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This is a really cool project, but I can't help but wonder about the numbers. 1,400/month for a 1 bedroom when there are rentals for <1k nearby, closer to Pittsburgh proper. And the same price point will get you a place inside the city, if that's where you work.
would have been nice to see a project like this turn into a co-op instead of trendy market rate rentals.
Yea, this isn't as simple as it appears.
A building like that would have all sorts of remediation challenges, just from sitting vacant for 10 years. I'm surprised it could be remediated without major costs - that's often a big challenge in reusing/repurposing old buildings.
It's not like 3 random dudes bought a building and refurbed it, these guys have the background (and financing), to the tune of 3.3 mil to rehab the place. Just getting it to meet code for a multi-tenant dwelling (instead of a school which is how it was originally zoned), is quite an accomplishment, and could've been enough to stall such a project. I'm impressed - I can only imagine all the potential showstoppers that could've popped up anytime along the way.
To your point about the rental costs, surely their financer(s) had to look at their plans and determine whether it could generate the income necessary to repay the loan.
It would be interesting to see their project plans and get a sense of everything this kind of project encompasses.
One of my dreams is an NGO or government agency that builds high density housing and rents it at cost. Then uses the income and donations to scale the process up until it's a major player in the housing market.
Alas, I do not have access to millions of dollars in funding.
I've heard other psych nurses say that it would be nice to have a pseudo / super low acuity psych hospital / jail superlite where all the people who have been so chronically institutionalized that they can't function in society can just check themselves into and chill semi-indefinitely instead of clogging up psych hospitals with vague suicidality complaints (some of them are probably legit, but most of them are realistically mild enough that they just need a $100 a month room with a bed, a locker, and one of those japanese style single-piece sink / toilet / shower stall units, and a cafeteria on the ground floor). Offer them ways out, job training, etc, but if they're really just so fucked by the system that they just wanna do nothing and maybe occasionally go to the common area and do a word search while watching sitcom reruns just kinda... let them live their best life as they see it...? It'd probably actually be cheaper than constantly ripping them between different institutions and paying for nursing care, COs, etc. You'd probably still need a small amount of supervision but you'd need a much lower ratio of workers who don't need as much training.
Yeah. Yeah that would actually be really nice and it would save a ton of money. Most people in that situation do want to get functional and live on their own though too, so I would expand it to include nearby housing that's more expensive, more independent, but also in walking distance so they can come back and hang out or get more help when they need to.
Looking at the pictures of the one apartment that they showed, the rent seems pretty reasonable. It would be nice if it was made more affordable to the average person, but it's not crazy expensive either.
The building also has a gym and a common area that do add value to what you get. I imagine the place also had a cafeteria, but it doesn't say what they did with it.
Personally I'd have probably retro fitted it into a server room to help recoup some of the costs.
"Three millennials become slumlords"
Wow, I'm uplifted
If this apartment building is what you consider slums, you must be super rich.
Lol, give it a decade, you'll see what happens.
I have been aware of that area of Homestead for decades, and it has slowly been getting a lot better since the 80s/early 90s. The area it is in is the gentrified part that has been steadily getting more wealth, and less QOL issues, for decades now. It is on 9th right between west and amity, just up from the waterfront.
"We were never allowed to live in my old school!" - Phoebe
You still aren't, because you can't afford what they're asking for rent.
It's not a steal, but 1600/month for a 2 bedroom isn't exactly unattainable...
It's half the rent for where I live now.
While this is wholesome, fuck this AI article. There's absolutely no human alive that would accidentally type cost instead of caused.
I watch confirmed humans type "should of" every fucking day.
I concede. I just typed "I" instead of "eye" in a comment. U right.
I am humans lmao, I can see that. I feel like what I said is a bit more of a stretch, but from a proofreading/editors standpoint, it's not excusable.
Bonus story, in fifth grade, I had to write an essay and I swear to god I wrote "ov" instead of "of" and I had an internal battle about which it should be knowing damn well how to spell much more complex words. After I settled it, I could feel my ears get hot from the embarrassment of even having to deal with it. I wrote ov naturally, then just saw it in writing and was like no, there's no way. Then I erased it and wrote of, then thought no fucking way, there's no way they landed on 'f' for a 'v' sound.
English is and always will be German, French, and Spanish in a trenchcoat pretending to be one language.
It might be possible that a human dictated it and the speech-to-text program transcribed it that way; in most American accents those words are near perfect homophones. Still, -10 points for failure to proofread.
In fact, I'd assume a bot would be less likely to make a phonetic mistake than a person/
I started to say this in my previous comment, but on things like Youtube shorts, I've noticed the baked in subtitles they always have tend to be hilariously inaccurate, even if the video is using a text-to-speech program to read aloud something written on Tumblr or Reddit, so they had the text in the first place.. It does speech-to-text, then they run text-to-speech on that.
LLMs are trained on written text, and I don't think they would correctly innovate on misspelling. Someone else mentioned the "should of" mistake, which I can see an LLM doing, because it's a common mistake humans have made. "cost" instead of "caused" isn't commonly made by humans, so I don't think an LLM would just come up with it. STT software has been pulling that shit for 30 years now though.
Absolutely. STT is still hit and miss on YouTube.
Likely. I was thinking that too, but still sort of the same outcome. Journalism is dying a very public death.
You may be on to something. But yes, imagine your whole job is to read, rather than write/read/write/read and you still miss this and many others.
Brilliant.