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by LordKano 3718 days ago
If you're not set on living in the city, housing is fantastic in the Pittsburgh area.

I live 20 minutes from Downtown and I bought my house for $74,900 in 2008. 3/2, two car garage and driveway sitting on about 1/8 of an acre.

It blows my mind when I hear how much money people are paying for housing in bigger cities. The salary would need to be significantly higher to make it worth my while to move to a place like SF or NYC to take a job.

Additionally, this area is fairly centrist politically. Sure, it's Democrat heavy but there are a lot of conservative, blue collar Democrats that balance out the urban intellectual Democrats and we have a small but intense Republican population so we never go too far in any direction. That's an intangible thing that is very important to me.

The low cost of living, the low housing costs, the abundance of college educated professionals and the variety of experiences around would make this place attractive to all kinds of people. It could become a startup hub. I'm not sure I want to see that but I'm also not blindly opposed.

2 comments

> Additionally, this area is fairly centrist politically.

I spent three months crossing the US in 2009 as a tourist. I had developed a light-hearted measure of the patriotism of an area by how many US flags were seen in suburban front yards. Before I visited Pittsburgh, I had rated '1 house in 4-5 with a flag' as a very patriotic area on this scale. Then I hit Pittsburgh, and the area where my hotel was had one house in 4-5 that didn't have a little US flag planted somewhere in the front yard. Even the local cemetery was bestrewn with Old Glory all over the place... :)

Out of curiosity, where was your hotel?
While I live in a neighborhood where you will get an annoymous letter from a neighbor if dare to fly the US flag.

Crazy?

Snagged my house in Morningside, which is in the city. You can still get pretty inexpensive houses throughout the East End, but you'll need to put in some elbow grease. Average prices seem to be around $200,000 for a decent home in the city. $500,000 and it's a move in ready palace.
I could never live in the city.

I don't even like going into the city for work.