The Pittsburgh region knows how it feels to go through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. New data from the Census Bureau is giving a snapshot of what it looks like to emerge from one.
The Census released data last week from the 2022 American Community Survey, an annual sampling of communities nationwide on more than 40 topics, including employment, poverty, health insurance and transportation.
Last year’s American Community Survey results, capturing data from 2021, acted as one of the first data-based insights into the pandemic’s impact on households.
This year’s findings provide additional insight into the pandemic-era trends that have continued to define American life — and those that have begun to fade away.
Here are some highlights of key metrics shaping the United States and the city of Pittsburgh.
Fewer Pittsburghers working from home
One of the most prominent pandemic-era trends has been the move from in-person to remote work: In 2021, 30.30% of those in the city of Pittsburgh worked from home, according to the American Community Survey.
But this trend has been increasingly on the wane: In 2022, about 23% of Pittsburgh’s workers did so from home, the data shows.
Major Downtown employers — such as PNC Financial Services Group and health care and insurance company Highmark Health — have been pushing for workers to be physically located in the office more frequently.
That increase in office workers Downtown has helped improve the environment there, said the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, adding that an increased focus on safety and cleanliness is also making a difference.
“There is little doubt that Downtowns thrive because of people, and as people return, that vitality returns along with them,” said the PDP in a statement. “Some of the largest employers in Downtown have recently modified their work from home requirements to ensure that people spend a little more time working Downtown, and there is an exponential impact to businesses, with strong upticks in customer engagement and a palpable shift in positive momentum.”
But the Golden Triangle still faces record high office vacancy rates, leading some employers to use incentives such as discounted parking on the North Shore in hopes of drawing more employees back to the office.
Data from the PDP from earlier this year shows that the higher-end Class A office space in Downtown’s Central Business District had a vacancy rate of 18.8% in the second quarter of 2023, compared to 12.9% in the first quarter of 2019. The cheaper, Class B office space has a lower vacancy rate now than before the pandemic – 15.3% in the second quarter of 2023 versus 19.3% at the beginning of 2019.
“We may never see Downtown in-office worker numbers return to pre-pandemic levels, but the interest in living and visiting this city is incredibly high, with residential availability unable to meet demand, and tourism surpassing pre-pandemic totals,” said the PDP.
The decline in working from home was also present – though less pronounced – in the larger regions outside the city. Allegheny County declined from 26% in 2021 to 20.9% in 2022, and the Census-defined Pittsburgh Metro Area of seven counties and more than 2.3 million people saw a drop from 21.1% in 2021 to 17.4% in 2022.
Improvements from pandemic-era disruptions
Along with the shift to remote work, the pandemic was a time of major economic upheaval across the nation. But an analysis of key economic metrics in the American Community Survey shows that again, many of these changes are beginning to reverse.
The median household income in Pittsburgh rose from $57,821 in 2021 to $63,380 in 2022, a 9.1% increase. Nationally, the median income increased by about 7%, to $74,755 from $69,717.
Christopher Briem, a regional economist at the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh, cautioned against drawing broad trends from just a one-year snapshot of Census data, noting that any one year could be an aberration.
But rising income in the region does seem to be part of a greater trend, he said, pointing to data showing growth since 2019.
“People are concerned with the lack of job growth, but there’s certainly been an increase in incomes that reflect the changing nature of industry here,” he said. “The jobs that are here and are growing are seeing a rise in income.”
The 9.1% growth in the city of Pittsburgh was higher than the 4.3% increase in Allegheny County to a median household income of about $72,000. Median household income in the Pittsburgh metro area grew 6% to about $70,600 in 2022.
Mr. Briem pointed to technology, education, health care and other sectors that serve a national clientele as industries with competitive income growth, versus companies that cater locally to a declining population base. Jobs in some of those areas, such as technology, are more likely to be headquartered in Pittsburgh, he said, possibly driving the greater income increase in the city.
The data also showed improvement for those on the low end of the income scale. After data from 2021 showed poverty in the city increased to 20.2% — almost eight percentage points higher than the national rate — the Pittsburgh Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in the region, pledged it would invest $50 million toward racial equity and justice-related causes.
Last year, according to the newest data, poverty dipped back below pre-pandemic levels. More than 3,200 Pittsburghers moved above the poverty line, giving the city an overall poverty rate of 19%.
That said, Pittsburgh’s poverty rate remains well above the national statistic: Only 12.6% of people nationwide lived below the poverty line in 2022.
“I cheer any reduction, since it translates to more families in our region seeing the possibility of thriving instead of merely surviving,” said Pittsburgh Foundation President and CEO Lisa Schroeder.
“But an 11.4% poverty level in the county and 19% in the region remains unacceptable. And while the poverty rate nationally for Black Americans fell to pre-pandemic levels, it is still alarmingly high in terms of their proportion of the population,” she said. “Locally, we still have a long way to go to reach the point where race is no longer a determinant of who thrives and who gets held back.”
Furthermore, the poverty rate doesn’t tell the whole story, said Alyssa Cholodofsky, chief program and policy officer for United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Even families earning more than double the poverty level struggle to afford basic needs such as food and housing, she said.
The United Way has also seen a large increase since before the pandemic in people calling its 211 hotline for assistance. The hotline received about 236,186 calls from southwestern Pennsylvania in 2022, an increase from 178,910 calls in 2020.
“Many of the public assistance programs that were expanded during the pandemic such as the child tax credit, unemployment benefits and rent assistance to help people not be evicted from their homes have all expired,” said Ms. Cholodofsky. “While it helped them to not fall further into poverty, it didn’t lift them out into financial security.”
In addition to the 211 hotline, which is staffed 24 hours a day, the United Way is funding more than 150 programs now to help people meet their basic needs.
“When we talk about the recession of 2008, people were very much struggling with that until 2018, when we saw some recovery – things took over 10 years to pick up,” said Ms. Cholodofsky. “We’ll see in the next year or two what the data shows us in terms of people who are struggling.”
Pittsburgh’s housing stock continues to age
Pittsburgh’s housing stock remains one of the oldest in the nation, with the median home being 82 years old, a Post-Gazette analysis of the Census data shows.
Almost half of the entire city’s housing was built prior to 1940, a rate only exceeded by three of the 100 most populous cities in the U.S: Buffalo, St. Louis and Cleveland.
While experts say these figures aren’t inherently problematic — highlighting a city’s historic character while effectively sheltering residents — previous Post-Gazette investigations have found that Pittsburgh’s housing stock is rife with crumbling and dilapidated homes — 13,000 of which are city-owned, according to the latest data.
At the same time, Pittsburgh is facing continuing challenges in housing affordability: In 2021, the median cost of housing in Pittsburgh was $985.00. Last year, that rose to $1,096 – an increase of more than $100.
Local housing nonprofits have criticized city officials for obstructing them from wielding the state’s conservatorship law to take over vacant city-owned properties and convert them to affordable developments.
A Post-Gazette investigation earlier this month found the city solicitor’s office proposed significant price increases for condemned homes in the Garfield, Spring Garden and Perry Hilltop neighborhoods.
“If you're in a situation where we are trying to accomplish a public purpose of turning blighted, city-owned properties into affordable homeownership options — and a part of the city structure is actively fighting that — that system is broken,” said Kendall Pelling, executive director of nonprofit Rising Tide Partners.
Michael Korsh: mkorsh@post-gazette.com; @michael_korsh. Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com.
First Published: September 17, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: September 18, 2023, 1:08 p.m.
