Mayor hopefuls differ on housing solutions
Whether Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has done enough in eight years to balance rapid economic development with housing affordability is shaping up to be one of the essential debates in his bid for a third term.
The issue is important in a city that once was ranked America’s most livable but now is losing Black residents and faces a shortage of reasonably priced housing.
The mayor insists that not all Black Pittsburghers are leaving because of gentrification, but by choice — they see the impact of long-term, generational disinvestment in their communities and expect to find a better quality of life elsewhere.
To keep people here and to attract new residents, Mr. Peduto believes in investing in both affordable and marketrate housing. That is a tall task that, if done right, can give residents more control over their spending and developers more of an incentive to make investments, but if done wrong, risks pricing out long-timers and changing the fabric of neighborhoods.
In his bid for the Democratic nomination for mayor in this May’s primary, Mr. Peduto is facing a state lawmaker who sits on the board of the city’s
Urban Redevelopment Authority and who says the mayor’s idea of growth has not been beneficial to everyone.
Rep. Ed Gainey, D-Lincoln-Lemington, has accused Mr. Peduto of rubberstamping developers and turning neighborhoods into playgrounds for the wealthy, and says he wants to make it a prerequisite for residential developers to carve out room for affordable units.
And then there’s retired police officer Tony Moreno, who says the problem’s not in affordable housing but in leadership — and that if he wins the Democratic nomination and becomes mayor, he will pilot a new idea altogether to make Pittsburgh accessible for all.
Dedicated revenue
As with many issues facing the city, Mr. Peduto recalls what it was like in Pittsburgh before he took office in 2014: a bleeding population with no structured investment in affordable housing.
One of his first acts as mayor, he said, was to create a task force on affordable housing that found in 2016 that the city had a shortage of about 17,000 affordable rental units for households at or below about 50% of the area median income. Mr. Peduto took the findings, raised taxes and created a multimillion-dollar fund for affordable housing.
“There had not been any dedicated source of revenue to affordable housing before our administration other than from federal sources and the Housing Authority,” Mr. Peduto told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this past week, noting that the only tool the city used to create affordable units was low-income tax credits.
The $120 million fund, managed by the URA, uses $10 million a year to help nonprofit developers create affordable rental units, help support first-time homebuyers, and provide a quick financial boost to households facing a temporary crisis, among other things.
Though he believes the fund has worked, Mr. Gainey says $10 million a year isn’t enough of an investment — and that overall, the mayor still prioritizes market-rate housing over affordable housing.
The state lawmaker says while some brag of expanding the city’s tax base, real growth is realized only if everyone can buy in. And here, he says, residents are being displaced instead of valued.
Carl Redwood, a housing activist who chairs the Hill District Consensus Group’s board of directors, agrees with Mr. Gainey. A statement he passed along from an advocacy group that’s endorsed the state lawmaker criticizes Mr. Peduto’s recent talk of “Black flight,” saying the mayor is worsening the housing crisis and that Black families are being forced out because of a lack of affordable housing for lower-income families.
“In Pittsburgh, over the last four decades politicians have promised a city that would be economically and racially diverse,” Mr. Redwood said in a statement. “But Peduto, like others before him, has accelerated existing class- and racebased inequities.”
To Mr. Redwood’s claim that Black residents aren’t choosing to leave but are forced to, Mr. Peduto says gentrification is happening in the city — citing East Liberty and Lawrenceville as examples — but that it’s not the primary reason why people are leaving, and that quality of life matters.
“I have dealt with East Liberty since the time it led the city in violent crime. I dealt with Lawrenceville when Dresden Way was a shooting gallery,” Mr. Peduto said. “I’ve seen the investment come back for the betterment of some, but to the cost of others. We want to be able to create a
way in which that cost is minimized or eliminated, but not to cast the city and every neighborhood’s community plans under this one broad net over what’s happening in a handful of neighborhoods.”
Mr. Gainey suggested the mayor ask the people of Penn Plaza whether they wanted to move for a better quality of life, referring to the more than 200 residents of an East Liberty apartment building who were displaced about five years ago when a developer tore it down to replace it with an office and retail complex.
Mr. Moreno said people are moving out because the city is cultivating $1,500-permonth single-bedroom apartments that people can’t afford. No one in East Liberty asked for Bakery Square, he said as an example.
Jennifer Rafanan Kennedy, executive director of Pittsburgh United, an advocacy coalition that hosted a mayoral debate this past week, said “you can’t build your way out” of the affordable housing crisis.
“I think we’ve seen tremendous amounts of luxury development without the subsequent development of affordable housing in areas that would have access to transportation, good jobs and good schools,” Ms. Rafanan Kennedy said, “so we need to attend to not only luxury and marketrate but rather to people who are just trying to make ends meet in the city.”
Grand ideas
The answer to many of the city’s housing-related problems could conceivably be a successful land bank.
That was the goal of Pittsburgh’s land bank: to get vacant and blighted properties back onto the tax rolls, turn some into affordable units and keep others as green space.
But in the seven years since its creation, it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants, lawyers and experts to draw up strategies — and the result has been the acquisition of a single empty lot. Of the roughly 11,500 properties the city owns, about half have been slapped with code violations and many are laden with court liens, making it more difficult to put them back on the open market.
And there are thousands of vacant lots that aren’t owned by the city but are scattered through nearly every neighborhood.
Mr. Peduto acknowledges there’s a problem, and says the land bank “has not produced what we wanted, but we’re not giving up on it.” He said state law has made it difficult to clear titles — making it tough for a land bank to succeed. He said he supports the ongoing effort by the URA to take a larger role in managing the land bank.
Mr. Moreno wants to start a city-funded program to train plumbers, carpenters, electricians and bricklayers to revamp or tear down abandoned properties and make housing units available on an as-needed basis. Then, he’d offer training to those homeowners or renters on how to take care of a property.
“Now you have a stake in your community,” Mr. Moreno said.
Mr. Gainey’s platform calls for “fully [activating]” the land bank, which he says means creating a strategy and structure to redevelop the parcels. It’s about being creative and working under the current conditions, he said, while Mr. Peduto
counters that fully activating the land bank would have to be done despite property rights advocates lobbying Harrisburg for years to make it difficult for municipalities to clear titles.
In what’s been a theme of their race, Mr. Peduto said Mr. Gainey could have used his clout in the state Legislature to help make it easier to operate a land bank, while Mr. Gainey says the mayor is just pointing fingers and should have known the rules when he created the bank.
Developers should know the rules going into their work, too, Mr. Gainey says. Tepidly incentivizing them to create affordable housing doesn’t work, he insists. The candidate wants to demand community benefits agreements from development projects so residents have a say in what is needed.
“You actually set the trend for what you want to see. If your development principles are in place for what you want to see and work with the community, if the developers want that deal, they’re going to do it,” Mr. Gainey said. “They’re going to give some concessions because in order to get the deal they want, they have to give some concessions.”
Mr. Gainey also wants to establish citywide inclusionary zoning, requiring developers to make a certain percentage of units affordable in their projects, baked into their strategy and not just as a patronizing add-on. Every new housing development should have affordable units, he said.
Mr. Peduto supported an inclusive zoning pilot in Lawrenceville. Mr. Gainey said this happened too late for the neighborhood, and that doing it citywide would make it so neighborhoods aren’t separated between old and new, but that they’re intertwined.
The mayor thinks the issue of affordable housing and equity is intertwined with homeownership, which he sees as a way to create wealth that can be passed down from generation to generation. He touts a $22 million bond for affordable homeownership, offering competitive loans to buyers seeking single-family homes.
His priority for a third term would be to keep fighting for a pilot program that would allow residents to use federal rent vouchers for mortgages. He calls this program Bridges Beyond Blight, and had approached the Trump and Obama administrations about obtaining authorization. It would help cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit that have many abandoned properties but no vehicle to turn them into ownership opportunities, he said.
“Creating the opportunity for homeownership is more than just creating a roof over someone’s head,” Mr. Peduto said. “It’s creating that empowerment to be able to break cycles of poverty.”
Some don’t want to own a home, though, Mr. Moreno said, and just want an affordable apartment in their neighborhood.
Mr. Gainey said success in affordable housing is measured by how many units are created, and to him, Mr. Peduto hasn’t delivered.
“It’s hard to believe the grand ideas when he’s not delivering on any of the things he’s promised,” Mr. Gainey said.