Good morning. Also in here: the city voted to redirect fifty million dollars of Downtown tax growth, a plant at Phipps is dying in front of an audience, and Pittsburgh's most famous haunted house is for sale — with a listing that never mentions the ghost.

—Tim

Camp opened Tuesday at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe — the 59th the school has hosted. Fifteen practices are open to the public through August 17, free with a mobile ticket, free parking. That part is exactly like every other summer of your life.

Here's the part that isn't. For nineteen seasons the man running that field was Mike Tomlin — nineteen years, not one losing season in any of them. His tenure ended after last season's AFC North title and a playoff loss in Houston. Mike McCarthy now has the whistle, the first coaching change since 2007, and Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback in what he says is his final season.

Pittsburgh measures time in coaching tenures — three men across more than fifty years, the kind of continuity most cities don't get in any institution. The drive out Route 30 in late July is a civic ritual here, closer to a county fair than a practice: kids on shoulders, retirees in lawn chairs, the same rope line since the Carter administration. This week the ritual is intact and the constant inside it is gone.

On Tuesday, City Council approved a Downtown Transit Revitalization Investment District — a TRID — 6 to 3. In plain English: the district issues bonds to pay for redevelopment now, then repays that debt using much of the new property tax revenue those buildings generate later. Developers still pay the higher reassessed bill; a chunk of it just routes back into more Downtown development instead of the general fund. Opening round is $50 million — $40M to convert empty offices into housing, $10M for transit. It could reach $200 million, pulling tax capture from Downtown, the North Shore and the Strip while spending it around Steel Plaza, Wood Street and Penn Station.

It was not quiet. Roughly 40 residents signed up to speak against it at a five-hour committee meeting. Barb Warwick, Deb Gross and Khari Mosley voted no — Warwick argued the money would do more good remediating abandoned buildings citywide, and objected to calling it an "investment" when the city won't own any of it. Gross moved to hold it for legal review; that failed 7–2. Anthony Coghill called it "short-term pain for long-term gain."

The Planning Commission approved Pitt's new residence hall Tuesday. Nine stories, 105 feet, at Fifth and Ruskin, on what is currently a surface parking lot, shaped like an L to wrap the 19th-century Music Building rather than replace it. Six residential floors, 420 beds, and ground-floor dining open to the public. Map test: corner of Fifth and Ruskin. You can stand on it.

I pulled the seven-day numbers for Allegheny County this morning:

Not a typo. In one week, forty-six sellers cut their price for every one who raised it. Same seven days: 810 new listings came on, 562 sold, and 331 quit the market entirely — 216 expired, 115 withdrawn.

If that's all you read, you'd think Pittsburgh is in trouble. So look at the other end of the same county, in the same week.

Closed volume above $1M went from $304 million in 2021 to $446 million last year — up 47% in five years — and first-half closings are running about 27% ahead of last year. That's a pace, not a promise. But it's the strongest half-year this segment has produced in six years.

This isn't one market having a good year or a bad one. It's two markets that happen to share a county — a luxury tier that's never moved faster, and everything underneath it where 786 people spent the week admitting they'd asked too much. The gap is the widest I've seen in six years.

There's a plant at Phipps dying in front of an audience right now, and it's the most Pittsburgh thing happening this week.

It's an Agave americana — a century plant — in the Desert Room, somewhere between 50 and 60 years old. These flower exactly once, then die. Decades of nothing, one enormous bloom, curtain. This one started in March and has been climbing since, throwing up a stalk twenty to thirty feet tall, which created a problem, because the greenhouse roof is not thirty feet up. So Phipps took a panel out of the glass ceiling and let it keep going.

That's the detail I can't stop thinking about: a plant waited half a century for one moment, and an institution removed part of the building rather than cut it short. Go look before it's over. It doesn't do this again.

Sunday falls off a cliff. Anything outdoors, do it by Saturday night.

It's haunted. I'm not being cute — it's the haunted house, the one people here have told stories about for twenty years. And the part most people don't know is that the Catholic Church came, and it stopped.

This is 3406 Brownsville Road in Brentwood, and it's on the market. If the address doesn't ring a bell, the story will. It's the house Bob Cranmer — a former Allegheny County commissioner — wrote a book about in 2014, after his family spent years describing things they couldn't explain. The Diocese of Pittsburgh took the case and assigned Father Ron Lengwin, later joined by other priests and a lay woman, Connie Valenti. It was not one afternoon with holy water. It took two years. The family says it ended in February 2006.

That was twenty years ago. The house has been quiet since, and for several years it's run as a bed and breakfast — people book a room, sleep there, eat breakfast, leave.

Now the part that's actually my job. Read the listing and you'll find a beautiful description of an 1899 Victorian — stone, slate roof, six gas fireplaces, coffered ceilings, a grand staircase and the original servants' staircase, a music room, a third-floor suite with its own kitchen. A genuinely spectacular old house, sold that way.

It does not mention the demon. Not once.

And it doesn't have to. Pennsylvania settled this in 2014 in Milliken v. Jacono: psychological stigma — a death, a crime, a haunting — is not a material defect, and a seller has no duty to volunteer it. The court's reasoning was that a terrible event inside a house doesn't change the quality of the house. Whatever you think of that, it's the law here.