Post-war Pittsburgh family realizes the real value of real estate

By Peter Longini / For the Post-Gazette

Sometime in the early 1940s, before I was born, my parents moved from Chicago to Pittsburgh.

My father had been offered a job at Westinghouse Research. Westinghouse, at the time, was doing a significant amount of basic research into the fundamental properties of materials and their potential applications. It was a particularly attractive career opportunity for someone who, like my dad, had been educated in and enthralled by the physical sciences.

I don’t know what salary Westinghouse offered him, but it was enough to entice the couple to move from the familiar turf of Chicago to a place they knew essentially nothing about and where they knew no one. I’m told that they initially rented an apartment in Wilkinsburg where their bedroom view was of an oversized billboard.

Before I was born, and while World War II was still raging, they decided to make a commitment to remaining in their new community by buying a two-bedroom house in Forest Hills, one which had been built on a steep slope during the early years of the 20th century.

Although they didn’t have a car until a few years later, their newly acquired home was a relatively short trolley ride to the company’s research campus, best known locally for its towering atom smasher — a 5-million-volt Van de Graaff electrostatic nuclear accelerator — which stood for 80 years on a cliff above Ardmore Boulevard. Then in the 1950s, the company’s research labs were relocated to a new, but now abandoned, campus in Churchill.

Many years later, I remember Dad reflecting on that house purchase. Its $5,250 price struck him as being a great deal of money at the time. That was money he didn’t have in hand. Although he was able to secure a mortgage that he felt he could pay off over time, he felt sick about having paid so much for it.

After all, how could people of modest means, straight out of the Great Depression, take on the burden of buying a home in an economy that was now reeling from a major war effort?

Still, they managed to do it. And by the early 1950s, after Westinghouse had relocated its labs, they felt secure enough to build a new three-bedroom home in the still-growing neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, adjoining Frick Park. To save costs during its construction, my dad did a significant part of the labor himself (at the lasting expense of a back injury).

But by May 1952, the new house was ready for us to move in. Once again, as a young boy, I wasn’t sure how much money the house had actually cost, although the figure of $48,000 somehow comes to mind.

When they sold it, in the early 1990s, they received something like $180,000 — not a massive amount, but still a major step in the direction of building generational wealth — assets which would enable their children, and even their grandchildren to achieve a measure of material stability. And their former Forest Hills home, according to Zillow, is currently valued at $300,000.

Over time, the appreciation of my parents’ real estate assets became tremendously helpful to me in buying my own home. But not every family has had that good fortune.

I was recently listening to an audiobook version of “The 1619 Project” – an ambitious effort by The New York Times to look at American history through the lens of the nation’s Black experience.

It offers an uncomfortable view of America’s development that makes clear, among many other things, that the potential for accumulating generational wealth within the country’s many Black communities was repeatedly short-circuited by virulent and often violent racism. One result has been the lingering disparity of resources between the nation’s Black and white communities, a disparity we continue to see today.

I am not so naïve as to think that America’s unhappy history of racial discrimination can be remedied through simple gestures of reconciliation. The wounds are far too deep for that, and healing them will require an enormous amount of work. But finding ways of enabling people from every walk of life to afford a first home, along with the opportunity to build on that asset for the future of their families, can become an important first step up the ladder of financial stability.

And that, in turn, can help to narrow America’s racial wealth imbalance — an imbalance which continues to undermine American society.

Peter Longini, of McCandless, is a former communication professor, speechwriter and ghostwriter for business leaders and public officials.