Pittsburgh is houses on hills. Streets climb, city steps stand in for sidewalks, and a front door may be a flight above or below the road. Retaining walls hold the yards. Basements are buried on the uphill side and open on the downhill side. Winters are cold. Summers are humid. Fog sits in the river valleys. Rain and melt run at the foundation because the hill gives them a direction. This is not a flat rowhouse with a party wall on both sides.
Roofs are usually pitched, often steep, and they deal with ice at the eaves and with snow that slides onto a lower roof or a walk. Houses are older brick and frame, foursquares and narrower houses perched on small lots. Some flatter streets do have rows. The job on this page is still the slope: drainage, steps, a wall, a foundation that takes the hill. Heat is a furnace or a boiler that has to finish the winter. Cooling fights valley humidity.
Say where the house sits. Above the street, below it, or cut into the grade. Say what failed. Water at the uphill wall, an ice dam, a furnace that quit, a sash racked out of square, a yard that is mostly terrace, mice at the sill, a bath over a walk-out lower level, or a question about your policy. Steps matter. If every bag and every fixture has to be carried, say that.
Have the slope in the first sentence and the symptom in the second. Declarations page and deductible if you are calling about coverage or a claim. Roof shape if you are calling about a leak. Whether the lower level is wet only when the hill runs. Do not describe a marble stoop on a flat grid. Describe the wall that is underground and the wall that is not.
The hill is the whole context. Pittsburgh houses shed water, hold onto ice, and meet the ground at an angle. Pick the trade and call.