Lena Gainer stood perched over a laptop that sat on the kitchen island inside of her renovated, colonial-style house in Larimer. On the other end, her granddaughter sat preoccupied by a snack and Gainer’s daughter, Cameron. Gainer, Cameron and Gainer’s mother are all real estate professionals.
“She’s gonna be in it, too,” she said of her granddaughter.
Gainer isn’t done remodeling the home, but she’s so far received two separate appraisals for $520,000 and $560,000. Yet “when I talk to people and say, ‘I live in Larimer and I’m making this investment,’ they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that house is only worth, like, $300,000,’” she said. She’s hoping that the recent sale of a home just a few blocks away — the highest-ever residential sale in Larimer — will invite them to reconsider.
In August, the Utah-based real estate firm Ashmont Ridge, LLC, paid $600,000 for 32 Mayflower St. — a single-family home previously owned by Eli Tisdale Designs, LLC. Up until that point, no homes had sold for more than $295,000 in the neighborhood.
The sale has come as a surprise for some, while others say it seems like the natural result of recent investments in and around Larimer. For community leaders, as well as local real estate professionals and developers with roots in the area, it also aligns with the community’s desire to make Larimer a mixed-income neighborhood with a range of housing options.
“I think it’s important to allow a mixture of people to live together, to keep a community whole,” said Donna Jackson, the chief executive officer of the Larimer Consensus Group.
From Little Italy to Bakery Square
Michael Berardini remembers stories of what Larimer was like when it was still considered Pittsburgh’s Little Italy.
His wife’s family planted roots in the neighborhood around the 1950s. By then, other Italian immigrant families had already settled in the area, establishing businesses such as the former sausage manufacturer Henry Grasso Inc. and Vento’s Pizza. In the 1980s, he even worked at his uncle-in-law’s gas station on Negley Avenue.
But similar to neighborhoods across the City of Pittsburgh at that time, a mix of factors — from de-industrialization and outmigration to discriminatory lending practices — had begun to transform Larimer into a segregated, low-income neighborhood, said Nick Cotter, a researcher and the founder of The Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project, which focuses on how racial and economic segregation shape the city’s neighborhoods.
These forces reduced the neighborhood’s population from 9,400 in 1960 to 2,600 in 2000. About 30% of homes sat vacant then. Lots along Larimer Avenue went for only a few hundred dollars, and Berardini said he was prepared to buy all of them. He didn’t totally follow through on that plan, but he did purchase five, which he still owns today.
Larimer — and its neighbor East Liberty — eventually saw investment through the establishment of Bakery Square and a $30 million Department of Housing and Urban Development Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant. The grant funded the construction of 334 housing units, as well as facade repairs for homeowners, in both communities.
Those investments began translating to the neighborhood’s real estate market in 2015. For the first time, a home sold in Larimer for over $100,000.
Still, with the neighborhood’s history in mind, Berardini initially said “it is odd” that a home there would sell for $600,000. On the other hand, he said he thinks it’s a “groundbreaker.”
“Instead of fleeing out of the neighborhood, people are coming back,” he said.
Gainer said she isn’t surprised. A quiet contingent of local homeowners have used private capital in recent years to fix up their homes, she said, to a similar degree as her and the previous owner of 32 Mayflower St. If they put their homes on the market today, there’d likely be about five that could go for a half-million dollars, she said.
But Richard Payne Jr., a Larimer native whose parents still live in the neighborhood, said he’s hesitant to see the $600,000 sale as good news for Larimer’s non-white homeowners. It’s still the norm, he said, for homes such as his parents’ house to be appraised for a lower-than-expected price. His parents’ home is close to the neighborhood’s border with Highland Park, and if “this house moved seven streets over, it would be $500,000,” he said.
“It’s just a problem that we face in this area, especially as people try to come back and reclaim this area,” he said.
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While the $600,000 figure doesn’t surprise Cotter, either, he does worry about the possibility for Larimer’s market to get overtaken by similar sales down the line.
“You’re starting to see some potential warning signs of it becoming, someday, prohibitively expensive for people that are low-to-moderate income, including people who have lived in that neighborhood, but also people who haven’t, right?” he said. “So how can we protect against that?”
To prevent that, Cotter said the region should:
- Produce more housing — and affordable housing, specifically, in low-poverty areas
- Offer higher incomes
- Regulate housing monopolies
- Address factors that funnel new residents into certain neighborhoods more than others, such as school performance or gun violence.
Finding the right balance of subsidized housing
Gainer owns an inactive, two-story commercial building along Larimer Avenue. She’s tried several times to bring it online again, possibly transforming it into a coffee shop. But every time she’s submitted her ideas for underwriting — a process in which the financial risk of a business is assessed before a loan or investment is approved — she’s been told that too much subsidized housing exists in Larimer for the investment to be feasible.
“If this cost $17 million to develop — and I’m just throwing out numbers — you’ve got to generate enough money to pay [investors] back,” she said. “So when they see that, ‘Oh, it’s mostly institutional investment here,’ they’re like, ‘You’re not going to make the millions.’”
The subsidized housing that is hamstringing Gainer, though, may be serving the neighborhood in other ways.
Aside from providing residents with a place to live within their means, Cotter said that non-market and subsidized housing, when built at scale, can compete with market-rate housing, therefore bringing the prices of those housing units down. On the other hand, the concentration of non-market housing in a neighborhood could perpetuate long-term issues.
“We should strive to have mixed-income neighborhoods, and there’s two ways we can do that: We can do that by increasing people’s incomes, and by changing the mix of neighborhoods to have different income backgrounds. A way you can do that is through housing,” he said.
For Jackson, of Larimer Consensus Group, the sale of 32 Mayflower St. signaled that her organization’s plan to provide a broad range of housing options — including for-sale, single-family homes and market-rate townhomes — could work. The group settled on that plan in 2023, after a six-month community engagement process.
“Do I want people to have to pay an arm and a leg? No. But that [sale] does say there’s a market here — somebody purchased it,” she said.
A community benefits agreement between the Larimer Consensus Group, Village Collaborative and Walnut Capital guarantees that the Oakland-based developer behind Bakery Square will raise funds for the construction or rehabilitation of 100 homes. The Urban Redevelopment Authority is also in the process of selecting teams to redevelop roughly 250 parcels in Larimer. The purpose of the project would be to produce “high-quality housing,” according to a request for interest the URA put out for interested developers.
Majestic Lane, the URA’s deputy executive director and chief strategy officer, said Mayor Corey O’Connor’s administration is also looking for ways to partner with the commonwealth to fund site prep work for several of the lots. O’Connor previously said he asked the state for $15 million for citywide remediation of city-owned parcels.
“In any situation, you want to create as many accessible opportunities for people of all communities as possible to be able to live in a neighborhood,” Lane said. “When you look at Larimer, the amount of units that have been created — multi-family units and affordable units — the community thinks it makes sense, and we think it makes sense, to partner that with single-family, affordable and accessible homes.”
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O’Connor will be in Larimer on Thursday afternoon to highlight the community’s efforts to bring more affordable homes online along Mayflower Street.
Gainer said she thinks recent investments in affordable housing have been important. At the same time, she hopes the $600,000 home sale signals to homeowners like her that Larimer is worth investing in.
“Larimer does not need to become Lawrenceville. It does not need to become East Liberty,” she said. “Larimer has the opportunity to become a thriving version of itself again.”
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
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