On Friday, April Hamlin showed up for a tour of The Clairton Inn Apartments, a new $17 million affordable housing development in the Mon Valley.
Hamlin is one of 163 people to have applied for a spot in the newly renovated 49-unit building.
She has lived in an affordable housing development in Clairton for almost 12 years, she said, and her rent has gone up. She makes less than $20,000 per year from disability benefits and a part-time job as a receptionist at a recovery center in Oakland. The rent would be about $150 per month cheaper than her current apartment, she said.
Hamlin loved how new everything at the Clairton Inn is. She said she had rodents earlier this year in her other apartment.
“It would be a new start for me. And it's a new building. So we have something in common,” she said.
Richard Lattanzi, the mayor of the City of Clairton, said at a ribbon cutting for the building on Friday that this was a new start for the city as well: There hadn’t been a development like this one in 50 or 70 years. The city once had a population as large as 22,000 people. But today it’s around 6,700, he said.
“What a dream come true for not only the City of Clairton but myself as mayor, when all the naysayers were saying, the town's going down, we're never coming back,” he said.
Lattanzi, who is in his fourth term as mayor, said the city had to make difficult decisions to help get out of Act 47 financial distress with the state, which it had been in for 29 years. The city cut jobs and raised taxes. And so when this project came up, lawmakers and officials said on Friday that they pressed hard to help the city out.
Laura Zinski, the chief executive officer of the Mon Valley Initiative, said the list of names of people who helped make the project possible was three pages long. Several of the funders were in attendance Friday to celebrate.
David Gibson, a vice president at PNC Bank, said the bank put $12 million of equity into the project, which limited the need for loans and, he said, would keep the cost of rent down for residents. The Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development delivered more than $2 million for the project, according to Ali Doyle, a representative from the department. County Executive Rich Fitzgerald represented Allegheny County, which provided over $1 million for the project.
State Rep. Austin Davis said this was the first of several projects, including the construction of a library and the addition of businesses downtown, that would bring $60 million of investment to the area.
The new apartments are part of a restoration of the historic Clairton Inn Hotel. The first floor of the new development has commercial and retail space.
Residents are expected to be able to move into their apartments in August.
