Pittsburgh is a pretty amazing place right now, because it's a recovering rust belt city that's managed to transition from manufacturing (steel) to services (health care, banking, higher education, technology firms) pretty well but because their initial crash was SO hard they still have very affordable cost-of-living comparitively. So you have all the public transit and nice museums and great libraries and all that but a bartender and a waitress can buy a house and raise kids together too. It's someplace where "hipsters" are not secretly living off their parents' money to front as making it.
Pittsburgh has really weird demographics, with an uneducated older population, an educated younger population, a big gap in middle-aged population, and a massive housing surplus.
Why? Pittsburgh's steel industry, which had tons of well-paid blue-collar union jobs, collapsed in the early 1980s: 'Following the 1981–1982 recession, for example, the mills laid off 153,000 workers.'[0] A lot of the working-age population left in the following years. The main thing remaining were a lot of world-class institutions in healthcare & education (much better than a lot of the Rust Belt, e.g. Detroit/Toledo/Milwaukee), so the people that come to & stay in Pittsburgh today are very well-educated[1]. The older population that had pensions or savings to fall back on when the steel collapse came, and didn't need to relocate for work, is a lot less educated.
