I've shared content from City Nerd (Ray Delahanty) in the past because I find his videos to be well-researched, engaging, and high-quality; and because he places a lot of emphasis on cities other...
I've shared content from City Nerd (Ray Delahanty) in the past because I find his videos to be well-researched, engaging, and high-quality; and because he places a lot of emphasis on cities other than the ones you hear about in the news all the time. Many of these low-profile cities are excellent places to live.
In this week's video, Delahanty runs a linear regression on walkability and housing costs (monthly rent), indexing walkability data from two datasets to create a final, normalized score based on both. He then plots these values against the cost of housing for those cities. He analyzes only municipalities with a population of 200k+ and with median rents below $2000/mo in order to find the "best cities for your buck." Delahanty also takes a qualitative, anecdotal look at neighborhoods with high clusters of affordable units to get a sense of the urban character of the area. Several honorable and dishonorable mentions are included to provide upper and lower bounds to the analysis.
Personal comment: he is so right about Northern Liberties in Philadelphia.
Northern Liberties has been gentrifying for quite some time now. :) Speaking from personal experience, many of the denser suburbs along the regional rail of Philly have great walkability as well,...
Northern Liberties has been gentrifying for quite some time now. :)
Speaking from personal experience, many of the denser suburbs along the regional rail of Philly have great walkability as well, if you want walkability without full-city density.
And there's a reason Pittsburg is cheap. Maybe someone more in the know can enlighten me, but it's been struggling for quite some time as the steel manufacturing wound down.
Philadelphia's regional rail corridors are nice because lots of them largely predate the automobile era. If I were to move back into a suburb, these are pretty high on my list. SEPTA and local...
Philadelphia's regional rail corridors are nice because lots of them largely predate the automobile era. If I were to move back into a suburb, these are pretty high on my list. SEPTA and local governments have missed a lot of opportunities for better transit-oriented development in recent projects, like the sadly parking-oriented station at Wawa, but they're going down the right track.
I lived on the Main Line for several years and enjoyed walking around Ardmore and Narberth in particular. I don't know if I would call the whole area pedestrian-friendly, and I certainly wouldn't call Lancaster and other stroads safe to cycle on, but it's still pretty realistic to live car-free or car-lite.
I've somehow never made it to Pittsburgh, though a friend went to Carnegie Mellon and had overall good things to say. It's snowy in the winter, and there are apparently some air quality issues. Some neighborhoods are dramatically trendier than others, so a city-wide "walkability" metric might be overstating things a bit. It seems a lot more car-centric than Philadelphia. My uneducated impression is that Pittsburgh shares a lot of cultural history with other Rust Belt cities in Pennsylvania like Allentown, Reading, Scranton, and Bethlehem, except that it has the advantage of being a good bit larger and the home of a very prestigious research university, plus having active intercity rail service. I can see that the population has been on a year-over-year decline for a while, but at the rate that drop is flattening, it seems like the trend could be parabolic. There's certainly been investment in the last decade. Anecdotally, I know of at least a few technology, healthcare, and finance companies that have set up shop there because some have tried to recruit me on LinkedIn. :P
I feel that the last 4–5 years have demonstrated a renewed cultural appreciation of the urban landscape and of multi-modal and walkable communities all over the country, and particularly in the northeast. I don't have specific data to back this up, but it feels like many young people are taking greater interest in city centers, sustainable infrastructure, and accessibility. There's more energy; people are voluntarily talking about traffic patterns and zoning laws. While the Rust Belt has been struggling for decades, ever since the blue collar jobs walked out, I think there's a huge unrealized social and economic impetus to revitalize smaller urban centers like this.
Pennsylvania has been receiving small waves of white-collar New York expatriates for years; not necessarily enough to offset other forces, but with the housing market being the way it is, I imagine Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will see growth in the near future.
I would also be curious to hear perspectives of people who actually live in Pittsburgh.
I've shared content from City Nerd (Ray Delahanty) in the past because I find his videos to be well-researched, engaging, and high-quality; and because he places a lot of emphasis on cities other than the ones you hear about in the news all the time. Many of these low-profile cities are excellent places to live.
In this week's video, Delahanty runs a linear regression on walkability and housing costs (monthly rent), indexing walkability data from two datasets to create a final, normalized score based on both. He then plots these values against the cost of housing for those cities. He analyzes only municipalities with a population of 200k+ and with median rents below $2000/mo in order to find the "best cities for your buck." Delahanty also takes a qualitative, anecdotal look at neighborhoods with high clusters of affordable units to get a sense of the urban character of the area. Several honorable and dishonorable mentions are included to provide upper and lower bounds to the analysis.
Personal comment: he is so right about Northern Liberties in Philadelphia.
Northern Liberties has been gentrifying for quite some time now. :)
Speaking from personal experience, many of the denser suburbs along the regional rail of Philly have great walkability as well, if you want walkability without full-city density.
And there's a reason Pittsburg is cheap. Maybe someone more in the know can enlighten me, but it's been struggling for quite some time as the steel manufacturing wound down.
Philadelphia's regional rail corridors are nice because lots of them largely predate the automobile era. If I were to move back into a suburb, these are pretty high on my list. SEPTA and local governments have missed a lot of opportunities for better transit-oriented development in recent projects, like the sadly parking-oriented station at Wawa, but they're going down the right track.
I lived on the Main Line for several years and enjoyed walking around Ardmore and Narberth in particular. I don't know if I would call the whole area pedestrian-friendly, and I certainly wouldn't call Lancaster and other stroads safe to cycle on, but it's still pretty realistic to live car-free or car-lite.
I've somehow never made it to Pittsburgh, though a friend went to Carnegie Mellon and had overall good things to say. It's snowy in the winter, and there are apparently some air quality issues. Some neighborhoods are dramatically trendier than others, so a city-wide "walkability" metric might be overstating things a bit. It seems a lot more car-centric than Philadelphia. My uneducated impression is that Pittsburgh shares a lot of cultural history with other Rust Belt cities in Pennsylvania like Allentown, Reading, Scranton, and Bethlehem, except that it has the advantage of being a good bit larger and the home of a very prestigious research university, plus having active intercity rail service. I can see that the population has been on a year-over-year decline for a while, but at the rate that drop is flattening, it seems like the trend could be parabolic. There's certainly been investment in the last decade. Anecdotally, I know of at least a few technology, healthcare, and finance companies that have set up shop there because some have tried to recruit me on LinkedIn. :P
I feel that the last 4–5 years have demonstrated a renewed cultural appreciation of the urban landscape and of multi-modal and walkable communities all over the country, and particularly in the northeast. I don't have specific data to back this up, but it feels like many young people are taking greater interest in city centers, sustainable infrastructure, and accessibility. There's more energy; people are voluntarily talking about traffic patterns and zoning laws. While the Rust Belt has been struggling for decades, ever since the blue collar jobs walked out, I think there's a huge unrealized social and economic impetus to revitalize smaller urban centers like this.
Pennsylvania has been receiving small waves of white-collar New York expatriates for years; not necessarily enough to offset other forces, but with the housing market being the way it is, I imagine Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will see growth in the near future.
I would also be curious to hear perspectives of people who actually live in Pittsburgh.