Wilkinsburg Home Values Rising (Pittsburgh, Braddock: sales, neighborhood, property tax rates)

[PennHillsNative80]

A positive article about Wilkinsburg!

Wilkinsburg home values on the rise

As I've said before in other threads, I believe that Wilkinsburg probably has the best Victorian architecture that the Pittsburgh area has to offer. There are some serious deals to be had in Wilkinsburg.

[BrianTH]

Very interesting. As the article somewhat discusses, because Wilkinsburg has such a mix of areas, raw sales statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt because it really depends on the mix of sales in a given year. On the other hand, I think it is quite likely some particular areas have seen significant appreciation, and in general I would agree Wilkinsburg has lots of potential for appreciation given fundamentals such as location, housing stock, and so forth.

The article also touches on the tax rate issue and how Wilkinsburg is trying to address it, but I don't think it was perfectly clear. To make a long story short, Wilkinsburg was the beneficiary of some good studies conducted out of CMU, and they came up with some policy recommendations for how Wilkinsburg could increase its property tax base, which will allow it to cut its property tax rates in the future. If those programs work, and if in fact other basic factors are also pulling in Wilkinsburg's favor, then we could see a positive cycle of increasing property values feeding into lower property tax rates and vice-versa.

[BrianTH]

By the way, I've been thinking about Wilkinsburg in contrast to places like Braddock, since one might see some superficial similarities but things appear to be heading in different directions at this point (not to kick Braddock when it is down or entirely rule out its long-term prospects, but I think that is a regrettably fair assessment for the nearer-term). It occurred to me that one notable fact is that Wilkinsburg was never really directly dependent on the steel industry. Rather, Wilkinsburg has always been a transportation-based town: it has been on the main road from the east into Pittsburgh since the days of the Great Road to Fort Pitt, was once a stop on the Pennsylvania Railroad and a streetcar hub, and now has a couple stops on the East Busway in addition to being an I-376 exit and along Penn Avenue.

And that is really the story with the City of Pittsburgh itself: even more fundamentally than a steel town, it has always been a transportation hub. And so while the contraction of the steel industry was a huge blow for the City and by extension Wilkinsburg (which is really for all practical purposes a City neighborhood that just happened to fight off annexation--it was actually briefly annexed at one point and then managed to break free, but that is a whole other story), to me it isn't surprising that as Pittsburgh is finally putting the echoing effects of the steel bust behind it, Wilkinsburg is starting to come along, while former towns much more directly linked to steel are still struggling.