The Neighborhoods Most Likely to Slide
Pittsburgh was built on hills, and hills move. We laid the city’s official slide-risk map over all 90 neighborhoods to see whose ground is doing the most work to stay put.
76 of 90
Pittsburgh neighborhoods sit on ground the city flags as prone to sliding
After a long wet stretch, whole hillsides in this city have been known to creep toward the street, taking driveways, garden walls, and the occasional garage with them. It is common enough that the City of Pittsburgh keeps an official map of the ground most likely to give way, and uses it to decide where building gets harder.
We took that map and laid it over every neighborhood in the city to answer one simple question: where is the ground least willing to stay put?
11.47sq mi
92%
9
how much sits on slippery ground
The darker a neighborhood, the more of it falls inside the city's slide-prone zones. Hover or tap any shape to see its share.
Source: City of Pittsburgh landslide-prone zones over 2010 neighborhood boundaries.
The 15 neighborhoods most on edge
Fineview earns its name: more than nine-tenths of it sits on slide-prone ground. South Side Slopes and Duquesne Heights are close behind, which will surprise nobody who has tried to park there.
Why Hillsides Move
It almost always comes down to water
Water is the troublemaker
Rain and snowmelt soak into a slope, adding weight while loosening the soil’s grip. Most slides happen after a long wet stretch, not during a single storm.
The slope does the rest
The steeper the hill, the less it takes for soaked soil to start moving downhill. Pittsburgh has plenty of steep, and gravity is patient.
Freeze and thaw loosen it
Our winters expand and contract the ground all season, opening small cracks that hand the next round of water an easy way in.
You cannot flatten a Pittsburgh hillside.
You can control what the water does to it.
Built on a slope?
Let’s keep your hillside where it belongs.
For more than 30 years, Stockman Lawnscape has built retaining walls and drainage into Pittsburgh’s hardest hillsides. The trick is never just the wall you see. It is giving water somewhere to go and holding the soil in place while it gets there.
Retaining walls that drain
Engineered to hold the hill and move water out behind them, not trap it.
Yard & foundation drainage
French drains and regrading that send runoff away from your slope and your house.
Erosion control
Stabilizing bare or washing slopes before a small problem becomes a moving one.
Certified, permitted work
Certified drainage and wall installers who handle the permits and engineering taller walls require here.
“It’s not about the price, it’s about the process.”
– Nathan Stockman, President
How we did this
We started with the City of Pittsburgh’s official Landslide Prone Areas map, the same one the city uses to set stricter building rules on risky slopes. We laid it over the city’s 90 neighborhood boundaries and measured how much of each neighborhood falls inside a slide-prone zone. The city’s map is a simple yes-or-no: a spot is either flagged as prone or it is not, so our percentages describe how much of a neighborhood is flagged, not how severe any one slide would be. The map covers the City of Pittsburgh only, not the surrounding suburbs.
Data sources: City of Pittsburgh & Allegheny County GIS, via the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center. Landslide-prone zones last updated 2018; neighborhood boundaries from the 2010 census geography.
This is a general look at public data, not an engineering assessment of any specific property. If you are worried about a slope, have it looked at in person.
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