When Wayne Grgurich and Lisa George bought a two-story house in Upper Lawrenceville, they thought it would just be a starter home. It was small and “crummy,” Grgurich said, but at least it had a view of the Allegheny River.
Thirty-six years later, the two still live in the home that they purchased for just $26,500. But their views of the river have been replaced with new developments and fixed-up houses once similar to their own. Now retirees on fixed incomes, they worry about their ability to stay afloat once a property reassessment takes place.
“If they assess one of the upgraded ones at $800,000, then that’s fine,” Grgurich said. “Don’t assume ours is worth anywhere near that.”
In August, a Court of Common Pleas judge ordered Allegheny County to begin reassessing properties by 2027, with an end date sometime in 2032. Generally, a reassessment aims to bring a property’s assessed value, which helps determine its tax bill, in line with what it would likely sell for on the open market. Currently, the county generally assesses properties at just half of what they could go for in the market.
Property owners will fall into one of three groups of similar size once a reassessment takes place, said Dominick Gambino, who managed the process for the county from 2001 to 2003.
- Those who pay too little in taxes now will see their bills go up.
- Some bills will roughly remain the same.
- Those who pay too much in taxes now will see their bills go down.
Generally, the three groups can also be thought of as a sliding scale from the fastest-appreciating communities to the slowest. If Allegheny County reassessed regularly, Gambino said, market changes would gradually affect tax bills. But “when you reassess every blue moon, the changes are dramatic.”
Public Source identified three communities that are likely to fit within those three categories: Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward, Wilkinsburg and Findlay Township.
Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward: Change may spur tax shock
On a muggy Thursday evening in October, Rafe Shaffer sat on the lawn of the 1925 two-story home that he shares with his wife and two children in Morningside.
When he and his wife made their move from New York City to the Pittsburgh area two years ago, Shaffer said they could’ve settled in a suburb such as Fox Chapel. But his upbringing in the Big Apple made it difficult to pass up the diversity of city life.
“Coming from New York City, the most valuable part of that entire experience, 36 years of my life, was just being surrounded by diversity,” he said.
That brought the family of four to their current home, which the county has assigned a fair market value of $115,700, despite Shaffer and his wife purchasing it for $405,000 just under a year ago. In the last two years alone, 12 other families have moved into homes along the same street. Like Shaffer, they all paid about three times the county-calculated fair market values of their homes.
He said it’s hard to imagine how a higher tax bill triggered by a future reassessment would impact his family and their ability to stay in their home. “I hope to be in this home until I can’t go up and down those stairs anymore,” he said.
Across Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward, which includes Morningside, Upper Lawrenceville, Stanton Heights and Garfield, homes sell for about 2.4 times their fair market value.
While each neighborhood looks different than it did a decade ago, Grgurich said Upper Lawrenceville’s transformation has been dramatic. The nondescript, working-class community he remembered from his childhood had experienced a wave of violent crime by the time he reached adulthood.
Once that happened, residents such as Grgurich and George organized to turn the neighborhood around. Their efforts eventually worked, George said, enabling property values to rise and a new crop of creatives and “hipsters” to live alongside Upper Lawrenceville’s longtime residents.
“It was an organic thing that happened. And it was beautiful,” she said.
Those community-focused improvements began translating to Upper Lawrenceville’s real estate market about a decade ago, Grgurich said. As the neighborhood became more attractive, real estate investors began purchasing property, making upgrades and quickly selling for more (known as flipping), he said.
“Why would we want to have a rental place for a poet when we can flip it and sell it for $500,000 to a surgeon?” he said, explaining developers’ approach to flipping properties in the neighborhood.
Corporations bought about a quarter of all single-family homes sold in Upper Lawrenceville between 2001 and 2021, according to a report published by the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.
It’s led to a challenging circumstance for the couple, who rely on Social Security payments and small pensions to live.
Another longtime resident, Deirdre Kane, said she also fears for her mother, who still owns and lives in the home she bought with her late husband in the 1980s. If there’s reassessment with no protections for long-time residents such as her mother, Kane said the neighborhood “will cease to exist, the original Lawrenceville that I grew up in.”
A state law passed in 2024 enables the City of Pittsburgh to pass its own longtime owner-occupant property law. A local version of the LOOP, proposed by former mayor Ed Gainey, would’ve limited assessed values for properties that experienced a 25% increase from one year to the next, or a 50% increase within five years. The cap would have applied to the city’s tax bill, but not the county’s or school district’s. The bill was held for a public hearing in 2025 but ultimately expired by the end of the year.
Airport communities: New houses, less volatility
About 25 miles west of Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward is Findlay Township — a municipality that’s home to roughly 7,500 residents and a portion of Pittsburgh International Airport.
In the years since the county’s last reassessment, the township has welcomed several new Amazon facilities and about 2,400 new residents.
“We fully embraced the opportunities that being an airport community gave us,” said Tom Garrity, the township’s manager.
Bob Doddato, a real estate investor who has served on nearby North Fayette Township’s Board of Supervisors for 14 years, said he imagines part of that growth is also due to the West Allegheny School District and the desire to live in a rural setting.
“We still have a lot of farm land,” he said. “A lot of people who live out here don’t want to look at suburban development after suburban development.”
Unlike their distant neighbors in Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward, the typical property owner in Findlay or North Fayette is likely to see their tax bill go down. That’s because properties there more closely match their potential sales price than the rest of the county.
Doddato said that both townships have seen a lot of new development since the last reassessment, which likely plays a factor in those communities’ levels of assessment. A property usually keeps the same assessment as it had in 2012 unless an upgrade or sale triggers an appeal. Permits for new construction can also trigger reassessment.
About 40% of the 136 properties sold in Findlay over the last two years were built after 2013, whereas only 7% of the 261 properties sold in Pittsburgh’s 10th Ward during that same time period were built after the last reassessment.
Findlay already has some of the lowest millage rates in the county: 1.6 mills for the municipal tax, and 18.5 for the school district. Because state law doesn’t allow municipalities to receive a windfall of tax revenue from a reassessment, those millage rates would drop even lower.
“There are amenities in the City of Pittsburgh that people out in the suburbs don’t have,” said state Rep. Valerie Gaydos, whose district stretches from Imperial to Sewickley Hills. “That’s the type of stuff the city pays for, which is great. But that’s why people are moving out to the suburbs, to keep their taxes low.”
Gaydos, who voted against the state law permitting Pittsburgh to create its own LOOP law, said she would like to see countywide legislation that would have the same effect.
Wilkinsburg: High millage, varied impact
Marita Garrett, the former mayor of Wilkinsburg who spent several years on its council and currently runs the nonprofit Civically, said the borough being home to two stops along the East Busway and a portion of Parkway East make it a prime location.
Yet its municipal and school district millage rates — some of the highest in the county — send potential homeowners to other municipalities, she said.
“I’ve had a lot of friends and colleagues who may have lived in Wilkinsburg, where they’re renting and wanted to at some point purchase a home,” she said. “But if you know your taxes are gonna be 50% of your mortgage, you have to be realistic.”
Based on recent sales and assessments, the typical Wilkinsburg property owner would likely see their tax bill change relatively little after reassessment. But as with other municipalities across the county, a lot of variation exists within that average.
Property owners who exist at the extremes will see a difference in their tax bills, even if most Wilkinsburg residents see little change overall.
Tracey Evans, the executive director of the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation, said she would like to see the borough’s taxing bodies conduct a study of the future property reassessment’s financial impact on residents.
“I think it’s important for the borough and the school district to be well ahead of this, and not wait until ‘32,” she said.
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Matt Maielli.
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