Infinitive Splitter

One of my parents’ friends told me a story a few years ago about moving home to Pittsburgh for what he expected to be a few months after graduate school before going to New York to start his life. But then an illness stalled him, and then he met his wife (who’d had big-city ideas, too), and 30 years later I sat in their suburban living room, where we agreed that it’s never any twentysomething’s dream to end up in Pittsburgh.

But maybe it is, or could be.

Here are some anecdotes about my friends from high school:

Ian bought a house in Pittsburgh last month, having spent most of the previous five years in Las Vegas and Washington.

Max, who’s in law school in Ann Arbor following stints in Boston and New York, told me recently that he’ll probably take the Pennsylvania bar exam.

Jessica, who has lived mostly in New York since 2000, told me she can see herself ending up in Pittsburgh when it’s time for kids and mortgages and all that.

Here’s some data:

The difference in housing prices between Pittsburgh and New York/Washington is absurdly large. Trulia’s home price “heat map” for Pittsburgh features a scale from $58,000 to “$136K and up”; Washington’s scale begins at “236K and below.” New York starts around a million.

Here’s some more:

The seven-county Pittsburgh metro area lost almost 3,000 people last year, but new Census Bureau figures show that the region’s long-term population drain could be coming to an end.

University of Pittsburgh economist Chris Briem said what’s most interesting is that the gap between the number of people moving out and moving in closed considerably between 2007 and 2008, from 3,351 to 708.

The closing gap is probably due to Pittsburgh faring better than surrounding metro areas in the early months of the recession, which began in December 2007, he said. If so, then the number of people moving into the metro area could exceed the number moving out this year, the first time that would have happened since the early 1990s.

…

During the mid- to late 1990s, Pittsburgh lost population even though its economy was doing well because other places were booming, Briem said.

“If you were young and mobile, there were some great wages to be made in some of these places,” he said.

The question among economists was whether those booms were sustainable, and the answer appears to be that they weren’t, he added.