New affordable housing is coming to the Hill District.
Officials broke ground Tuesday on the Herron Village Apartments, which will eventually include 12 affordable housing units and commercial space for a beauty salon, community market and laundromat. The Urban Redevelopment Authority will also help fund financial literacy courses and other life-skills training for residents, provided by ACH Clear Pathways and Catapult Greater Pittsburgh.
Elected officials today billed the apartments as a model for “resident-led development.”
“This is the epitome of … development by the people, for the people, in our own neighborhoods,” said Presley Gillespie, president and CEO of the nonprofit Neighborhood Allies.
The project has been led by developer and fourth-generation Hill resident Tonya Ford, with help from nonprofit and government lenders.
Ford’s family has owned the three buildings that make up the Herron Avenue development since the 1960s. She said it’s important to keep the neighborhood affordable while investing in its future and rehabilitating existing buildings.
“My family's legacy has always been to provide affordable living in the Hill District,” she said. “My uncles and my grandmother always made sure that people had some place to live, and they kept it affordable. So I would like to just carry on that legacy.”.
The project is about “fostering housing opportunities and economic growth in this neighborhood,” said URA chief housing officer Quianna Wasler.
The units will be available to residents making between 30-50% of the area median income and below. In Pittsburgh, that’s a range of between $21,000 to $34,000 a year for a single person, according to the URA.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee said it’s important to back development plans with community roots.
“There are many proposals for housing, but the reality is that the people who have lived here, who have endured, they deserve to also stay here and to be centered. And we want to see it done that way,” she said.
The first five units and the laundromat are expected to open in six to nine months. And though five units address just a small fraction of demand for affordable housing in the city, Lee said the “key is the multiplication” of similar projects.
“Every unit isn't just the unit,” she said. “It's a family. It is stability. … That's five families that'll be touched by this project to start, and then we know that there are other investments going on throughout the Hill. That is just going to start to multiply.”
The Herron Village Apartments project has been in the works for the past four years, but more recent government actions were also on Lee's mind Tuesday.
Speaking with reporters, she condemned the Trump administration’s refusal to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported, back from El Salvador, even after the Supreme Court ordered his return.
Lee said Trump's defiance was an attempt to undermine the judiciary and called the situation a “constitutional crisis.”
“So that means that right now we need all of our institutions to be in alignment in calling this out. We need organized people right now who recognize the dangers that he poses, that the administration poses,” she said.
“It is not an issue that is only for immigrants,” she added. “If we can do it to someone who has legal status, we can do it to a citizen. And that is the slippery slope that we're on.”
