East Liberty in transition

The neighborhood is losing Section 8 units but still leading other areas with landlords who take vouchers

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

At a raucous community meeting at East Liberty Presbyterian Church last year, the topic was the first phase of relocations then in full swing at the Penn Plaza apartments. City Councilman Ricky Burgess said “the Penn Plaza crisis has spilled over into everybody’s psyche.”

Relocating is an exhausting routine for many low-income renters, but Penn Plaza’s scale made ripples in the greater public’s awareness of the shortage of decent housing for low-income people. Its residents were not just displaced but dispersed, and East Liberty lost 200 units of affordable housing in one year.

Those Penn Plaza residents with Section 8 vouchers could be tracked, and of roughly 60 households with vouchers, 40 went looking for a Section 8-approved landlord. Ten found a landlord in East Liberty.

The rest dispersed in the East End or more broadly. Nineteen did not use their vouchers for reasons that included being over income, having expired vouchers or wanting off assistance.

At the same time, but more gradually, 127 units in East Liberty Gardens were emptied out for new construction.

Samantha Gilcrese lucked out after several dashed hopes looking for a place with a voucher.

“I had a couple things fall through,” she said. “One place I was supposed to move into sold because he got an offer. Another landlord didn’t work out.”

She found a place in one of eight townhouses East Liberty Development Inc. has been renovating for voucher holders on Enright Court and Hays and Selma streets.

With its high-end building boom and the closure of Penn Plaza, East Liberty has become the perceived epicenter of the affordable housing crisis in Pittsburgh. It is a neighborhood in economic transition, which its Section 8 numbers confirm. It still has more voucher units than any other neighborhood, with 396, but it has 114 fewer than it did in 2011.

And yet Section 8 doesn’t begin to stem the tide.

Nationally, one in four households eligible for a Section 8 voucher can get one, said Mary Cunningham, co-director of Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

Locally, the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh maintains a waiting list, and the last time the waiting list was opened — two years ago — more than 7,000 people applied to get on it in a two-week period, said David Weber, chief operations officer for the authority.

“Not all of them will be eligible,” Mr. Weber said..

“We don’t want to give people false hope” that just because they get on the waiting list a unit will open up soon, he said. “The time before that, we had more than 13,000. We randomly selected 5,000.”

The federal budget offers no hope, either.

The 2017 federal budget for vouchers is $20 billion, and the proposal for 2018 is $19 billion.

“We’re moving in the opposite direction” from need, Ms. Cunningham said. “Local and state governments don’t have the resources to fill” the gap. “Some have housing trust funds to which they dedicate tax revenues or levies. In places where you have tighter rental markets or where incomes are stagnant — and that’s most places — you have a very large group of households feeling really rent burdened.”

Housing is considered affordable if you can pay for it with no more than 30 percent of your income.

“There is no place in the country that has enough affordable housing to meet the need,” Ms. Cunningham said. “This is an issue that affects small and big cities and rural areas, and it’s going to get worse.”

Much housing stock that exists, whether vacant or affordable for purchase, would not meet the standards of Section 8 inspections, she said.

“One trend is that people are not always able to use a voucher if they’re lucky enough to get one,” said Phyllis Chamberlain, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania. “Part of the problem” is finding a landlord who will accept it.

She said the alliance has been working in Pittsburgh with landlords to help build relationships with service providers, such as a nonprofit with a client in a homeless shelter or someone with a disability. They act as navigators and help their client find a landlord.”