Why is EVERYONE I know, moving to Pittsburgh??

Surely your immediate family and all of your aunts and uncles and cousins and current next door neighbors and everyone you run with and work with would tell you, correct?

I’d like to know also.

RunningChef wrote:

Low cost of living, decent public transportation, bike lanes, great schools, several parks, and a booming food scene. Also we have 6 super bowl rings.

Decent public transportation?!?! Wow. I'd love to see what you consider lousy public transportation. Low cost of living? Is that why people are moving out of the city in droves and driving up the cost of living in the bordering areas? Frick Park is the only decent park (and pretty much the only decent part of the city). A booming food scene? Is food fun? Maybe if you're fat. I eat to live - not the other way around. Pittsburgh is always trying to stand on its tippy toes to be in the picture with real (albeit way more expensive) cities that actually have stuff going on. It's a small town. The 'downtown' shuts down at like 6pm on weekends. Lots of huge country music concerts because there are a bunch of rednecks in the greater Pittsburgh area. The 'cultural district' is like 2 city blocks. Blah.

with apologies to Jordan Hasay...

ummm, ever heard of Schenley Park?

The rust belt and the mid-Atlantic are enjoying a huge influx of young talent due to a combination of low cost of living (especially for those who do want to own homes) and economies that are finally transitioning to white collar jobs.

Google, Carnegie Mellon, Uber, Autodesk, UPMC...there are 232 biotech jobs currently listed on Indeed for Pittsburgh. It’s got everything you need in a city and a burgeoning tech job market without ridiculous costs of NYC, SF, Seattle.

Just about every US city is getting bigger and better right now. Rural American is going away and down hill. Rural areas of US have no good jobs, meth problems (not all, just use generalizations), and most importantly bad wifi. The idea you could work from home anywhere failed when small towns could not connect to internet.

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee are improving Midwest cities. Cleveland, Detroit and Indianapolis need some work. They all have money in the suburbs. Their downtown's just need some work.

runfasta wrote:

Just about every US city is getting bigger and better right now. Rural American is going away and down hill. Rural areas of US have no good jobs, meth problems (not all, just use generalizations), and most importantly bad wifi. The idea you could work from home anywhere failed when small towns could not connect to internet.

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee are improving Midwest cities. Cleveland, Detroit and Indianapolis need some work. They all have money in the suburbs. Their downtown's just need some work.

Terms / phrases like “improving” and “just need some work” are euphemisms for sh!tholes. All the places you mention meet the objective and widely agreed upon definition of a sh!thole—this of course includes the biggest sh!tholes of them all which are rural areas.

Pittsburgh is an awesome city.

No it’s not.

I grew up in Western PA, and now live in the Bay Area. I know a few people who have left San Francisco to live or invest in Pittsburgh.

The attraction for SF or Bay Area folks: You can buy a home in Pittsburgh, for a fraction of what rents costs in the Bay Area. It takes over 1M to own almost any place in the city of San Francisco...and most of the surrounding cities cost as much. If you want to start a family, you can buy a house in a good school district, for about 1/4 of what it costs in the bay area. (sometimes 1/10 of the cost)

Over the last 10 years, tech offices (Apple, Uber, Google) have opened in Pittsburgh. With Carnegie Mellon in the city, there is local talent to recruit. Not everyone wants to move to Silicon Valley. Tech growth is a really positive sign for the future of the city. Pittsburgh has done a great job in moving on from the collapse of the steel industry. It really has reinvented itself with tech, biomed, and education.

It still is rough around the edges (it is a city in the middle of the sticks). While the critics in this thread call it a shithole, it is a city that still has heart and quirkiness. Many people's biggest fear is that the city will lose some of its charm if more tech comes to town.

Larger than that, I do see some trends happening in Pittsburgh that happened in SF, and other major cities. Mainly, people are moving back to cities. There's better access to healthcare (elderly) and more opportunities for younger folks starting their career. Investing (RE) in areas that are outside of "prime" areas will continue to be a good strategy, long term. Housing is still undervalued. Pittsburgh was not affected by the last housing crash, as prices at that point had been stagnate since the early 1980's. Values have appreciated in the last 7-8 years, and yet, homes are still more affordable when compared to national averages.

If you are considering moving to Pittsburgh, especially from CA, understand it's balls cold in the winter, and you'll sweat balls in the summer. Yinzers can be weird, but most of them mean well. I really miss Sheetz...the best thing to ever come out of Altoona.

Who cares? As long as people keep moving there and stop moving to Colorado then I'm good.

They heard Trump was bringing back the steel industry.

Columbus, OH, is similar.

Booming healthcare, campus, tech, banks, etc.

Accenture, Chase, Nationwide, Huntington. Lots of good industry!

Sheetz is dope.

Also to the other poster who said frick park is the only nice part of Pittsburgh..

Have you ever been to the Schenely park and Phipps conservatory area? CMU?

As some other posters have said, it's really all about CMU.

In the U.S., when it comes to computer science and its various offspring, there's Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and CMU (and not necessarily in that order). Tech companies want their professors and their students, and are locating near them. So that's where the jobs are going to be.

Having lived in Pittsburgh, I can say it is a cool city, although the topography make getting around difficult. It was always funny to me, though, that it still thinks of itself as a steel town than a tech one, and thought of CMU as being just another university, sort of like Pitt and Duquesne. It is not.

Pittsburgh is a city like "Fruity O's" is a cereal...off brand. It is the Wal Mart of cities except without all the cool stuff. It is listed as the 66th largest city in the US (next to Greensboro NC and near Plano TX) yet still thinks it is of national importance. It still functions as the northern capital of Applachia but other than that, it could disappear tomorrow and not be missed. Now I am off to scour the want ads in real states.

It’s cause all the women there have massive tits. It’s not Pittsburgh anymore, it’s Titsburgh.

Buxcies07 wrote:

It’s cause all the women there have massive tits. It’s not Pittsburgh anymore, it’s Titsburgh.

Pics?

Buxcies07 wrote:

It’s cause all the women there have massive tits. It’s not Pittsburgh anymore, it’s Titsburgh.

"Massive tits" don't really count if they are just a result of morbid obesity.