Part of old Allegheny Dwellings reopens as housing at mixed rates
Ask resident Carolyn Brown about her new apartment at Sandstone Quarry, and she can barely contain her excitement.
“I’m in heaven,” said Ms. Brown, 72, of her apartment at the new mixed-income development in the Fineview neighborhood of Pittsburgh’s North Side.
“It’s a nice place down here,” said Ms. Brown, who appreciates the views of the city, as well as the safety of her one-bedroom apartment.
“The transformation is really great. The way they did this, I really love it,” she said.
The homes are the first phase of a planned redevelopment of one of Pittsburgh’s oldest public housing sites, Allegheny Dwellings. The 65 new units are a combination of townhomes, duplexes and a fourstory apartment building; 18 are market-rate, 47 are at various levels of affordability.
The new units on Federal Street and Sandusky Court, dubbed Sandstone Quarry, will be privately managed by Trek Development Group. Part of the red-brick, barracks-style Allegheny Dwellings still remains nearby, with 175 units on Belleau Drive and Letsche Street. The Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh plans to redevelop the whole site.
Housing authority officials celebrated the transformation Thursday, along with officials from Trek, the state, county and city plus tenant representatives, architect Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, Key Bank, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“I never thought in a million years it would look like this,” said Cheryl Gainey, president of the Allegheny Dwellings Tenant Council.
The hillside site has the “most spectacular views in the city,” Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald declared. “I’m an East End guy, but I can see crossing a river for this,” he said.
The new housing aims to connect community in what had previously been a somewhat isolated
site, due to the history of building public housing in the city on hilltops that were cut off from other neighborhoods, said Ken Doyno, president of Rothschild Doyno Collaborative.
“That isolation hurt everybody,” he said, and the new design aims to better connect the site to the rest of Fineview and the Central North Side.
The Sandstone Quarry name is a nod to the site’s history as a quarry, prior to it being housing, he explained.
Residents of the old Allegheny Dwellings on Sandusky Court moved out starting in 2016 to make way for the redevelopment. They were offered spots at other public housing sites, or a housing choice voucher to rent an apartment in the private rental market. To date, 15 former residents have moved into the new units. An additional 11 have been deemed eligible by the city housing authority.
“Everybody was offered options,” said Michelle Sandidge, chief community affairs officer for the housing authority.
Market rate units at Sandstone Quarry are being advertised for one- and twobedroom apartments from $875 per month and threebedroom townhomes at $1,375 per month.