I don't think I've ever seen someone so confidently attempt to refute data via personal anecdote, so bravo for that.
The median home is not always "crap, run down with a crappy school district". Yes, there exists a quality distribution, and the bottom quintile often has the worst quality, but that's true in every State and every Country.
These are perfectly good homes in perfectly good school districts.
Again, single data points only get you so far in an argument — but most importantly, the aggregate data corroborates it. Nobody claims that outliers don't exist, but we're talking about medians here.
I honestly can't help it but laugh. LATROBE. Latrobe is an hour away from Pittsburgh. Population? 7,885 (2018). There is nothing near Latrobe but St Vincent College. There are very few jobs. Oh and the commute? You take 376 E through the Squirrel Hill Tunnels. Easily a 2 hour commute. Sounds fantastic! Great pick!
Hampton is in Allison park which is a nice suburb. The median home price there is 295k. The house you selected is pretty small, 2 br, 1 bath, which makes a ton of sense - not a lot of young people looking for good jobs are going to want to live in a suburb with older people and families.
> Again, single data points only get you so far in an argument — but most importantly, the aggregate data corroborates it. Nobody claims that outliers don't exist, but we're talking about medians here.
But you cherry picked a value WELL BELOW THE MEDIAN IN HAMPTON. The median is 295k and rising fast. So tell me again, what cheap housing are you talking about?
Oh btw, unless you're lucky and at a FAANG (which have fewer jobs here) you ain't making anywhere near 6.
Go ahead, move to Braddock for that 50k house and breathe in the wonderful air from Clairton Coke Works and Edgar Thompson. I doubt you'd read that on zillow.
Again, I’m just playing by your rules — look up the top 10 school districts in the Pittsburgh metro area, and look up housing on Zillow and Redfin, it’s really not hard to find decent housing under $250,000.
> Not a lot of young people looking for good jobs are going to want to live in a suburb with older people and families
You’re moving the goalposts. You started off talking about school districts — not a lot of young people care about that. If you want affordable housing outside of nice school districts, and not in the suburbs, you’ll find plenty of that in the Pittsburgh city center, also.
The fundamental argument is that if you earn the median income, and you need to live in a good school district, it is more than easy to own a home and build equity in property — you just have to sacrifice being able to live near dim sum and access to “Hamilton”. If you don’t care about school districts, you can find a place with a short commute from work. You might even be able to get some dim-sum action. Trade-offs!
> Pretty small, 2br, 1 bath
Are young people looking for 4BR’s? I seriously think you misunderstand what the “median home” means — it’s not a McMansion. Also 2BR is large enough for a couple with one child.
> Go ahead, move to Braddock for that 50k house
Yeah but...you don’t have to do that. You can move to a far nicer neighborhood in the Pittsburgh area for $150k. It all depends on which trade-offs you’re willing to make given your personal circumstances. $50k is many standard deviations below the median, we’re not talking about that. You don’t have to be a FAANG engineer to earn the median income, especially at the household level.
> But you cherry picked a value WELL BELOW THE MEDIAN IN HAMPTON
No, I showed you the aggregate median home value in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area on 3 different sources now, and then made a cursory sweep of the current state of the housing market to corroborate the aggregate metrics. It was pretty easy to do. The data doesn’t lie. That’s far more than you’ve done in this discussion: un-verified personal anecdotes devoid of any citation or sources. It’s honestly pretty remarkable.
The median home is not always "crap, run down with a crappy school district". Yes, there exists a quality distribution, and the bottom quintile often has the worst quality, but that's true in every State and every Country.
This data isn't groundbreaking either, Zillow shows a comparable median home value in Pittsburgh: https://www.zillow.com/pittsburgh-pa/home-values/
Just eyeballing some CURRENT listings, you'll find:
On Zillow: A 3BR house in a top 10 Pittsburgh school district (Greater Latrobe School District) for $179K https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/34-Loretta-St-Latrobe-PA-...
On Redfin: A 2BR house in a top 5 school district (Hampton Township district) for $130K https://www.redfin.com/PA/Allison-Park/2695-Ginger-Ln-15101/...
These are perfectly good homes in perfectly good school districts.
Again, single data points only get you so far in an argument — but most importantly, the aggregate data corroborates it. Nobody claims that outliers don't exist, but we're talking about medians here.