re: #257 Decatur Deb

Looked idly at costs in Pittsburgh a year ago. Even a nice river view on Mt. Washington is affordable, if you don’t live too long. The city is much nicer since I left it, perhaps because I left it. It scores high in most surveys of retirement cities. The attitude is good for fogies—free FogyFare on the bus system for instance.

This is one of the things that got me started looking at houses back there a few years ago. We were in Pittsburgh for a family reunion (the Smiths are South Side denizens going back to at least 1822), and it seemed like a really nice town - vibrant, no longer dependent on smokestack industries but not dying from their absence - and I started looking at houses, because I’d spent some time on Ancestry with old City Directories and had identified the street addresses where the Smiths lived going back to 1860. A couple of them had old listings on Zillow, which keeps the listings with pictures even after the property sells. I noticed two things: 1) the houses were pretty cheap and 2) the Dignals (one of them married my Great Grandfather in 1887) managed to fit 9 people into a house that was one narrow door and one narrow window wide. Must have been a real rabbit warren!

BUT, Pgh gets REAL FUCKING COLD in the winter!