Sekine, a student at Chatham University, lived in a Wylie unit in Lawrenceville with her sister for one year. When she moved out, she says, she “made sure that everything was meticulously clean, because we really needed our security deposit back.” When they left, Sekine says Wylie claimed it took “a crew of three to four men to paint our 700-square-foot apartment over 16 hours” and refused to return most of her deposit.
Wylie officials say they have had only “rare exceptions” of bad tenant-landlord interactions. “We are comfortable with our tenant practices and proud of our business reputation,” wrote Edelstein.
And at least one of Wylie’s current tenants agrees. Megan Dyer lives in Lawrenceville and says Wylie has been a “great company to rent from.” She cites its promptness in addressing maintenance issues and extremely pet-friendly policies as benefits to living in Wylie properties.
Wylie embraces support from tenants like Dyer (a testimonial on Wylie’s website from “Meg D” cites similar praise). But when former tenants voice more critical views, the company bites back.
When Vercellotti posted her Wylie experience on NextDoor Lawrenceville, a social-networking site for neighbors, Wylie sent her a cease-and-desist letter saying she was spreading “false, destructive, and defamatory rumors” about the company. (Another former tenant, Brian McDowell, also showed CP a cease-and-desist letter that Wylie sent him after he posted a critical opinion of them online.)
Vercellotti says she has truth on her side. (She showed CP videos backing up her claims of a leaky roof and other problems.) She embraces the cease-and-desist order as a badge of honor. “I keep the cease-and-desist on my fridge to remind me of my own power,” she says. “And that [way], when others try to silence me, my power in truth is all the more vital.”
However, Wylie sees itself as a good community player. In Edelstein’s email to CP, he cites Wylie’s sponsorship of such places and events as the community dog park, the annual Butler Street Cookie Tour and Art All Night. “[We’ve] contributed time and money to just about every organization and event that exists in Lawrenceville,” he wrote.
But critics argue such sponsorship doesn’t address the neighborhood’s most-pressing concerns. Swartz, of Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., says neighborhoods like Lawrenceville are struggling to create enough permanently affordable units to counter skyrocketing rent.
“Small developers like Wylie and others do not invite any collaboration with the community,” says Swartz. “It’s almost like they all went to the same school and learned the first thing you do when buying distressed property in an inner-city neighborhood is not to contact the community organization.”
Swartz says Wylie is hardly alone in this financial pursuit, and a few developers have snatched up cheap Garfield properties, looking to flip them into luxury units for significant profit.
“Real-estate speculation can be a very amoral enterprise,” says Swartz. “[It’s] really about one thing and that is making money. It’s not about serving a neighborhood or serving a population that arguably needs a little help.”
Jeanne McNutt, of Uptown Partners, says her neighborhood has been held hostage by land speculators for years. Uptown is a small neighborhood sitting between Downtown and Oakland with only about 800 residents, but 25 acres of mostly empty parking lots. McNutt says one family owns about 150 properties in Uptown, and another speculator owns 60. McNutt says both of these speculators are just sitting on most of their properties, many of which are vacant, hoping to make a substantial profit on a future sale.
“Investment in Uptown has reached a new high,” says McNutt. “It’s time for [these speculators] to unburden the neighborhood by selling parking lots … to make way for mixed-use development, including housing and much-needed retail.”
But can anything be done to keep developers from altering the economic landscapes of neighborhoods?
For more than a decade, says Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s chief of staff, Kevin Acklin, city-owned properties were merely listed on the city’s real-estate-holdings website. From there, anyone could purchase city-owned plots with little oversight. This is how companies like Wylie were able to purchase a fair amount of city-owned lots for really cheap, says Acklin.
“In prior administrations, the thought process was it was too expensive and burdensome to hold onto city land,” Acklin says. “So the assumption was land should be just sold.”
Now, Acklin says that process has flipped. The city and its Urban Redevelopment Authority are close to finalizing a 25-item plan meant to ensure that city-owned land is sold more carefully. Ideally, the city hopes to maintain some of its land to be used as parkland, storm-water management, or affordable-housing development. He says that about a year ago, the administration stopped selling land just to unload it. “This is our wealth,” says Acklin. “Vacant and abandoned properties are not a liability, they are an asset.”
Acklin added that the administration is not hostile to private development, and that it encourages developers to improve the housing stock. But he says the city must be better at managing property sales to developers, and at seeking buyers who have the community’s best interests at heart.
“We created this new process so we can avoid the speculative developers who don’t do community-driven development, or those who have not paid taxes and are looking to buy up land to sit on it and expose communities to blight,” Acklin says.
But while developers may have a harder time getting their hands on cheap public land, there’s nothing stopping them from aggressively pursuing private land. In just the past three months, for example, Wylie has purchased nine lots in Lawrenceville for a combined $147,000.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2017.
a nicely researched article on one side. however, you should do the same financial research on Bloomfield Garfield Corp and ELDI, who has also made hundreds of thousands of dollars on vacant and dilapidated properties in East Liberty and Garfield by selling them to investors, renovators, contractors… Community groups get exclusive rights to the properties from the city for prices of $100, $1000, and then often sell them off without touching them.
Not surprised by any of this. Joe Edelstein is a crook. He was convicted of insurance fraud years ago. Just google his name. He knows every way to bilk people out of money.
I cant believe those sob’s invested thousands of hours and millions of dollars into our city….
😉
No effort to talk to Lawrenceville United or Lawrenceville Corporation? Ryan Deto with another failure!
So, whats the take-away supposed to be here? Wylie has contributed to the improvement of an entire community, provided housing, increased property values for residents, beautified the city, improved the local economy, brought in businesses which gives people jobs, got abandoned tax-delinquent properties producing taxes for the city again….. and you whiners are flipping them crap about increased rents and two tenant complaints? Bad neighbors? What dorks. Why dont you, CP, send a follow-up email to Edelstein thanking him for answering your questions and apologize for birthing a well-oiled hit piece. –Ken Elshoff
Hey all, thanks for the comments. Comments from all sides are always an appreciated addition to the story’s narrative. I just want to address one thing: I reached out to both Lawrenceville United and Lawrenceville Corporation, and both chose not to comment on this story. Thanks for reading. -Ryan Deto
Shame on the City Paper for writing such a negative article about one of the true gems of our city, Lawrenceville! If it weren’t for Wylie Holdings there would be no Lawrenceville. Wylie Holdings invested in this neighborhood when no one else wanted to, and over two decades created a massive tenant community that now serves as the consumer base for hundreds of businesses throughout the commercial corridor of Butler Street. I happen to think, as many Pittsburghers do, that Lawrenceville is the most dynamic, diverse and delightful neighborhood in Pittsburgh. A night out in one of the many trendy restaurants or an afternoon of one-of-a-kind shopping is all possible because two investors took a chance on community development 20 years ago. Thank you, Wylie Holdings, for not just “speculating” on this zip code but truly investing your time and effort into making it what it is today. Keep up the great work!
If there was a nuclear war, and I was wandering through the desolate wasteland, making friends with cockroaches that I would name Frank and Nancy, only to resort to eating them as my stomach churned after days without food, and I came upon a vacant fallout shelter that said Wylie Holdings on the front door, I would still not rent it.
At an apartment I rented through Wylie, there was a leak that they would cosmetically repair every few months. We knew there was mold in the ceiling, but they refused to deal with the actual problem. They even resorted to blaming our upstairs neighbors, accusing them of making a mess in their bathroom, which they speculated was causing water to leak. We were friends with those tenants and knew that this was false.
I can’t say my experience was as bad as others who didn’t even receive their security deposits after moving out, but they would never do proper maintenance. We were good tenants and always paid our rent on time.
Also, while I agree that it was probably risky for them to buy property in this area of town, it also took a community of people moving into the area who were starting and/or working at the restaurants, retailers, coffee shops, and other developments to make Lawrenceville what it is today. Realtors like Wylie are now pricing those people out of the community in an effort to court people with a higher income who had nothing to do with developing the community into its current state.
I challenge you Robert to back up your claim about the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation with citations. BGC and ELDI are separate organizations with completely different models and philosophies on land use and sales. As a board member for BGC I can assure you we are not by any means making hundreds of thousands of dollars on anything, let alone property sales.
Wylie Holdings is the reason Lawrenceville is what it is today. These guys invested in a neighborhood that had an abundance of problems. These guys should be thanked and not slammed in your article. So they made a profit…So what? They followed their vision and it paid off. Why were you not blasting them when Butler Street was full of drugs, violence, and prostitution?
Real-estate speculation can be a very amoral enterprise? Really? Another amoral enterprise is writing an article where you first draw a conclusion, then do your research, and ignore any research that does not support your original hypothetical conclusion. But I guess vilifying successful people is always easy, low-hanging fruit for a writer. The law of supply and demand says that as demand increases, prices go up. Demand (and the neighborhoods tax base) has increased in Lawrenceville because developers like Wylie Holdings and countless other developers have risked millions of dollars and countless hours of sweat equity to revitalize the community. Despite the opinions of a few disgruntled tenants who were selectively chosen to make a point, Id say theyve done a pretty good job. Thank them dont scold them for it! Developers only succeed when they give the market what it is asking for, and when they succeed, they make money. It is easy to complain about the big guy, but you don’t hear much complaining when an individual who bought their house in 2001 for $20,000 sells it for $300,000. Should they instead sell it for $25,000 because that is more fair? If the author owned a house in the neighborhood, would this be his strategy?
I am so shocked by this e-mail and the negativity. Guys, they invested millions in renovating Pittsburgh and make this neighborhood better. I am in shock for the lack of consideration for people that took risks and eventually help to make the city better.
The rhetoric and logic of this article is so easy and flawed that I am even wondering how it can be seriously published in this paper.
(And note that Wylie’s agreed to reply to the CPs question …. what an asshole!)
Rebekkah, here is the information you requested for BGC transfers:
4906 Rosetta bought by BGC for 33,070 in 2013, sold for 131,500 in 2016
5122 Penn bought by BGC in 1992 for 80,000, sold for 420,000 in 2016
4924 Dearborn, City of Pgh to BGC for $1000 in 2015, sold by BGC in 2016 for 7000
5446 Broad St bought by BGC in 1994 for 17,500, sold by BGC in 2015 for 93000
a host of vacant lots purchased for $100 to $1000 each from City of Pgh to BGC, then resold to a development company for an average of $3000 each.
there are nearly 500 land transfers from BGC alone.
Please consider the following message from Rick Swartz, executive director of the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation (BGC):
In response to Robert Swope’s comment, let me say that there may be a Community Development Corporation (CDC) in town that somehow managed to acquire a property from the city at some point in the past and then flipped it for a substantial profit. The Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation (BGC) is not that CDC. We actually have taken one property in this manner from the city and re-sold it within a few months to a private buyer. It’s at 4924 Dearborn Street in Garfield. As Mr. Swope correctly notes, we were able to obtain the vacant house from the city for $1,000. We incurred another $2,447 in settlement costs on top of the $1,000 purchase price. When we re-sold it, we incurred another $787 in closing costs. The buyer paid us $7,000, but that was only after we issued a public RFP for prospective buyers to respond to, and had cleaned it out completely at a cost to us of over $2,000. We netted less than $1,000 in the end for all of our trouble.
Paul Leger, the city finance director, has no intention of letting any CDC abuse this process. And, as the market begins to recover in a number of distressed neighborhoods, it may become less necessary (hopefully) for CDC’s to ask the city to take vacant, tax-delinquent houses on their behalf. Folks like Mr. Swope will be able to buy them more swiftly from their owners, assuming they can find them. For us, though, it’s a 2-year-long process at best, and the property usually suffers further damage during that period.
The principal value in the city doing this is not to find a way for CDC’s to enrich themselves, but to remove liens totaling, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars that could leave the property vacant and blighted for a very long period of time. These sales, by the way, are open to other bidders, and we have been to court-supervised sales where other parties have outbid the CDC for the property that the city had taken on their behalf. It was all fair and square. Just sayin’.
just sayin too, the article took none of these factors into consideration for wylie holdings. its easy to see this stuff in black and white on records, but as you mentioned above, theres a lot more to it.
Robert, I can see where you’re coming from if you only analyze county sale records and jump to conclusions from there, but as you’ve mentioned, there’s a much larger picture that includes holding costs and renovations. I think BGC did a nice job of responding to your concern with hard numbers.
Sure, you could take into account any expenses Wylie also incurred when doing their flips. What’s important to note, however, is that Wylie is a private developer that exists to make profit. BGC has a completely different incentive for land acquisition and is held accountable by local government. If we were making huge sums of money off any of the land we’ve acquired from the city they’d stop working with us.
ELDI has a for-profit arm of their organization that handles their real estate development, hence why you can’t compare our models. It’s apples and oranges.
@RyanDeto
Your piece was very poor journalism.
It wouldn’t have taken you 2 minutes to research Anna Sekine’s Claim on the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania Website. Do reporters still do research? Or do they report half the story to create a controversy where none exists.
Anna’s claim: Wylie stole her security deposit
Anna’s response: She filed suit at the magistrate.
Court response: Her claims were baseless because she had no proof, and Wylie had proper proof showing damage.
Obviously, Anna had damaged the property and her security deposit was used to remedy the damage. That is why security deposits exist. AND the courts agreed with Wylie.
https://ujsportal.pacourts.us/DocketSheets/MDJ.aspx
MJ-05231-CV-0000202-2016
To blame the success or failure of a neighborhood on a single for-profit entity is ridiculous, and marginalizes the hard work of Lawrenceville Corporation, Lawrenceville United, Lawenceville Stakeholders as well as the hundreds of individuals who took a chance on a not great neighborhood. If Wylie wasn’t there, someone else would have bought these properties, perhaps not even a speculator, but individuals who had vision for the neighborhood. And perhaps that would not have been an altogether bad thing.
The devil is not Wylie, lay the blame on the people who are bat #*@( crazy paying a fortune for these properties in Lawrenceville. No person in their right mind spends over $300k on a tiny 2 bedroom home with no on-street parking regardless of how nice the granite counters or hand scraped hardwood floors are. Yet it regularly happens.
I’ve lived in Lawrenceville since 1995 when I bought a home there. I own a corporate lodging business with properties in L’ville and Bloomfield. I’ve seen and benefited firsthand from the current real estate boom. But even I realize a real estate market cannot grow exponentially for an infinite amount of time. There comes a point where people come to their senses and refuse to pay $200k+ for a 600 square foot condo. When the bubble bursts and those homeowners are now under water, those granite counters are going to gleam a little less.
If I was looking to rent in Lawrenceville and read this article – I would absolutly not rent from them. If the goal of this article was to be destructive to their reputation you succeeded.
This article is a new low for the city paper. You are attacking Wylie for revitalizing a distressed neighborhood. Do you realize how bad things had to be for a property to be sold for $1000???? I am so glad that Wylie brought their talents and vision to this neighborhood. Seems to me that Wylie is not the only business to benefit from this boom in Lawrenceville. Amoral? This is textbook real estate 101. Perhaps the author should sit in on a business course some day and learn the real definition of “Land Speculation.”
This article is the definition of #fakenews.
The problem with this article is that Ryan obviously intended it to be read as an investigative report, when the article is really an opinion piece with an agenda. My 100% guess…. with no prior knowledge of Ryan, is that he’s in his 20s and voted for Bernie Sanders….. and he’s probably pro Apple and Anti Microsoft (even though Steve Jobs was probably one of the most ruthless capitalists ever). What Ryan should have stated at the top of the article is that it is an OPINION piece. Ryan obviously has no concept of capitalism and the wide ranging advancements for the human condition solely credited to capitalism. Free market capitalism is responsible for providing just about every necessity and convenience that Ryan enjoys. Those necessities and conveniences were invented or discovered for one reason….Profit. The profit motive is responsible for the greatest of human achievements.
Businesses aren’t in business to provide 22 year old girls with cozy apartments. Businesses must either make a profit or cease to exist. Those are the only two possibilities. It’s not Wiley’s job to take care of the people in Lawrencville. But funny enough, Lawrenceville has thrived and prospered because of “Speculators.” Listen, ever single business decision made by every business owner is a Damn Speculation. Business owners make and lose money based on their bets. If they bet big and bet correct, they win big. If not, they go bankrupt. When a business like Wiley becomes successful and wealthy, they create hundreds of jobs in their community. The ripple effect is what causes economic growth and success for a NATION. I’d love to have an apartment in Time Square, Ryan. But guess what???? IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE. That’s the problem with the Bernie Sanders 20 something year old person. They BELIEVE that they are ENTITLED to any number of things. They subscribe to GROUP THINK. You can boil it all down to the concept known as COLLECTIVISM, AKA SOCIALISM. I’m glad that the owners of Wiley are smart enough to take a worthless piece of property and make that property valuable. The owners of Wiley are 2 people that I don’t have to worry about paying more tax to support. Next time Ryan does a slanted, one-sided piece designed to make a successful business look bad, he should at least label it as an opinion piece and state his point of view. In Closing, he should’ve also included an alternative point of view
Hey Pittsburgh Nick. First off, as always, thanks for reading and thanks for the input. It’s always good to get different sides to stories. Secondly, I am 30, I don’t like Apple or Microsoft (especially their dumb ads), I went to college in California and Oregon, my mom’s family is from rural West Virginia and my dad’s is from the Bay Area of CA. I love to cook and drink beer, and I love playing and watching baseball, football and basketball, but thanks for making broad assumptions about me.
As for the claim that this article is slanted or an opinion piece written by me. As clearly showcased in the article, I merely documented the facts about Wylie (their profits and their cease-and-desists letters) and then let many sources share their experiences and opinions about Wylie and land speculation. I also include the side of Wylie in numerous quotes from Joe Edelstein, which he sent via email. I actually wanted even more input from Wylie, but they refused multiple requests for in-person interviews. I also reached out to Lawrenceville Corporation and Lawrenceville United, two organizations who have relationships with Wylie, for comment, and they also refused. The article, like most articles, presents facts and quotes in a narrative, and lets the reader decide what to take away from it. As shown in the comment sections below, some people took it one way and some took it another. I have also received numerous emails providing even more points of view on the story.
Best,
Ryan Deto
Staff Writer
Pittsburgh City Paper
ryandeto@pghcitypaper.com