City’s new development leaders will try to refocus economic growth
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto introduced the city’s new development leaders on Wednesday, saying they are a team “comprised to be able to address the realities of the Pittsburgh of today and the Pittsburgh of tomorrow.”
The mayor said the four-person development leadership team — soon to be joined by a planning director-to-be-named-later — will not only encourage growth in areas that haven’t seen it in decades, but will also address the backlog of city-owned property and perhaps even curb the rate of change in hot neighborhoods.
He said the team will find models and programs used elsewhere “so that growth will never mean somebody is forced out of the community they call home.”
The team includes:
• Marty LaMar, city chief development officer, whose last public sector job was in Toledo.
• Greg Flisram, executive director of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, who left a development job in Kansas City, Mo..
• Diamonte Walker, deputy director of the URA, who has been with the URA since 2017 and is the only Pittsburgh native among the four.
• Monique Pierre, chief development officer for the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, who left the Montgomery, Ala., Housing Authority for Pittsburgh in October.
Prior to introducing the team to the press, Mr. Peduto unveiled its members to around 20 community group leaders, developers and union representatives.
“It’s always nice to have a lot of new energy, and being also a Pittsburgher by choice, not a Pittsburgher by birth, it’s nice to also see these new leaders come in with other perspectives of what other cities are doing,” said Aaron Sukenik, executive director of the Hilltop Alliance, which spurs
development in the neighborhoods south of the South Side. “And I think we’re just really looking forward to getting them out in the neighborhoods and showing them the opportunities and threats that exist.”
He said he offered two of the new leaders guided tours of the neighborhoods he serves, “and they were both excited to do it.”
Mr. Peduto said the city has changed much since Mayor David Lawrence created the current redevelopment model in the 1940s and 1950s.
City chief of staff Dan Gilman noted that in recent years “suddenly gentrification and displacement was entering the terminology of Pittsburgh for the first time in decades.”
As Mr. Peduto’s original development agency directors began to leave in the first half of his second term, he decided to forge a new team with a different structure. The administration conducted a national search, and interest in jobs here “was tremendous,” said Mr. Gilman.
“I come here from Kansas City, Mo. And I’ll tell you, I left a really, really good job — a really, really good, wellpaying job — to come here,” said Mr. Flisram. “Because Pittsburgh has got it going on.”
“We are building a team that feels cohesive,” added Mr. LaMar, who holds a newly created position charged with coordinating all of the development-related city offices and authorities. Mr. Peduto noted the city’s longstanding failure to convert some of its 17,000 cityowned parcels into affordable, owner-occupied housing. “We’ve had less [such conversions] than I can count on one hand over the course of six years, and that is just not acceptable. That has been a focus of this administration, but we haven’t seen any traction. … That wasn’t happening. That’s going to be happening.”
He added that he wants “good-paying jobs for everybody in a growing economy” whether they have a Ph.D or a GED.
The city’s shortage of affordable housing is also at the top of the team’s agenda. The Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh has, over decades, converted old barracks-style communities of concentrated poverty into attractive mixed-income neighborhoods — but at a cost of lower numbers of lowincome units.
“I think you have to be creative on all fronts,” said Ms. Pierre, who added that she’ll “look at how can we build affordable housing and make sure that it’s a permanent fixture so that it’s a resource for people to touch and tap when they need it.”
URA board chairman Sam Williamson said the agency he oversees has “not done as effective of a job as we could have in coordinating with other authorities” and some nonprofit entities. That must change.
“We can’t achieve the economic development goals of the city as effectively if we don’t have all the various departments and authorities that are involved in one part of the development process or another effectively coordinating with one another.”