Affordable-ish Housing in Pittsburgh: We’re so old edition

Wow, Pittsburgh, your houses are so old!

The median house in Pittsburgh is 68 years old, built in 1956. That gives us the oldest housing stock in the country after Buffalo, N.Y., according to a report by Redfin (though this is not new information). That’s pretty amazing, because most places east of the Allegheny Mountains got a 100-year (or more) head start building houses; Boston, Ma., and Charleston, S.C., were already major cities when Pittsburgh was still a riverside fort in the wilderness.

Having old houses isn’t necessarily good or bad. Sure, it’s probably bad that we haven’t built much new housing from the ‘70s until quite recently, because our steel-based economy was busy imploding and our air tasted like deep-fried truck tires, so people weren’t in a rush to move here. On the other hand, maybe it’s not all bad, because the suburban sprawl era was a terrible mistake that sucked the life out of cities in favor of atomized, segregated, redlined, and utterly interchangeable nowheresvilles that might as well just be more Ohio.

The past wasn’t better than the present; there’s just a lot more of it. In a few years, there will hardly be anyone left who remembers the steel industry’s heyday, or the shared sacrifice that was required to beat the Nazis (some are already having trouble identifying the Nazis as the bad guys). New industries will arrive on our shores; old ones will fade into the sunset.

But those weird little houses built before the war, dotting the hillsides — those are still going to be here.

For rent: The Pennsylvanian, 1100 Liberty Ave., Downtown, $1,484/month.
I’m not going to pine for the days when you could build things like this; the masses of skilled craftsmen who could conduct symphonies in brick and terra cotta are resting their bones in the cemetery now. Plus, I’ve noticed a weird undercurrent of sweaty, manosphere-adjacent architecture bros who have decided that pre-modernist ornamented styles are just another front in the war to convince us that things were better back when those people knew their place. I hate that garbage; I just want to have an elegant place to wait for the hundreds of trains that no longer run to all points of the compass. Apartments here go up to $2,599, but the smallest studios are $1,484.

For sale: 1313 Ingham St., Marshall-Shadeland, $219,900.
So, this 1930 brick beauty is going for $220k? Oh, it last sold for $85,000 in 2024, which is a pretty wild mark-up, even in this unsettled economic environment. The inside is pretty typical of what tends to happen, and I don’t feel the need to constantly reiterate my disdain for these kinds of minimalist-greige makeovers. History will look less kindly on this approach than it does on even the most egregiously stuccoed and wood-paneled excesses of the ‘80s. Those houses were ugly, but at least they could party.

For rent: The Wellington, 245 Melwood Ave., Oakland, $1,425/month.
The listing says this is new construction, but that seems inaccurate; there’s no way this was built after World War II. However, Melwood Avenue is one of those weird warp zones where dense multifamily development is actually allowed and local NIMBYs seem unorganized or unmotivated to stop it. For the record: this is a city; well-maintained, apartment towers are good, actually, and this is exactly the sort of thing that can keep neighborhoods affordable for people that don’t want or need a single-family home (students, young professionals, seniors). This may not be new, but it would be better if more things like this were getting built.

For sale: 3075 Mount Troy Rd., Spring Garden, $239,900.
This house just dropped by $7,000, which is a thing that’s becoming pretty common. Is the end of the great housing prices inflation of the 2020s at hand? Perhaps, but homebuilding looks like it may slow down considerably — or perhaps drop off a cliff entirely — in the near future. Why? I’m no contractor, but it seems like jacking up the costs of your supplies (Canadian lumber, for example), while deporting a chunk of your workforce may be a problem. If you’re taking a wait-and-see approach, well, everything’s a gamble, isn’t it?

For rent: Hampshire Hall, 4730 Centre Ave., Oakland, $595/month.
Sub-$600/month rents in Oakland and adjacent areas are about as common as Steelers playoff victories nowadays, but this doesn’t seem to be a typo or phantom listing haunting us from 1997. Yeah, it’s pretty bare-bones, but there’s a lot of natural light and a negligible commute to a lot of useful schools and jobs.

For sale: 725 Dunster St., West Liberty, $229,900.
West Liberty is pretty obscure, even for Pittsburgh; I can’t really recall anything about it, or even where it is (it’s near Brookline). This one follows the usual formula: a little grubby on the outside (the multicolored bricks are just varying hues of brown), and a bright-white-walled, laminate-floored Realtor’s special on the inside. But if you need a reason to get excited, that’s 1,860 square feet with a garage, near the aforementioned Brookline —perhaps Pittsburgh’s most underrated walkable neighborhood.

This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2025.