The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Tim Grant: tgrant@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1591.
http://www.post-gazette.com/business/development/2018/07/02/That-home-in-Garfield-sold-for-more-than-300-000-Really/stories/201807010005
IS GARFIELD THE NEXT BIG THING IN PITTSBURGH?
A medical fellowship at UPMC brought Taylor Lincoln from Chapel Hill, N.C., to Pittsburgh in 2016. Her partner, Joshua Bennett, joined her in 2017 and they spent two years in Shadyside renting a condo near Walnut Street.
“We both really loved Pittsburgh and decided to try to stay after Taylor’s program was complete,” Mr. Bennett said.
They started their home search in November 2017, considering just about every part of the city, including the North Side, South Side, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, East Liberty and Point Breeze. In January, Dr. Lincoln, 33, noticed a newly renovated three-bedroom house in Garfield.
“We set up an appointment to view the house and found ourselves thinking only of Garfield during every subsequent visit to potential houses,” said Mr. Bennett, a 32-year-old mortgage loan compliance officer and U.S. Army Reserve captain. They closed on the house in Garfield on June 1.
“We love that we can see the Cathedral of Learning and the U.S. Steel Tower from our back patio, and the smell of honeysuckles and the sight of fireflies remind me of the house where I grew up in Mississippi,” Mr. Bennett said.
For a community that once had one of the highest rates of reported crime in the city and a reputation for poverty and broken-down housing, Garfield has come a long way — and that means longtime homeowners are dealing with regular offers from investors, even as the community improvements are welcomed.
Data compiled by RealSTATs, a North Hills-based real estate information service, show average home prices in the city’s 10th Ward — which includes Garfield — have appreciated 70 percent between 2012 and 2017 from $99,000 to $168,518. The total volume of home sales increased by an impressive 174 percent during that same time frame from $16.8 million to $46.2 million.
Real estate records show homes in Garfield are selling for substantially more this year than what they sold for within the past two years.
One buyer paid $270,000 for a five-bedroom house on Broad Street that sold for $14,500 in late 2016.
Another couple paid $240,000 in May 2017 for a three-bedroom house on Dearborn Street that sold for $25,000 a year before.
Mr. Bennett and Dr. Lincoln paid $307,000 for their home last month, which is the highest price on record for a single-family home in Garfield.
“This kind of sale is sure to get the attention of other homeowners and investors,” said Dan Murrer, owner of RealSTATs. “It’s what we saw in the South Side and Lawrenceville 10 years ago. People were buying dumps, fixing them up and selling for a profit.
“You will start to see more activity like that in Garfield,” he said. “It’s like the four-minute mile. Once one person shows it can be done, the floodgates open.”
‘Wonderment and apprehension’
Garfield, which traces its roots back to 1881, was originally built in two sections divided by Aiken Avenue.
The west side was historically the working class side of the neighborhood for people employed in the mills and foundries in Lawrenceville and the Strip District. The larger homes, east of North Aiken Avenue, were built for the landed gentry.
Today, Garfield is more defined by its Garfield Gators football program and its Penn Avenue arts district, which is home to organizations like Pittsburgh Glass Center and Kelly Strahorn Dance Studio. The community also supports more than a dozen restaurants along Penn Avenue, whereas in 1987, there was only one.
In the past 10 years, it also has attracted projects such as the Aldi grocery store and the Children’s Home of Pittsburgh.
The community has always had a large African-American population. About half of its population has been African-American since the 1920s, and it grew in the 1950s when many blacks were displaced from the Hill District due to redevelopment.
Rick Swartz, the executive director of the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., said Garfield was hardly on anyone’s radar 15 years ago.
But the combination of medical, high-tech and knowledge-based organizations that have made the city home in the past 20 years is fueling the escalation in real estate prices.
“People in the neighborhood are experiencing a combination of wonderment and apprehension at the surge in prices,” Mr. Swartz said.
“It’s really something no one could have predicted at the turn of the century. You could have bought a house in Garfield for as little as $15,000 or a commercial building on Penn Avenue for as little as $30,000 in the year 2000.”
Part of Garfield’s charm comes from its diversity.
The neighborhood of about 4,500 residents is 75 percent African-American; 25 percent white, Asian-American and Latin-American. Mr. Swartz said his concern is that rising home prices and rents could effectively cause blacks who live in Garfield to get priced out of the market.
“When you reach a price point above $200,000 for a home, you have moved beyond the range of affordability that most African-American households can meet given their household income, which is typically 65 percent of white families,” he said.
“When you start pricing homes at $250,000, $275,000 and even $300,000, the odds are greater that it will be a white family or white home buyer rather than an African-American individual or family,” he said. “Fortunately, all the houses will not be $300,000. We will also have $150,000 houses. You will see a dual nature here.”
The Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. has since 1975 built and renovated hundreds of housing units in Garfield and dozens of commercial properties along the Penn Avenue corridor that were once home to nuisance bars and vacant storefronts.
The nonprofit has invested more than $100 million over the years in new development, including more than 300 rental housing units, 45 renovated homes, 110 homes constructed for ownership and more than 50 renovated buildings in the commercial district.
Mr. Swartz said his organization — which uses private and government funds to encourage homeownership and business development — will continue to seek out homes that can be renovated and sold for under $150,000. It also will build single-family homes and sell them for less than $200,000.
“The purpose is to thwart any effort to have Garfield be gentrified all because the only activity happening in the private market is geared to the upper-income segment of the private market,” Mr. Swartz said.
Meeting the neighbors
Real estate agent Hedy Krenn at Coldwell Banker Real Estate Services, Shadyside, said in mid-June she sold a condo on Penn Avenue in Garfield for $215,000 to a woman training at UPMC to become a doctor.
She said the community has become so popular over the past two years that listings receive multiple offers.
“Garfield is becoming another great story in the renaissance of our city,” Ms. Krenn said.
The Garfield community is nestled between North Mathilda Street and Mossfield Street to the west, North Negley Avenue on the east, Penn Avenue on the south, and Black Street and Mossfield Street on the north.
For residents like 39-year-old Breen Casey, who lives in a four-bedroom house on North Aiken Street that cost her partner $4,000 in 2010, hardly a week goes by without being contacted by investors interested in buying the property.
If they were to sell now, she doubts they could buy another home in the neighborhood. But at this point, rising prices and changing demographics have made the neighborhood less inviting to her.
“Personally, I worry about the people who have lived here for generations,” she said. “In many cases, their whole lives they have been renting and they will get priced out.”
Garfield’s split stands at 42 percent owner-occupied homes and 58 percent renters, according to the Garfield-Bloomfield Corp.
Mr. Bennett and Dr. Lincoln said many of the communities they visited during their home search had lots of traffic in and out of the bars, restaurants and shops. Garfield was the only community they visited where they saw people spending time with their neighbors.
“We look forward to picking up trash with the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp., becoming fans of the Garfield Gators football team and joining the Garfield Community Farm CSA,” Dr. Lincoln said. “We have met more neighbors in the two weeks we have lived here than we did in the two years we lived in Shadyside.
“We had a neighbor do some minor home maintenance. We had a different neighbor over for drinks. Later that week, she brought us some delicious food left over from her barbecue,” she said. “Our dog is becoming very popular with the neighborhood kids.”