ED NOTE

Lest we forget some of the bigger stories in all of this. The other day I played with the housing data for the trends across metro areas since 1991 . I have renormalized the data to show changes over just the last 5 years. Just fun with numbers, but this is what you get:So we can quibble over what the Pittsburgh time series means in itself, but clearly some awful awful times in a lot of, if not most, other real estate markets over what is now a half of a decade. So we are not merely talking about a bad month, quarter or even year. Some markets out there are stabilizing, but not all are and most opining I see projects more pain elsewhere at least in the near term.Anecdotal I know it is.. but if this is not a sign of something weird in local real estate markets I don't know what is. It is almost done, but there is not one, but THREE new townhomes being squeezed onto this triangle plot of land (below) in Lawrenceville that I thought for sure was undevelopable.It really is kind of remarkable. Henry George would be cheering.: I've taken down the google street view embed that was here becasue it was interacting strangely with the blog. You can still get to the view I was referenencing here I honestly had imagined a drill of some kind going in on that site. A bit too small I know. Just so Wiz does not feel forgotten: Look at those parcels. Lawrenceville was one of the first parts of the city where the Landmen started to buy up leasing rights for Marcellus shale production within the city of Pittsburgh . By all acounts they have given up for now on city development, but why they started with the densist part of the city is just a bit confusing.