A new bill introduced by Pittsburgh City Councilor Bob Charland would scale back the proposed use of a zoning law to encourage more affordable housing — setting up a conflict with Mayor Ed Gainey.
Gainey has presented a package of zoning changes to make housing more available to lower-income residents. The most contentious change involves the use of inclusionary zoning, which requires developers make a certain portion of units in their new buildings affordable. The city has experimented with the approach in some rapidly-growing areas, but Gainey wants to extend it citywide.
Charland’s bill would let each neighborhood decide for itself whether to apply the zoning rules. It also expands the definition of “affordable” to include more expensive rents — and requires the City of Pittsburgh, the Urban Redevelopment Authority or the Housing Authority to compensate developers for additional costs that inclusionary zoning could cause them.
“We have chased away a lot of development in our city,” Charland said. “We need to tell developers that we want you to come here. We want you to play by our rules, and we want you to build housing for all income levels in the city of Pittsburgh.”
‘There has to be a better way’
Inclusionary zoning has been in place in the hot real estate market of Lawrenceville since 2019, and it’s now in place in Bloomfield, Polish Hill and parts of Oakland neighborhoods.
Gainey’s proposal, which is currently before the Planning Commission, would require 10% of the units in a development to be affordable to people at 50% of the area median income. According to Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak, that corresponds to people making about $17 an hour.
Affordable housing advocates say that inclusionary zoning helps build a mixed-income neighborhood, particularly where there’s access to shops, restaurants and public transit.
But developers and some pro-housing advocates argue that the best way to make housing more affordable is to make it more available — even at higher prices. They contend that inclusionary zoning makes building new housing more expensive and would result in fewer units overall.
Dave Vatz has been a frequent critic of the mayor’s proposal. He coauthored a study released Tuesday by his organization Pro Housing Pittsburgh, which argued that since since inclusionary zoning was implemented in Lawrenceville five years ago, less housing has been built there than in other hot neighborhoods like the South Side Flats and Strip District.
“What the mayor's proposing is the wrong plan,” Vatz said. “It's a plan that will harm housing production and will make housing more expensive for everybody. So there has to be a better way.”
Charland’s bill proposes a number of changes. For one thing, it requires the city or related agencies to cover “the financial gap burdening the creation of each inclusionary unit.”
“If we are telling developers that you have to build affordable housing, we as the city need to say that we've got skin in the game,” Charland said. “If this is our goal to build affordable housing, then we need to be participating as well on the city's end and not just asking the renting class to pay for it.”
Charland noted that the city wouldn’t necessarily have to cover those costs in cash: The city could instead use tools like tax abatements or incentives, or tap the city’s Housing Opportunity Fund — which is meant to finance various affordable-housing initiatives.
And letting communities decide whether they want to opt into an inclusionary zoning approach, he said, “empowers neighborhoods to opt into the idea of becoming an inclusionary zoning neighborhood as opposed to being told that they have to be.”
Charland isn’t yet certain how neighborhoods would opt in: “We intentionally left that open-ended and let that be the decision of city council and the Department of City Planning,” he said. But as written, the bill would require neighborhoods that already have inclusionary zoning to reapprove the program. “So if neighborhoods are grandfathered in, we'll have to sort that out and have to figure out policies around that as well,” Charland said.
Charland’s bill also would make another change: Expanding the definition of “affordability” to include a portion of units — which the bill calls “workforce housing” — where rents can be as high as 120% of the area’s median income.
Charland said that change would provide more flexibility and options for developers to house a range of households.
“I think there's maybe a debate to be had about what level …should we be looking at subsidizing,” he said. “But I think providing options to provide affordability on a bunch of different levels is a good thing.”
He pointed to firefighters, nurses and teachers as people who might benefit from workforce-tier housing. And while he agreed that the city needed “deeply affordable” homes for the lowest-income households, “we really also need the workforce housing as well. This gives developers an option to build different tiers of housing.”
A ‘poorly disguised Trojan horse’?
Many supporters of the mayor’s original zoning proposal were not happy with Charland’s alternative. Gainey said in a statement that it would “hinder” efforts to create more affordable units.
“This proposed bill is not reflective of the future that we envision for Pittsburgh, one where every resident is afforded an opportunity to thrive,” the statement said. Charland’s proposal, it warned, “will continue to prioritize corporate interests over working families."
“We’ve seen what can happen when we prioritize the interests of a privileged few over the wellbeing of the many. My administration will continue to fight for our proposed zoning amendments, which will make development work for every resident of our neighborhoods.”
Pawlak, the deputy mayor, said the administration has “grave concerns” about the effect the bill would have on housing affordability and on the city's finances, especially because the city doesn’t know how many developments would be built under the proposed rules, or how much it would owe developers.
“It's a blank check to developers to build units that most people can't afford,” Pawlak said.
Councilor Barb Warwick said Charland’s bill “spuriously uses the language of inclusionary zoning,” but doesn’t actually help with the housing affordability crisis.
“In reality, it's a taxpayer funded rent subsidy for individuals making as much as $85,000 per year” she said. “It's a very poorly disguised Trojan horse that does nothing but enrich developers on the taxpayer's dime.”
Bob Damewood of Regional Housing Legal Services was unhappy that Charland would include pricier housing in the definition of “affordable.”
“Our subsidies really need to be geared towards where the need is, where supply does not meet demand,” he said. “Our subsidies should not be targeted where we already have a lot of supply, which is at the higher end of the spectrum.”
