Lisa Wilson circled the room at Brookline Teen Outreach, where the Department of City Planning had lined the perimeter with maps on easels.
She paused in front of a map outlining Pittsburgh’s green infrastructure, mixed in with proposed trail and bike path connections, places to plant trees and new green spaces. For Wilson, maintaining her neighborhood’s green spaces and its Hallmark appeal is important.
The event, which saw roughly 35 residents attend, was one of 13 information sessions the Department of City Planning held across different neighborhoods in April. The sessions were for residents like Wilson to provide feedback on the department’s multi-million-dollar comprehensive plan, which will inform a complete rezoning of the city once complete.
“It’s a little overwhelming,” Wilson said.
After an administration change and concerns over funding that brought a brief pause, Pittsburgh’s first-ever comprehensive plan is on its way to completion. City Planning is revising the plan based on feedback submitted during the neighborhood-oriented sessions held in April. The department will hold three citywide sessions for additional feedback during the first week of June.
The department hopes to complete a final draft by August, said Planning Director Ivette Mongalo-Winston, and present it to the City Planning Commission in the fall for a vote.
What is a comprehensive plan?
Comprehensive plans help municipalities strategize how they want to develop over a set number of years. Pittsburgh’s plan will blueprint development over the next 25 years.
According to the website PGH2050, where the city posts comprehensive plan information, the plan is intended to express “a holistic, community-wide vision of the city’s future.”
A Pennsylvania law, which exempts Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, says comprehensive plans should include:
- The municipality’s goals for future development
- A plan for land use, which might involve when, where and how much to build of types of development, including residential, industrial and commercial
- Plans for how to meet current and future housing demand; protect natural and historic resources; move people and goods throughout the area; and maintain community facilities — such as schools, libraries and hospitals – and utilities, such as waste treatment
- Short- and long-term implementation strategies
- Consideration of how future development aligns with nearby municipalities and the county.
Mongalo-Winston said Pittsburgh’s plan will address more than what the state mandates, which has, in turn, made the process more expensive. The city allocated $6 million toward the plan, and the Heinz Endowments* recently donated $750,000 toward the effort.
How to read the preferred direction maps
The current draft of Pittsburgh’s comprehensive plan includes seven maps that visualize the city’s preferred development based on overall land use, the economy, housing, mobility and green infrastructure.
The maps will inform the comprehensive plan’s future land use map, which can be thought of as its visual guide. The maps typically include splashes of color that indicate what kind of development should go where, as well as how much of it.
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for overall land use. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for economic growth. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for housing. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for mobility. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for stormwater management. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for parks and open space. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning. 
A draft of Pittsburgh’s preferred land use direction for energy infrastructure. Courtesy of the Pittsburgh Department of City Planning.
City Planning used these maps to guide the recent neighborhood discussions.
The best way to read the maps is to think of the colors as a sliding scale — from least (red or “adapt”) to most (purple or “transform”) intervention required — said Mongalo-Winston.
The sliding scale of colors could also be thought of as the greatest (purple) to least (red) change in density as compared to today, said Andrew Dash, the department’s deputy director, at the Brookline session.
Parts of the North Shore, South Shore, Strip District and South Side Flats are marked as places to “transform,” meaning these areas will be targeted for the greatest change over the next 25 years. These areas will grow through more residential and mixed-use development, Dash said.
Other neighborhoods, including Larimer, the Greater Hill District, Hazelwood and Manchester, are marked as places to “restore,” where the focus would be on repurposing vacant lots and aging buildings for new development.
There are also neighborhoods such as Downtown and East Liberty that are categorized as places to “strengthen.” These neighborhoods are home to strong economic centers, Mongalo-Winston said, but they lack enough housing to allow employees to live close to their jobs.
The “adapt” category includes land marked with red dashes on the land use map. These are areas where city planners will consider prohibiting development entirely, Dash said.
“When we grew [into] a city of up to 670,000, we kind of put buildings everywhere,” he said, noting Pittsburgh’s peak population in the mid-20th century. “We really just needed to have places for people to go, and maybe that wasn’t always the smartest decision.”
How much density is the right amount?
In Brookline, residents heard from city planners about how their department’s preferred direction would translate to their South Hills neighborhood.
“Brookline has been, for most of my life, a working-class neighborhood,” Nick Cotter said at the meeting. Cotter, who moved to Brookline with his family as a child, is the founder of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project.
Brookline is currently zoned for mostly standalone homes meant for individual families. The land use and housing maps show it’s a place that city planners want to “sustain” over the long term by keeping existing uses, scale and character. But Cotter said the neighborhood’s working-class roots have begun to lift as the demand to live in Brookline exceeds its housing supply.
“When I see Brookline sustained, that worries me, because it’s becoming prohibitively expensive to live in Brookline.”
At another meeting in Hazelwood, Liam Hodgson, a resident of nearby Greenfield, brought a printout of the Depression-era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of Pittsburgh. The map, one of hundreds created by the federal government during the 1930s, is often referred to as a redlining map because it used red to mark predominantly Black, Jewish or immigrant communities as hazards for mortgage lenders.
In a later interview, Hodgson described where he thought similarities existed between the proposed land use map and the redlining map: “The transform, strengthen, restore and stabilize designations, they all line up approximately with this red line map that was red and yellow neighborhoods.”
Hodgson said he worried that the comprehensive plan could “concentrate development, which, in my opinion, is gonna lead to more displacement.”
Mongalo-Winston said Pittsburgh needs more density everywhere, but the word might mean something different across neighborhoods. In a neighborhood with mostly single-family houses, such as Brookline or Greenfield, increased density could mean creating more accessory dwelling units, such as granny flats, or dividing single-family houses into several units.
“In these neighborhoods, there are a couple big sites left that probably require public-private partnership that no one-off developer is going to take down,” she said.
She also said that the city’s preferred direction is not set in stone, and that in addition to the category names being up for change, entire neighborhoods could be categorized differently, depending on the feedback her department receives on the plan.
What else will the plan include?
Once complete, Pittsburgh’s comprehensive plan will include a “shared vision,” or objectives for how Pittsburgh should operate in the future, based on feedback received via public workshops and surveys. One of its 10 vision statements reads, “In 2050, Pittsburgh welcomes more people while protecting who’s here,” while another reads, “Pittsburgh builds the next great industries, as iconic as steel and as green as our hillsides.”
The plan will also lay out what actions government and private sector businesses should take to implement the plan, broken up into three- to five-year chunks, Mongalo-Winston said. Similarly, policy recommendations will accompany the broader plan.
City Planning will create an online dashboard to track the city’s progress. The dashboard’s metrics are still under consideration, Mongalo-Winston said, but she said she liked the ideas residents shared at recent information sessions, including one to track the number of parcels still under the city’s ownership.
Why didn’t Pittsburgh have a comprehensive plan? Why now?
The state classifies municipalities based on their populations. Pittsburgh is the state’s only city of the second class, meaning more than 250,000 but fewer than one million residents live here. Philadelphia, the state’s most populous city, is the only city of the first class. State law requires neither city to produce a comprehensive plan.
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have gone through varied experiences since the end of World War II, but from a planning perspective, Matt Wysong noted key similarities. Wysong is the City of Philadelphia Department of Planning and Development’s deputy director of long-range planning.
The most crucial similarity was the collapse of industry beginning in the 1970s, which led to population loss in both cities.
“It was very much like triage to save the city” of Philadelphia, as opposed to focusing on economic development and growth, Wysong said. Though Philadelphia created its first plan in 1960, a “major renaissance” in the early aughts spurred the creation of a new comprehensive plan, he said. Mayoral support also helped, he said.
In Pittsburgh, at least three mayoral administrations have attempted to push through comprehensive plans, Mongalo-Winston said. Former Mayor Bill Peduto’s was the most recent example. Before he left office, he vowed to realize his vision of ForgingPGH, his administration’s version of a citywide comprehensive plan. The plan never materialized.
Why is this one, which began during former Mayor Ed Gainey’s tenure, likely to make it to the finish line? Mongalo-Winston said part of the reason is because Pittsburgh continues to lose residents, and “there is a need to really quickly pivot and make up for that population loss.”
Comprehensive plans also make it easier for cities and neighborhoods to tell their stories to investors and employers, Mongalo-Winston said, which in turn could attract more people and funding opportunities to the city.
An example of this on the neighborhood level is the success of several Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including the Hill District and Larimer, in receiving the competitive U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Choice Neighborhoods grant. Those neighborhoods had neighborhood plans before applying for the grants.
How do comprehensive plans shape planning and development?
While the final future land use map would have no legal teeth, the city’s zoning code does. It guides where, what kinds and how much development can take place across the city, and all development projects must show that they adhere to an area’s zoning, or request a variance, to move forward.
Once the comprehensive plan is finalized, the city will use it to overhaul the zoning code, said Dash of the City Planning department.
“The work that we do here tonight really does influence what type of development goes on in your community,” he said. “So it is really important to be able to think about design, to think about the scale of buildings that you want to see in your neighborhood as it grows and changes.”
What about specially planned districts like those scattered throughout Pittsburgh, and current neighborhood-level plans?
One of the goals of the comprehensive plan, and the subsequent zoning code overhaul, would be to make zoning codes more flexible. With more flexible zoning, there would be less need for specially planned districts, Mongalo-Winston said.
Nothing will happen to existing neighborhood plans, City Councilor Barb Warwick assured her constituents at a meeting in April. “I think a big part of this plan is giving feedback on how the Hazelwood plan should fit into [an overall plan] at the city,” she said.
How the city will go about new neighborhood plans remains up in the air, Mongalo-Winston said, in part because planning will happen on a broader scale in the future. A few neighborhood plans could be created at once, she said. The comprehensive plan will include guidance for how City Planning interacts with neighborhood plans and registered community organizations.
*The Heinz Endowments contributes to Pittsburgh’s Public Source.
Mia Hollie is the economic development and housing reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at mia@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Emma Folts.
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