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.
For instance, if someone wanted to move to, or within, the city, they could go to the website and check the boxes for quiet, relaxing, and "suburbs in the city." They'd see brief descriptions of Swisshelm Park, Bon Air and Westwood -- the last of those being the neighborhood to which Mr. Ravenstahl recently moved.
Visiting those areas would take a house hunter to the city's far east, South Hills, and western fringe, countering the usual tendency to hunt in just one of the city's river-cut sectors.
The system for suggesting neighborhoods uses rankings developed by city and URA staff, using community surveys and interviews by Downtown-based FSC Marketing Communications. FSC was paid $58,000 to help develop the effort and maintain the website.
Whether it pays off will depend in part on whether people find it.
The administration is promoting the site with an ad campaign, possibly using billboards and bus shelters, said Jason Tagano, the URA's public and legislative affairs manager.
To keep it fresh, the city and URA are recruiting "neighborhood ambassadors" who would be empowered to post news and commentary on their slices of Pittsburgh. "Those ambassadors are going to be so key to the robustness of the site," said Mr. Tagano.
Greg Panza, program manager at the Mount Washington Community Development Corp., has no doubt that his neighborhood can generate some vocal ambassadors.
"We have a pretty lively neighborhood blog already up here that someone in the community started, so I think that something like this will be a nice complement to it," he said. "One of the things that could be fun to do is have a lot of people here who are involved in our community go in and answer some questions from people who might be interested in the neighborhood."
First Published: May 17, 2010, 4:00 a.m.
