Fig. 1. Sign on a property along Miller Road, just up from North State Street, on the edge of Clairton, Pennsylvania. Photograph by author, August 8, 2020.
This post will, I fear, be a prime example of crappy writing. It’s more of a data dump, failing to offer an argument for any solution, because I don’t have a solution within the paradigm of our system of social organization.
The housing picture in Pittsburgh is, to put it entirely too mildly, paradoxical. On the one hand, you have developments like Glass House Apartments that command San Francisco-level rents in, really, not that great a neighborhood[1] and a move to develop vacant office space downtown into housing.[2] New subdivisions—called “plans” here—with homeowners’ associations are popping up all around the suburbs.
On the other hand,
Houses with crumbling roofs, collapsed porches and peeling exteriors line many of the streets, where the vast majority of housing was built decades ago. These decrepit, blighted properties — many devoid of residents — are relics of another time and, some say, another place.
The homes in Larimer are emblematic of an aging housing stock that dominates the entire city, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Half of all housing units in the city were built before 1940 — the third oldest stock among major cities in the nation, a Post-Gazette analysis found.[3]
Increasingly, there is a hard dichotomy between housing that’s available to the rich and housing that’s available to the poor. There are some middle class areas, but they are often too close to areas with poverty and all the problems associated with poverty: You’ll see crime watch signs or worse (figure 1) in these neighborhoods as white residents cast a fearful eye toward Black neighborhoods in an undeniably profoundly segregated city[4] with a very visibly wide intersection of race and class.
This dichotomy led me to favor Ed Gainey over incumbent Bill Peduto in the last mayoral race, as it was obvious that Peduto had attended to some better off neighborhoods and neglected poorer others. And I can’t escape a suspicion that this highly visible social inequality lies behind a recent spate of violence in and around the city. Just yesterday morning, there was a shooting and a car chase that started not very far at all away[5] from the house where my grandparents lived and my mother and aunts grew up.
There have been some moves around the edges of the problem and because Gainey tends more often to speak when and only when he has something substantive to say, it’s hard for me to see how much of a hand he has had in them. There’s a move to help lower income people buy houses, for example,[6] and some of those office spaces converted to housing will be “affordable,”[7] whatever that winds up meaning.
My thinking has been that I want to leave Pittsburgh, in part because of the horrendous social inequality that is hard for me, with my own longstanding difficulties of class, to confront. I see blighted housing daily. And I see people living right next door to it. And while all that housing sits empty, decrepit, deteriorating beyond repair, I see urban sprawl with new construction in better off neighborhoods, neighborhoods where workers in the high technology, medical, and academic fields that drive whatever growth there is in Pittsburgh will feel comfortable.
The obvious temptation is to rehabilitate—“revitalize”—these older neighborhoods. Too often, however, that leads to scenarios[8] like Lawrenceville,[9] once a poor neighborhood, with row housing along narrow streets that had clearly been meant for workers without cars, gentrified and with kids racing recklessly down those streets jammed by woefully inadequate parking. And as always with gentrification, the rarely-if-ever-answered question is what happens to the people who were there before?[10]
Councilman Ricky Burgess, whose district includes Larimer and nearby neighborhoods, said development has been guided by a strategy of intentionally targeting areas that are already close to those of interest to the private market, such as Larimer’s streets near East Liberty and Bakery Square.
“Development moves like fire, and you have to feed it; you have to coax it. So if you want to bring development into these communities, you have to start on the strongest edge, and then bring it inward,” he said.
But that strategy also leaves vast sections of the city with abandoned and decrepit homes. Larimer’s interior — along with neighborhoods that don’t align with the city’s market demand — continue to languish. Areas like Lawrenceville, with some of the highest concentrations of aged housing, have seen jump-starts of development, but the new properties that dot the neighborhood have priced out many residents, leading to gentrification.[11]
Lawrenceville is a cautionary lesson. The Housing Opportunity Fund I alluded to above should help avoid that. But I remember shopping centers—the one in Marin City, California, comes to mind—that promised opportunity for the numerous public housing residents that surround their construction sites. And failed to deliver: Those jobs went to non-residents. These are promises that backfire. I fear the same here.
For Larimer, Mr. [K. Chase] Patterson said the community needs a program in which residents can present their own vision for the neighborhood and invite investors to bring those ideas to fruition. He and many of the area’s residents fear prospectors and gentrification will trump the needs of the community, leading to displacement.
At a Larimer Consensus Group meeting Tuesday to update residents on the community’s development plans, group members expressed their concerns about the city’s efforts to help their neighborhood, private developers and the URA.
“A lot of it has to do with the fact that historically, poor and disenfranchised folks are taken advantage of by those with means. There’s a lot of mistrust and frustration, all reasonable and fair,” Mr. Patterson said.[12]
This is where I’m supposed to say I have an answer. I really don’t, because I see the problem as larger than housing, as inherent to capitalism where even the essentials of life are subject to market forces that inherently privilege whomever can outbid another.
There is no moral answer within such a paradigm.
- [1]GlassHouse Pittsburgh, n.d., https://www.glasshouseapts.com/↩
- [2]Mark Belko, “Quicker conversions of Downtown Pittsburgh offices into apartments moving closer to reality,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 21, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/business/development/2022/09/20/pittsburgh-planning-commission-zoning-apartments-condos-residential-downtown-partnership-larimer-twg-indianapolis/stories/202209200105↩
- [3]Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods pay the price for abandoned and decrepit homes,” October 15, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/10/15/pittsburgh-blight-crime-urban-vacant-census/stories/202210160080↩
- [4]Ryan Best and Elena Mejía, “The Lasting Legacy Of Redlining,” FiveThirtyEight, February 9, 2022, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/; Ryan Deto, “Pittsburgh is one of the most gentrified cities in the U.S.,” Pittsburgh City Paper, April 4, 2019, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-is-one-of-the-most-gentrified-cities-in-the-us/Content?oid=14381722; Kimberly Rooney, “How rising rents and renovations have displaced Pittsburghers and added to the city’s ongoing issues with gentrification,” Pittsburgh City Paper, April 28, 2021, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/how-rising-rents-and-renovations-have-displaced-pittsburghers-and-added-to-the-citys-ongoing-issues-with-gentrification/Content?oid=19360553↩
- [5]Julia Felton, “Police say Dormont shooting led to chase, crash on Liberty Bridge,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, October 14, 2022, https://triblive.com/local/police-say-dormont-shooting-led-to-chase-crash-on-liberty-bridge/↩
- [6]Eric Jankiewicz, “URA weighs joining Housing Authority to aid new homeowners,” Public Source, September 8, 2022, https://www.publicsource.org/pittsburgh-affordable-housing-ownpgh-homebuyer-assistance-urban-redevelopment-ura/; Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh, “Housing Opportunity fund,” n.d., https://www.ura.org/pages/HOF↩
- [7]Mark Belko, “Quicker conversions of Downtown Pittsburgh offices into apartments moving closer to reality,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 21, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/business/development/2022/09/20/pittsburgh-planning-commission-zoning-apartments-condos-residential-downtown-partnership-larimer-twg-indianapolis/stories/202209200105↩
- [8]Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods pay the price for abandoned and decrepit homes,” October 15, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/10/15/pittsburgh-blight-crime-urban-vacant-census/stories/202210160080↩
- [9]Ryan Deto, “The displacement of Anthony Hardison from his Lawrenceville apartment is a microcosm of a neighborhood epidemic,” Pittsburgh City Paper, January 15, 2020, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/the-displacement-of-anthony-hardison-from-his-lawrenceville-apartment-is-a-microcosm-of-a-neighborhood-epidemic/Content?oid=16556108↩
- [10]Tom Davidson, “Is there a crisis of ‘forced mass displacement’ of Black Pittsburghers? Residents, council divided on answer,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, April 6, 2021, https://triblive.com/local/is-there-a-crisis-of-forced-mass-displacement-of-black-pittsburghers-residents-council-divided-on-answer/; Kimberly Rooney, “How rising rents and renovations have displaced Pittsburghers and added to the city’s ongoing issues with gentrification,” Pittsburgh City Paper, April 28, 2021, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/how-rising-rents-and-renovations-have-displaced-pittsburghers-and-added-to-the-citys-ongoing-issues-with-gentrification/Content?oid=19360553↩
- [11]Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods pay the price for abandoned and decrepit homes,” October 15, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/10/15/pittsburgh-blight-crime-urban-vacant-census/stories/202210160080↩
- [12]Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods pay the price for abandoned and decrepit homes,” October 15, 2022, https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2022/10/15/pittsburgh-blight-crime-urban-vacant-census/stories/202210160080↩
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