Like cities across the country, Pittsburgh is in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, as rental expenses have skyrocketed and the prospect of owning a home becomes further out of reach for working families with each passing year. As the city works to respond to this crisis, leaders must recognize that building a “Pittsburgh for All” requires addressing the immediate needs of the people who call Pittsburgh home.
The Housing Justice Table — a coalition of allied local organizations and independent advocates — formed under one uniting principle: that housing is a human right and that everyone should have access to the housing they need. Now over 130 members strong, our signature recommendation was creating a local housing trust fund to support the creation and preservation of affordable housing — thus birthing Pittsburgh’s first-of-its-kind Housing Opportunity Fund (HOF) in 2018.
In recent weeks, a performance audit by City Controller Rachael Heisler and conflicting media narratives from her office have sprung up around the HOF. On the one hand, the hard data from Heisler’s own report proves the value of the fund to residents in need. On the other hand, she has used media attention around this report to raise questions about the HOF’s effectiveness and spending practices, even when the questions are plainly answered within her own report.
The narrative around the HOF is part of a larger trend that we’ve seen from the city controller’s office regarding calls to cut crucial city services. But the numbers prove that the HOF is not only a net positive for the city, but one of the key building blocks to addressing Pittsburgh’s affordable housing crisis and closing the racial housing equity gap across the city.
According to the audit, the HOF directly assisted over 1,000 residents with critical housing supports and created over 250 affordable units in 2022 alone to counteract these trends. While the HOF alone is insufficient to address the scale of our housing crisis, by all logical measures, this is an incredibly efficient and effective use of public resources.
The city’s housing crisis can’t be discussed without acknowledging Pittsburgh’s racial equity gap, where our Black neighbors have been hit the hardest. Our housing crisis disproportionately affects this traditionally marginalized group — exacerbating existing disparities, deepening our city’s woeful segregation and driving a loss of 10,000 Black residents between 2010 and 2020. Black homeownership is falling and since 2015, with Pittsburgh losing nearly 700 Black homeowners, a decline of nearly 10% and counting.
We can and should do more to address the housing crisis in Pittsburgh. The HOF and Mayor Ed Gainey are taking bold steps to advance solutions, and we should be doubling down on these efforts and further expanding and investing in them — not inaccurately suggesting that these programs are ineffective or failing to meet their intended outcomes.
This means leaders like the city controller’s office doing the hard work of crunching the numbers to make the city run most efficiently, but doing so in a way that keeps an honest eye on what programs like the HOF mean to our communities and prioritizing the interests of residents in need first, not those of builders and developers. Because, if diverting tangible service funds from the HOF to developers while neglecting immediate assistance for folks is the city controller’s aim, the question is — as it’s been for decades in Pittsburgh — who are we truly building the city for?
Simply put, Pittsburgh cannot be “the most livable” for all without first ensuring all of our marginalized neighbors’ needs are met and they’re afforded every opportunity to live comfortably in the places they call home. The HOF has proven to be an invaluable starting point for addressing the city’s housing crisis. Diverting funds from direct services would do more harm than good in realizing our ultimate goal of elevating all Pittsburghers.
We must both build new affordable housing and invest in residents whose lives are being affected by the housing crisis today. Heisler and other media outlets also must stop with the false narratives about the good work being done in our city, and instead, join us to expand the resources of the Housing Opportunity Fund to help keep Pittsburgh home for all.
Dave Breingan, Crystal Jennings-Rivera and Jala Rucker are co-chairs of Pittsburgh United’s Housing Justice Table.