Pittsburgh has changed since the decline of steel, and perhaps no neighborhood is clearer evidence of that than Upper Lawrenceville. Once a steel hub, the former home of Lucy Furnace is in a real estate boom, with ample new construction and houses going for an average of $448,360, per Zillow.
Wylie Holdings, which Pittsburgh City Paper briefly covered in Part One of this story, played a prominent role in the neighborhood’s metamorphosis. The company brought businesses and young people to previously vacant properties. It also angered some area residents with questionable practices, and upward pressure on the area’s real-estate market.
Wylie sold most of its assets to Baltimore-based Riparian Management in 2024, leaving Riparian with valuable but maintenance-intensive properties, skeptical tenants, and well-organized neighborhood groups. After early missteps, the company is under pressure to make good with its remaining tenants. Riparian’s CEO says it has implemented policy changes, and has short- and long-term plans for a local presence.
But the unaffordability of a growing swath of the East End — and hard-to-reach, out-of-town landlords — may still be a foregone conclusion without broader changes in policy. Two Riparian tenants interviewed by City Paper after publication of Part One corroborated many of the same concerns about communication and notices to vacate detailed in our first story.
“We ended up experiencing many of the same issues you reported: short notice for home inspections that never ended up taking place, and a signed lease extension offer that was later rescinded and replaced with a 90-day notice to vacate,” Upper Lawrenceville resident Matthew Buck tells CP.
“I haven’t been able to reach them through any avenues,” a second anonymous tenant says. “All I’m looking for is answers.”
From “crime-ridden” to unaffordable
Upper Lawrenceville was, by many accounts, a different place 20 years ago. It was low on a list released in 2000 that ranked Pittsburgh neighborhoods by percentage of college graduates. News articles from the time describe a neighborhood in the early stages of gentrification. Several of those articles also note the role early developers played in reawakening the Butler Street corridor — and their sometimes legally dubious and disruptive ways of doing business.
Wylie drew local media scrutiny at the time. The company allegedly submitted inflated estimates for renovations in exchange for interest-free loans from Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority between 2006 and 2008, per the Tribune-Review. (“It’s not like we could just give it to somebody we liked,” a URA employee said at the time.) Wylie’s managing partner, Joe Edelstein, also reportedly pled guilty to health care fraud in a previous 1996 case. (Edelstein did not respond to CP requests for comment by email and text.)
“It was a risky business strategy that involved buying hundreds of small properties with hopes of spurring revitalization in the long run,” Edelstein told CP in 2017 regarding Wylie’s history.
The company acquired a mixed reputation among its tenants as its portfolio grew over the years. Wylie has 31 reviews on Google, with an average rating of three stars, and several Reddit threads dedicated to cautionary tales about its role in Pittsburgh real estate. Sources CP contacted for this two-part story describe a relationship of necessity with Wylie given their outsized presence in the neighborhood.
By 2021, Edelstein was telling a panel convened by the Pittsburgh Business Times that his company played “a pivotal role” in getting Lawrenceville back to its “former glory.”
“Our strategy was to identify, purchase and improve all the derelict properties we could get our hands on,” Edelstein said at the time, the goal being remediation of “crime-ridden neighborhoods [with] entrenched bad actors.”
The numbers tell an interesting story: crime, while always relatively low, has in fact fallen in the area, per a 2022 neighborhood metrics report by the Lawrenceville Corporation (LC). Housing prices have concurrently risen — the report found a tenfold increase in median home sale price since 2000. While Lower and Central Lawrenceville’s populations increased by over 10% and 5%, respectively, Upper Lawrenceville actually saw a more than 10% decrease in its population. Much of the growth was driven by a decrease in seniors and a 40% jump in residents aged 25 to 34.
During that time, Lawrenceville as a whole has also seen a 68% decrease in its total Black population — disproportionate to the city’s overall decrease in Black population of 13.4%. Increased rent, notices to vacate ahead of renovations, fewer properties accepting Section 8 vouchers, and other factors have all accelerated this phenomenon.
Residents say the changes afoot raise questions about how to keep Pittsburgh affordable for existing residents — and who gets the final say in that decision.
To rent or to own
Riparian is no stranger to cities in transition. Riparian CEO, Kris Garin, notes the company’s presence in Cleveland and Detroit, where the real estate markets have yet to bounce back as Pittsburgh’s has. Detroit, for example, has an average home price of $78,601, while Cleveland averages $116,771, both well shy of Pittsburgh’s $244,928. In Baltimore, where Riparian is headquartered, that number is $190,745.
“Historically, Riparian has operated primarily in deeply affordable communities in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest — partnering with dozens of housing authorities and voucher-issuing nonprofits in the process,” Garin tells CP. “When we met the Wylie team, they were already in the process of selling a portion of their portfolio, and we were confident that continuing the process they set in motion to convert a subset of rentals to owner-occupied would make it feasible for us to sustain a core portfolio of more affordable rentals for the longer term.”
The company’s claim to working in affordable housing is partly borne out of a large 2022 deal in the Baltimore area, where Riparian purchased 461 units using $54.7 million in loans that would enable the company to target renters making between 60 and 100% of the area’s median income (in Baltimore, $37,411). “Section 8 and other voucher programs are being used. Riparian owns more than $125 million in assets under management, making its [Single-Family Rental] portfolio one of the largest in the Mid-Atlantic area,” a report read at the time.
While it’s unknown how large the Wylie deal was, it seems Riparian’s intent is to sell off potentially millions of dollars in Pittsburgh properties acquired last year. “Wylie had already initiated a dispositions program for most of the single-family properties in their portfolio, transitioning them from rentals to owner-occupied over time. We expect to continue this program,” Garin says. “These sales are essential to allow us to preserve the remaining rental portfolio for the longer-term.”
As corporate real estate’s role increases, to rent or to own is a complicated decision for individual Pittsburghers. A recent report concluded that Pittsburgh was the only city nationwide where mortgages remained cheaper than the median monthly rent, but noted that “home prices in Pittsburgh have climbed roughly 31%, while rents have surged nearly 40% over the same time period, pushing the cost of renting beyond the cost of buying.” (The report also calls Pittsburgh “Midwestern.”) As other outlets have recently noted, locals are also strained by the area’s low salaries, and Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh’s $7.25 minimum wage.
Antony Gnalian, a former Lawrenceville resident, tells CP he experienced the same poor communication from Riparian as other tenants, and that he and his partner have been waiting longer than the required 30 days for their security deposit. Gnalian says they’ve been “very fortunate” compared to other Riparian tenants and recently purchased a home, but they were unable to find a place in Lawrenceville that was the right size, in good repair, and within their budget, and are moving instead to an inner-ring Pittsburgh suburb.
“Just living in Lawrenceville all the time that we had been living there, you could definitely see the change in the neighborhood, especially with rent prices going up,” Gnalian says. “You’re seeing more young urban professionals who can afford the higher rent prices, but you’re losing some of the cool cultural components of what made Lawrenceville really cool to begin with.”
“We’re not all able to just go out and buy a house anymore,” Riparian tenant Kwamé Govine tells CP. “We have to rent. We have to. And we’re just trying to get into a bigger place, a better place, just to hopefully, in the next few years, be able to buy a house.” Govine, who calls his rent “competitive” for the area, says his since-resolved water bill stalemate with Riparian (detailed in Part One) was just one example of the ways young people often find themselves at the mercy of their landlord.
“I think if you would look into other places outside of Riparian, you’d probably hear similar things. I think there’s a lot of people that have issues with getting maintenance done, have issues with rising rent costs,” Govine says.
Riparian’s Google Review ratings average — 3.6 stars — is actually higher than Wylie’s. Other area rental agencies range from 2.5 stars (Mozart Management) to comparable at 3.8 stars (Walnut Capital) to slightly higher at 4.0 (J.J. Land Co.).
“I think there’s a bigger concern that maybe Riparian is just a symbol of, or symptom of … these big corporate LLCs … buying more and more of our housing stock,” Pittsburgh City Councilor Deb Gross tells CP. “Our state government does not allow the City of Pittsburgh and the city council to interfere in the marketplace[, but] we’re certainly looking at every kind of policy we can to disincentivize this kind of land grab by big LLCs outside of the city.”
Searching for solutions
Dave Breingan of Lawrenceville United (LU) says his organization has had a “productive conversation” with Garin and others at Riparian, and that the company has taken steps to issue security deposits to tenants who had been waiting on them. “ââWe will be closely monitoring and checking in with tenants and businesses to ensure this translates to actual progress for the neighbors affected by these issues,” Breingan tells CP.
But, like Gross, Breingan sees bigger problems than one company’s missteps. “ââWe believe, at Lawrenceville United, that housing is a human right, and that our homes are the building blocks of our family and community lives, and should be treated better than just a commodity to be bought and sold for profit,” Breingan says.
Garin frames Riparian’s partial selloff of Wylie’s former portfolio as a way to add stability and says he remains in dialogue with local groups such as LU. “Our roots as a company are in affordable housing, and where we can meet our responsibilities to our other stakeholders while continuing to support the long-term affordability and economic diversity of Lawrenceville, we will always prioritize those outcomes,” he says.
Garin also highlights a professional history of 11 years founding and chairing the board of a nonprofit grocer serving food deserts in the greater Washington, D.C. area. He says Riparian is infused with “social impact spirit” and offers its staff access to an employee ownership and profit-sharing program.
Erik Oas of Pittsburgh United agrees with Breingan that housing shouldn’t be commodified and says he’d like to see local governments get involved in real estate. “The public needs to be in the housing game,” Oas tells CP. “I think that is very doable, actually, considering it’s just a question of something we’ve done in the past, which was building housing, and [we] have really gotten away from with private-public partnerships and Section 8 vouchers.”
Gross says she and other Pittsburgh leaders have been looking beyond the city’s borders for models — specifically examples in Riparian’s home state of Maryland, where, Gross says, Montgomery County has implemented one of the country’s most sweeping affordability policies. The county is also doing what Oas wants to see in Pittsburgh: building affordable housing.
This has already happened at a smaller scale in Upper Lawrenceville. Gross hopes scaling up can help Pittsburgh avoid another “unbearable” situation such as the demolition of Penn Plaza, which saw local residents uprooted.
“Re-upping the affordability terms gets you another generation or two, right? [But] having longer affordability terms keeps people in their homes even when they’re old,” Gross says. “So, while it’s true, in the 1,000 units that were built or preserved in the last three years … I think we could even try to push that envelope and do that even better.”
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.
