What’s wrong with this picture?
The Post-Gazette reports that “more than a year after the Hill District’s most expensive townhomes hit the market at $480,000 each, not one has sold to a private buyer.”
And that’s after the asking price was slashed by half. That’s in a Middle Hill neighborhood in which the median home sales price is $106,676, the P-G notes.
One observer quipped that the townhomes, billed as “sleek” and “contemporary,” didn’t sell because, from the outside, they resembled public housing units.
Ahem.
And then government rode to the rescue, bailing out the private developer, Steffan Johnson.
With an allegation of virtually no public process, the city Housing Authority purchased four of the six Rose Street units for $409,000 each last November. There’s no word what the authority plans to do with the townhomes. The two remaining units still have not found private buyers and are now priced at $240,000, the P-G reports.
Curiously, Johnson not only told the P-G “selling those units to the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh was not a retreat,” he said the authority’s bailout — at nearly four times the median home sale price in the neighborhood — directly achieved the stated goal of affordability and made good business sense.
For Steffan Johnson, indeed. But certainly not for taxpayers.
And it’s certainly not as if the townhomes didn’t come with handsome buyer “incentives,” Pittsburgh Magazine reminded in a laudatory May 2025 review.
“Targeted Toward First-Time Buyers, These Town Homes are Coming Up Roses in the Hill District,” the headline gushed.
“To assist with the buying process, some local developers and lenders are offering incentives that can help prospective buyers open the door to home ownership, even if they haven’t managed to save for a down payment,” the story noted.
“The project team also has partnered with the Urban Redevelopment Authority and First National Bank to offer programs designed to overcome financial and educational hurdles to home ownership.”
That would include offering first-time buyers up to $5,000 in closing cost assistance and 100 percent financing with no private mortgage insurance, plus flexible credit requirements, Jim Kernan, a mortgage banking consultant at First National Bank, told the magazine.
Yet, still no takers. But taxpayers yet again taken for suckers.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
