For the first time, Allegheny County and the city of Pittsburgh combined research resources to produce a housing report that analyzed the city and the county together to showcase a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the area’s housing market.
It showed that for most of Allegheny County, the market is hot, and housing prices are rising. But that housing boom is not happening evenly across demographics, and Black residents are largely being left out of the housing market surge.
The report, the “2021 Housing Market Value Analysis,” was commissioned by the Allegheny County Economic Development and Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority.
The Market Value Analysis found that a majority of Allegheny County residents live in robust (44%) or steady (30%) market types. These markets have strong housing demand and low levels of housing distress, like blighted properties and vacant lots.
Pittsburgh City Paper reporting mirrored these results, as the pandemic actually led to a rise in housing prices and a growth in demand for housing in some urban and suburban areas of the county, especially those with a large amount of amenities.
Housing prices in the city of Pittsburgh were up about 20%, when comparing February 2021 with February 2020, according to house listing site Redfin. The average home price in Pittsburgh is currently $217,000, a 3.9% increase from this time last year. According to the Market Value Analysis report, the region’s strong overall housing market likely benefited from not suffering from the foreclosure crisis of 2008 to the same extent other parts of the country went through.
According to a press release, “home sale prices have increased much more rapidly than inflation since 2016, creating increased home equity for many Allegheny County homeowners, but also placing financial pressure on low- and moderate- income households and narrowing the geography of opportunity for those households.” Some neighborhoods in Pittsburgh for the last several years have struggled with gentrification issues.
Even as the majority of Allegheny County residents now live in robust and steady housing markets, there are still 27% of people who live in market types with housing challenges including blighting influences and elevated foreclosure filings.
And those residents are more likely to be people of color. The release notes that Black and Latino residents are disproportionately likely to live in market types with housing challenges. This is especially true for Black residents in Allegheny County, with 66% of Black residents living in markets with housing challenges. This is compared to 21% of white residents living in these struggling housing markets, and 32% of Latinos living in those markets.
Regional housing experts are hoping for more reports like these to continue in the future, so that policy makers can respond to exactly what needs the region has.
“We look forward to the periodic MVA updates because it offers us as policymakers the opportunity to check our gut intuitions about the housing market against hard-data realities,” said URA Executive Director Greg Flisram in a release. “With increasingly limited resources, we must rely on partnerships, and smart policy rooted in data to ensure our interventions have impact.”
The full report can be viewed ACED website and URA website.
This article appears in Dec 22, 2021 – Jan 4, 2022.
