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Neighborhood Resurgence Should Not Eliminate Affordable Housing

Many Pittsburgh neighborhoods are experiencing a resurgence in new development. As new homes and businesses take shape, affordability for the working class.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writer Diana Nelson Jones and Richard Swartz, Executive Director of Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation discuss ways to motivate developers to build low-cost housing. Swartz finds the most effective way to ensure reasonably priced housing would be engaging communities in the process. Neighborhoods would have a voice and a motivationto improveand thereby dictate the kind of community in which they want to live.

In his work in Garfield, he operates under a model four-part plan:

“In Garfield, for example, we need to have a community organization who says, ‘You know what? We’re going to make this a part of our mission in the neighborhood.’ You’re going to have to have a city government that’s very receptive to helping you assemble a site or sites to do the housing development itself at a relatively inexpensive cost. Thirdly, you’re going to need to find a private developer who has experience in all of the aspects of financing and managing the construction of a project because most of that capacity does not lie within the community itself. Then I think fourth, you’re going to have to have a strong management component.”

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