2/4/2026
By Kate Luxemburg
I have worked as a data analyst and data manager for over thirty years, now self-employed, retired from contracting; and I have been a homeowner in Wilkinsburg since 1974. As a contractor, I was once assigned to PNC Bank to tag PNC customers in a dataset of “all credit-worthy individuals in the US.” I went to my job eager to work with “big data.” My interest in public data grew along with the power and storage available for personal computers. I came to love working with Allegheny County data in my home office— 913,650 records in the current voter history file and 584,144 real estate parcels in the county assessment file. The 130 Allegheny County municipalities can be compared with queries that join voter history and real estate data. Which municipalities are far from the county average on which measures? Wilkinsburg is large enough to be interesting and small enough to be well understood. This is one reason I continue to live here.
I’m particularly interested in civic participation, as measured by voting, correlated with homeownership and aging housing stock. Start with a house the borough has just paid to demolish. When was the most recent vote from that address? Where do the people who were the most recent voters at the address live now? In Wilkinsburg, in another Allegheny County municipality, no longer registered to vote in Allegheny County?
The issue that pops out when looking carefully at Wilkinsburg is that categorizing single-family houses as either owner-occupied or tenant-occupied misses the fact that the legal owner of a house may be long-deceased and the householder is the owner’s now-adult daughter or even granddaughter. I would not put house in this situation into the tenant-occupied bucket. From the point-of-view of a bank, the house is not owner-occupied, but from the point-of-view of the community, the house is owner-occupied. Allegheny County, unlike other PA counties, doesn’t operate a tax claim bureau to get new owners for tax delinquent properties, which increases the count of parcels with most recent sale date too long ago for the owner to be still alive—and thus the count of “not owner-occupied.” Also, some discussions that cite US Census data as to increasing percentage of houses that are deemed rental units because they are not strictly owner-occupied don’t state whether uninhabitable, still-standing structures are subtracted from the total of housing units before the unit count is divided into owner vs. rental.
Understanding that the dichotomy “owner vs. rental” doesn’t perfectly fit Wilkinsburg reality, now we ask—what percentage of habitable single-family houses is owned by corporate investors? This ownership is definitely rental, not owner. It has become matter-of-course to hear that corporate investors are pricing out other buyers. But I go to the data whenever I get a refresh of property owner name and mailing address, and what I see is that this well-known proposition does not hold true, especially in Wilkinsburg. Disputing the proposition with reference to data that people don’t want to take time to look at has made me a contrarian.
Not entirely willing to live as a contrarian, I was super interested to discover this Planet Money podcast–
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/30/nx-s1-5690291/affordability-housing-market-own-home-trump-davos
What we learn near the beginning of the podcast is that recently Trump promoted the proposition that government policy should deter institutional investors from dominating the market for single-family houses. Who expected Trump to become a champion of homeownership against moguls?
The Planet Money podcast goes on to present research documenting that the problem that is now recognized from left to right on the political spectrum is not, in fact, the actual situation in most US neighborhoods. Please listen to the podcast or read the transcript to learn generally where the proposition of homeownership priced out holds true and where it does not.
Super interesting to me! In appreciation, and wanting to spend time hearing from data-driven speakers, I decided to attend the Pittsburgh event on the Planet Money book tour. Planet Money will be in Pittsburgh the evening of April 22. I bought tickets for myself and my son. April 22 is a third Wednesday. I have decided to miss a Wilkinsburg council meeting for this.