Happy Thursday! Pittsburgh's getting a second train to New York, which hasn't happened here in decades. And down in Dormont, people are fighting about 180 apartments using facts a chatbot made up. You can buy a ticket for one of those in October. The other one has two more years to run.

Gov. Shapiro and PennDOT announced Monday that the Pennsylvanian, the one daily train between here and New York by way of Harrisburg, becomes two daily trains in mid-November. Eighteen stops, Greensburg and Latrobe included.

The route carried 236,000 riders last year. Best total it's ever had, and it still sells out. Right now you get one departure: 7:30 a.m. out of Pittsburgh, into New York around 5. Miss it and you're driving. Two trains means you can actually plan around it.

For decades the direction of passenger rail in this city has been down. This is the first time in a long while it went up. Times aren't set yet, but tickets should go on sale in October.

Dormont council signed an exclusive negotiation agreement with developer Pennrose back in June, covering the Dormont Junction park-and-ride on the Red Line. Early renderings show up to 180 apartments across three buildings, one of them eight stories.

None of it is approved. The agreement runs six to twenty-four months and locks the borough into nothing: no design, no construction, no vote. That part keeps getting lost in the fight online, where residents are now sorting real objections out of AI-generated ones. The real ones are specific and deserve an answer. Sewer capacity. Parking. What it does to traffic on Potomac. The made-up ones just make those harder to hear.

Destenie Nock studies energy affordability, and her piece out this week argues that utilities are measuring the wrong thing. A low bill gets treated as proof energy is affordable. Usually it's proof somebody is going without.

Her example is local. A family renting the top floor of a duplex in Allegheny County, newborn in the house, thermostat reading past 83 degrees. Pennsylvania law says a rental has to have heat. It says nothing about cooling. Their bill was low.

 

More houses got cheaper this week than came on the market at all. 792 price cuts against 699 new listings. Sixteen sellers went the other way.

That's not a glut. 655 sold in the same seven days. It's sellers deciding to meet the market instead of waiting it out. If you're buying, almost 800 people put it in writing this week that their first number was wrong.

 

"You get your own lakefront house. Sit on your front porch, overlook your own pond or lake."

Two and three-quarter acres in Beaver County, and the water is the whole point. The covered porch wraps the front of the house and looks straight out at the pond. Two docks on it, plus a path around the whole thing. There's a sauna in the finished lower level and a hot tub out back, which tells you plenty about how the last owners spent a Saturday. The kids' play area has a pirate ship on it. Central Valley schools, and you're minutes from I-376 and the airport.

Listed by Gina Cuccaro, Berkshire Hathaway The Preferred Realty.

 

There's an agave in the Desert Room at Phipps that spent fifty-odd years doing nothing in particular. Agaves bloom once. Exactly once. Then they die. This one finally went for it, and the spike got so tall that staff had to pull a pane of glass out of the ceiling to let it keep going.

It's still up there, though not for much longer. Once it finishes, the plant gets composted and the pups around its base take over the room. Fifty years of waiting, one flower, and they had to open the roof for it.

 

 

🎧 DJ on the Lawn at Bakery Square (Larimer) · free, 6–9
🎣 Candlelight: 90s Unplugged at the Omni William Penn (Downtown) · ticketed, 8:45
🎤 Mark Normand at the Improv (Homestead) · ticketed, 9:30

🎤 Bruno Mars at Acrisure Stadium (North Shore) · from $36, 7:00
⚽ Riverhounds vs. Tampa Bay at Highmark Stadium (Station Square) · 5:00
🐕 Steel City Mega Pet Expo at the Convention Center (Monroeville) · ticketed, all weekend

🥓 BaconBurgh at SouthSide Works (South Side) · free, noon–6
🚲 PedalPGH from Allegheny Commons (North Side) · registration required, 9:00

— Tim