Pittsburgh debuts neighborhoods website
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If you like diversity, saving money, and being able to stop in at a corner bar, move to Polish Hill.
If you'd prefer to live somewhere pet-friendly, walkable and quiet, you might try Regent Square.
But if you crave excitement, trendy nightlife and all things mod, the South Side Flats may be the better bet.
Those prescriptions come from pittsburghcityliving.com, a website that Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's administration plans to unveil at a 2 p.m. presentation today at the North Side Carnegie Library.
The site's purpose is twofold: to guide would-be Pittsburghers to an ideal nesting place, and to highlight some of the incentives the administration has heaped on to the urban experience.
"The big problem we have in the city is to increase our tax base, increase our population -- to get more people into the city," said mayoral spokeswoman Joanna Doven. "We need a one-stop-shop location from which interested people -- be it businesses or a future resident -- can understand what we have going on."
Among the goings-ons prominently pitched on the site are the Pittsburgh Promise, a 2-year-old college tuition guarantee for city school graduates; tax abatements activated in 2008 for new homes in struggling neighborhoods; and Urban Redevelopment Authority incentives to build or rehabilitate homes.
Such a site "is long overdue," said Tom Yargo, manager of the Shadyside and Downtown offices of Coldwell Banker Real Estate. "All of those things enter into somebody making [housing] decisions" and on the new site, "everything is centralized, if you will."
It's not as if Pittsburgh has been a hard sell lately, what with all of the accolades -- most-livable city, best place for college graduates, high-ranking urban school district -- according to Bebe English, president of the Realtors Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh. But some areas of the city have more name recognition than others, and the site "is designed to provide a place to go where people can get information on all sorts of communities," she said.
First Published May 17, 2010 12:00 am
