Pittsburgh, for one. Think about the city proper - honestly there aren't near as many chain restaurants as you might expect. It's one of my favorite things about Pittsburgh.

Absolutely - when I last lived in Pittsburgh I lived Downtown in the Roosevelt building and found myself in that terrible Burlington Coat Factory far too often. Would be nicer to have something with a local connection, but a Target right there would have been a huge upgrade.

Yeah - this is key and Mad Mex is a perfect example of this - just a clone of a national chain business model which inherently means a steady decline in quality. In the end you have what Mad Mex has been for years now: decidedly sub-par Mexican food (even by Pittsburgh standards) in a sub-par dining environment. Most of the people I know who still go to places like this have young kids, and it makes a bit of sense for them, I guess, but outside of that there really isn't any good reason to give business to these places.

This is huge. I'm looking in both Phoenix, AZ and Pittsburgh, depending on how things work out job wise. When I look in Phoenix I can raise my price ceiling by tens of thousands of dollars compared to Pittsburgh just based on the property taxes alone. It makes a lot of sense considering what the infrastructure costs must be, so I'm not complaining, but a lot of people seem to be surprised by these things whereas they should be considering them right up front.

Side note: even factoring that in, Pittsburgh is much cheaper. In Phoenix a run-down shack in bad need of major repairs and in a truly sketch neighborhood is easily $300k.