The Future is Pittsburgh
The answer to the coastal housing affordability crisis is in-shoring our economy to recycle the civic infrastructure already built in the heartland
Zohran Mamdani is promising his voters rent control. If he really cared about them, he’d tell them to move to Pittsburgh instead.
Smart politicians who can read polls are beginning to obsess about affordable housing policy. Mamdani’s recent New York City mayoral primary victory is but the first election that will turn on this issue; more are on the way. The socialist’s triumph was powered by under-employed, over-educated millennials sipping chai lattes in Brooklyn coffeehouses while pecking away at their laptops checking home prices on Zillow they will never be able to afford. They should point their browsers westward instead.
New York City’s housing is twice as unaffordable as Pittsburgh’s housing is, according to price indices calculated by Realtor.com. The same is true for real estate in hotbeds like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and Nashville. America does not have an affordable housing problem. It has a density problem and a hipness problem. We should fix the “where” to fix the “what.”
Owning a home is critical to wealth creation for families. The admonition to “buy dirt” has always worked. That’s why housing affordability is creeping up in the polls as the millennial cohort hits the childrearing years where they – finally – must start thinking about something more important than their own endorphins. Luckily, we have room in America for everyone who wants an affordable home to have one – but not in New York City.
Pittsburgh’s just one example, but it’s a good one. The metro area has 2,429,917 people today, which is almost exactly what it had in 1960, when its census showed 2,405,345. The New York metro area, meanwhile, is 53 percent more crowded than it was in 1960, cramming 20 million people into the same geography that formerly held 12 million in 1960. Boston is now housing 5 million people on the same dirt that held 2.6 million in 1960. Los Angeles is squeezing 10 million people into the ground that comfortably held 6 million.
Socialists like Mamdani propose policies that are sure to fail: rent control and government mandates on partial affordable housing set-asides as conditions for new construction permits. These sugar-high promises merely shift the cost to other market rate properties in the area, further widening the gap between renters and owners. But other leaders like Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and private sector CEOs in the Artificial Intelligence industry are taking a different tack: let’s call it “in-shoring.”
Tomorrow, July 15, McCormick and President Donald Trump will hold a Pennsylvania Energy & Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh where private companies will announce an eye-popping $70 billion in investments for the Keystone State.
The AI revolution, with its insatiable desire for new electricity production that is difficult to accomplish in coastal states dominated by environmental lefties, is driving private investment inland in the United States to places like Pittsburgh, and smaller cities like Meridian, Mississippi, where Governor Tate Reeves (R-MS) recruited a multi-campus AI data center cluster that will bring $10 billion to that city. Meridian has a population of 70,588 today, not too much different than its 1960 population of 67,119. Reeves has seized on AI and its energy demand as catalysts to create jobs in places where they’ve always been hard won, and backed it up with a program in state universities to tailor higher education programs to the industry’s needs.
In-shoring jobs is the answer to our housing affordability crisis. A freshly graduated engineer from one of America’s top colleges can go to Meridian and find a spiffy starter home for $289,000 – the same square footage in a condo in Queens, where Mamdani is from, would cost $1.4 million, with no comparable backyard for your pets to get some relief.
In places like Pittsburgh and Meridian, there’s ample civic infrastructure – highways, sidewalks, water plants, sewer pipes, churches, and school buildings – ready to handle more population. More forgotten places like Dayton, Ohio, with a population today of 821,740 that’s less than the 842,157 it had in 1970, have even more opportunity. Their negative population growth has left extra infrastructure going unused. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, just 67 miles east of Pittsburgh, today has a population that’s less than half the 287,733 it supported in 1960. Youngstown, Ohio, just 67 miles the other direction from Pittsburgh, has 426,086 people sitting in the same footprint that supported 533,080 a generation ago.
This should be a cause that can unite the right – which is politically anchored in the mid-sized cities of the heartland and the countryside around them – and the left, which is covenant-married to the environmental lawyers who make it expensive or impossible to build the new highways, subdivisions, desalinization plants and nuclear plants that it would take to make housing affordable in America’s coastal megaplexes.
Greenies should become the leading advocates for recycling the civic infrastructure that’s already paid for in places like the hollowed cities of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Missouri, and to growing the places with cheap flat land and abundant drinking water in the South and Great Plains. Lefties should give up their smug love of latte-ville and embrace using the concrete we have already poured in Youngstown, instead of pumping the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide to build Mamdani’s infill duplexes in Staten Island.
For an entire generation, our cultural curators have sold millennial kids a bill of goods, imprinting on our society’s largest cohort a worldview in which the future is urbane and coastal, creating aspirations that run necessarily parallel to the economic stagnation they’ve experienced while trapped in a high cost of living. Now that this generation is coming into political power through people like Mamdani, it’s time we tell the kids the truth, and nudge them inland to the forgotten America they can afford.
I heartily concur. Specifically for having spent a large part of my childhood in the greater Pittsburgh are and found it to be a wonderful place to be a child, but generally as one who grew up in D.C. metro area and lived in San Diego, and found my spot In Birmingham, AL over 30 years ago. Visiting D.C. and San Diego more recently caused me to give thanks that I had the choice to not try to raise my family there. Say what you will about these inland urban centers and the American South, but there is something to be said for the hometown feel these places provide.
Hey Brad —
Appreciate this piece. I recently relocated to Oklahoma City, and it feels like the embodiment of the inland promise you’re pointing to — affordable, forward-looking, and proud of its identity.
What drew me here was the job opportunity and low cost of living but got a whole lot more. Last year, under the stewardship of a terrific mayor (who was recently installed as the President of the United States Conference of Mayors), OKC locked in a 30-year commitment with the Thunder and is building a new downtown arena. It’s a city that knows staying competitive isn’t automatic — it takes vision and investment. That spirit is visible across downtown: cranes in the air, new projects everywhere, and a tone of optimism that feels earned.
The economic base here runs deep — oil, gas, livestock, aerospace — but what’s exciting is how OKC has layered in modern industries without losing its character. From federal jobs in aviation and defense to healthcare, fintech, and a strong startup ecosystem, the city has created a diversified economy that’s still accessible to regular families, which leads to the housing market. Today, Newsweek noted OKC tops the list of fastest selling homes. It’s active, but not overheated. Homes move fast because they’re realistically priced. You can still find well-built homes under $300K, and neighborhoods where young families are putting down roots. That’s a stark contrast to coastal markets where affordability is more myth than math.
What people often miss about cities like OKC is how much infrastructure is already in place — schools, highways, utilities — with room to grow. Through initiatives like MAPS, the city is reinvesting in itself with a focus on inclusive development: parks, mental health services, transit, affordable housing, and civic spaces. It’s a form of “civic recycling,” and it’s working.
So yes — I think you’re right to say the future for young families, creatives, and builders lies inland. OKC is proving that you don’t have to compromise on culture (we host several of the country’s top restaurants and top chefs and top the list for public art. We don’t have to compromise on opportunity, or lifestyle to own a home and build equity. I enjoyed Virginia. I miss the drive on GW Parkway or down 81 toward Tennessee. Oklahoma is where I landed and I got a whole lot more than I dreamed of.
Sometimes the smartest move isn’t up or out — it’s over. Inland, where there’s space to grow, and a city waiting to grow with you.
Thanks for the great read.