Mayor Ed Gainey touts accomplishments in affordable housing, but the numbers tell another story
In becoming the Mayor of Pittsburgh, Ed Gainey promised to build and grow more affordable housing in the city and had dedicated millions of dollars to the task.
While the mayor said his efforts have been a great success, critics have responded, saying he has fallen far short of his goal of making housing more affordable.
It's the cornerstone of his administration, to keep and grow the city's working class by creating more affordable housing. On the campaign trail, Mayor Gainey has touted this effort as his crowning achievement.
"We built more affordable housing than any administration in the past 20 years," Gainey said. "We've built over 2,000 units, either built or in the pipeline of affordable housing. That's incredible all by itself."
However, his critics call that his administration's biggest failure.
"They have not lived up to their promise of creating housing affordability," said David Vatz of Pro-Housing Pittsburgh. "Some of the claims that they've made about 2,000 units, we have not been able to validate those claims."
Officially, the administration said it has "created or preserved" 1,400 units of affordable housing but conceded that only about 400 of those are actual, new construction. Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak said the city has reinvested in 968 existing units and extended their affordability protections, which were set to expire.
"That's 968 units with people living in them today, which could have disappeared and dramatically increased the affordability change," Pawlak said.
The non-profit group, Pro-Housing Pittsburgh, puts the number of newly created units at 300, but said even the administration's own numbers are underwhelming, especially since the city has dedicated so much money to affordable housing.
To date, the city has received $36 million from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan, $34 million in an affordable housing bond issue, and about $30 million in the city's Housing Opportunity Fund, totaling $100 million in all.
"You would expect with that amount of investment, you would have seen a significant amount of affordable housing and that's not what we've seen," Vatz said.
Instead, according to Vatz, the city has blocked several market-rate housing projects by requiring that 10% of the units be affordable while not providing the developers andy support or incentives to include them. He said the lack of all housing development across the city has jacked up the price of rent.
"It's what we've seen over the last three years of his administration," Vatz said. "Housing costs have gone up and up and up, and at the same time, his administration has been hostile to development."
"There are thousands more units on the table," Deputy Mayor Pawlak said.
Pawlak pointed to several projects on the drawing board and those under construction, like the new Bedford Dwelling and City' Edge in the Hill District, saying that they will dramatically bolster affordability numbers.
While developers continue to complain that affordability requirements have stymied several market-rate projects, some, including the conversion of some downtown office buildings to residential, are finally getting off the dime through negotiations with the city to include affordable units.
"It's easy to get a cheap, superficial win that doesn't get the job done," Pawlak said. "We haven't taken that approach. We've put the time and effort into getting the job done right and sometimes that takes more time."
Still, by any accounting, the administration is still far below its stated goal of adding some 8,000 units of affordable housing, and while the city continues to lose jobs and people, developers complain that there are too many hoops to jump through to put shovels in the ground.
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