Jess Simms is a writer with Scribble House in Pittsburgh. I met her through the Festival of Books in the Alleghenies. She has written an article about the reality of housing affordability in Pittsburgh.
A recent report issued by Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy ranked Pittsburgh as the most affordable housing market in the United States, the latest in a string of similar assessments that have come out in recent years. Yet these reports seem to contradict the experience of prospective home-buyers.
The truth is, this report isn’t a sign of true affordability. It shows the Pittsburgh region’s median price-to-income ratio is 3.1. This ratio comes from dividing the median house price on the market by the median household income. A 3.0 or lower is considered affordable, putting Pittsburgh just over this threshold.
This method of calculating affordability also overlooks the complexities of income and housing cost disparities. On the big-picture level, Pittsburgh has been declared a “neutral” market as of July 2024 according to the real estate platform Zillow, rather than the “sellers” market it’s been for the past few years.
Issues Not Considered in Pittsburgh
The on-the-ground perspective of real estate agents paints a more nuanced picture. In a Post-Gazette article from September, analysts noted that, while the core city neighborhoods have become a neutral market, it’s a different story in the suburbs. Luxury home sales have slowed but the market is still very active at other price points.
Howard Hanna President Dennis Cestra said it clearly: “Pittsburgh is still pretty heavily in a seller’s market.” The clearest sign is that the average home in Pittsburgh stays on the market for only 43 days, and a lower 31 days when only the suburbs are considered. That puts it firmly in sellers’ market territory, which is considered a housing stock of 90 days or less.
And those homes are still selling for more than in the past. Zillow showed an average price of $215,662 across the Pittsburgh market in September, up 3.1% year-over-year from 2023. That’s an increse of 52.9% over the average sale price of $141,000 recorded 5 years ago in mid-2019.
Complicating this question further is the fact that there are two sides to the housing accessibility question. The feasibility of buying a home is part of it, but so is the price of rent—and that has been steadily climbing, too.
The median monthly rent in Pittsburgh in September 2024 was $1,315 per month. Again, this is considered affordable by national standards, 16% lower than the $1,564 median across the United States. Nonetheless, it’s a steep increse from the $847 per month average in 2019, and wages have not shown similar growth. The median household income in Pittsburgh in 2023 was $66,219 per year according to US Census data, which is actually lower than the $66,381 per year average recorded in 2019.
In short, despite widespread publicity of Pittsburgh’s supposed affordability, there is still a real concern of residents being priced out of their city. The question is: what’s the solution? Building more affordable housing stock is one option. Amendments to Pittsburgh’s zoning code announced by Mayor Ed Gainey in early September aim to encourage that. These amendments eliminate parking requirements, allow for denser construction, and require 10% of units in a new development to be affordable at 50% of the area median income.
While these changes sound good on paper, and similar initiatives have proven successful in neighborhoods like Lawrenceville, affordable housing advocates are dubious. As David Vatz of Pro-Housing Pittsburgh notes in the article linked above, these changes could increase the costs of new construction, and those costs will inevitably be passed along to renters.
Ultimately, what all of these figures show is that housing affordability is a more complicated issue than it’s sometimes made out to be, and one that calls for similarly complex solutions. It is heartening to see city leaders making an effort to address it, and the cooling of both the real estate market and mortgage interest rates could offer prospective home-buyers some much-needed relief, but there is still a lot of work to be done to make housing in Pittsburgh affordable for all of its residents.