While much attention in recent weeks has focused on how Pittsburgh can create more affordable housing through zoning changes, city council members wrestled with a different housing challenge Wednesday: how to maintain hundreds of troubled, privately-owned, publicly subsidized affordable properties.
A council post-agenda meeting focused on properties in the city owned by NB Affordable, a New Jersey-based company that bought roughly 1,300 units in the region in 2023.
The apartments — located in Homewood, the Hill District, Oakland, West Mifflin, and elsewhere — have been plagued by safety problems and complaints from tenants of poor living conditions, as council members heard Wednesday. Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala filed public nuisance and other charges against a related LLC that owns an NB property in West Mifflin last year. Council members heard about tenants with no heat, holes in their floors, no hot water, raccoons and other pests in their walls and more.
“Pittsburgh can do better,” said Councilman Khari Mosley, who called the meeting. “And Pittsburgh has no choice but to do better.”
Council members heard from several public officials, tenant advocates, and a security contractor whose firm is owed tens of thousands of dollars for services it provided at NB sites. They also heard about tenant organizing efforts from those hoping to improve conditions.
“Unacceptable is not even a strong enough word to describe what is happening,” said Congresswoman Summer Lee, who spoke to council and said her office has been coordinating between local residents and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The properties are privately owned, though they receive a federal subsidy to house low-income residents. Some on Wednesday were critical of HUD’s oversight and questioned why it allowed the properties to be sold to NB in the first place. Several speakers mentioned NB Affordable founder Fredrick Schulman’s guilty plea last year as part of a multi-million dollar mortgage fraud scheme.
Members discussed how to regulate such properties and ones with similar problems given the city’s limited resources and legal constraints (efforts to impose a rental registry on all city apartments have been limited by the courts) but found no easy answers.
A key concern discussed was enforcing penalties against an unresponsive corporate owner and improving living conditions for residents without shutting down properties and displacing vulnerable low-income tenants who would struggle to find other housing.
“I think it's important to recognize that while we want HUD to be forceful in enforcing the law, it's also a very risky thing if we're trying to preserve housing because HUD has one strong enforcement tool. And that's to abate the housing contract, force the relocation of the tenants, and leave the owner with empty properties and no rent,” said Rising Tide Partners Executive Director Kendall Pelling. “The problem is is that when that housing contract gets abated, we lose that housing … and the tenants get displaced.”
Such a situation played out in Homewood and surrounding neighborhoods in 2017, displacing nearly 200 people when their affordable apartments lost a federal subsidy because of the poor conditions in the buildings.
Pelling told council members there is a group of local, community-focused housing advocates who are working to raise funds to potentially step in and purchase at least some of the NB properties if they become available in the future.
No representatives from NB spoke at the meeting. The company has not responded to previous inquiries. A web search Wednesday showed its website was no longer online.
