Pittsburgh’s housing authority is looking to artificial intelligence and continued staff training to whittle away at a waiting list filled with thousands of people seeking affordable housing.
“We have all heard a lot about the affordable housing crisis here in Pittsburgh, and the Section 8 voucher program is key to helping us solve that problem, so what we want to explore today — we have guests from the [Housing Authority City of Pittsburgh] and landlords,” said Councilor Barb Warwick, during a special City Council meeting she called on Wednesday.
In 2020, PublicSource reported that the housing authority planned to “enhance the voucher program,” but those efforts were hampered due to staffing shortages, according to the authority’s leadership. Since then, steps have been taken to train new staff, according to HACP Executive Director Caster Binion, who along with the agency board’s then-chair pledged improvements in 2022.
Warwick on Wednesday said that concerns with a waiting list spilling into the thousands, the stigma around voucher holders and issues of on-time payments for landlords led her to invite HACP’s leadership, including Binion, and several landlords from across the city to meet in City Council chambers to discuss possible solutions and ways to attract more landlords to the voucher program.
Households with vouchers pay 30% of their income toward rent and utilities, with the balance covered by the HACP. Several thousand people in Pittsburgh rely on the program to help pay rent, with thousands more on a list hoping for future assistance. Issues around payments from the authority to landlords persist as city and county agencies push for affordable housing solutions that rely on the voucher program.
The landlords at the meeting represented various scales of business from independent landlord Deborah Clark with one Housing Choice Voucher [HCV] tenant to Rising Tide Partners, a nonprofit leasing a quarter of its 164 rental units to Section 8 subsidized tenants. Rising Tide Executive Director Kendall Pelling attended the meeting after meeting last year with HACP’s leadership to discuss similar concerns. Also in attendance was Glenn Williams, president of SEED Development, a nonprofit organization providing low-income housing with the intent to help renters become homeowners. Williams said his organization has 37 units under the Project Based Voucher [PBV] system.
Williams and the others described issues with receiving payments from the housing authority, while Warwick and other council members asked questions to better understand the breakdown between HCV and PBV, which are attached to particular apartment buildings as is the case with Williams’ tenants.
Binion told the group that the HACP has about 10,000 people on its waiting list for the housing vouchers, a federal assistance program that allows holders to use their rental assistance with any landlord willing to participate.
“Coming into this program, we thought that having the housing authority paying a good portion of rent is a good thing, but in some instances it’s been a failure,” Williams said.
He said that between December 2020 and April 2024 his organization had five unoccupied three-bedroom units, costing thousands of dollars to their bottom line.
“I have nobody to put in and I can’t go to the street and get a tenant,” he continued. “All my tenants have to come from them.”
Clark focused on concerns with lease enforcement issues and called on the HACP to pressure voucher-holding tenants to follow rules outlined in the rental agreement. Marsha Grayson, HACP’s chief operations officer, said that the authority cannot enforce lease requirements in such cases, and recommended that Clark begin the eviction process against tenants, a process that can be dragged out in court.
Binion, in response, said the HACP has trained a cohort of new housing specialist staff in the last two years, and he invited Warwick to bring Binion and his staff back before council in six months for an update on their progress.
“As of today we are moving in the right direction,” Binion said. “I have a super staff now and the morale is high. We’re processing contracts in a very rapid way, interacting with their landlords. It’s not perfect but it’s come a long way.”
Grayson said, “part of Williams’ issue is, we have 33,000 people on [PBV] waiting list. You get a repeat of people applying for various lists, so 33,000 isn’t unique people. We don’t know when you have a vacant unit.”
Binion said that along with the newly trained staff, HACP is looking to use artificial intelligence to process people on the waiting list. He also noted throughout the meeting that he will get involved personally to help landlords resolve their issues with the voucher system.
“This is why I like working with Director Binion so much,” Warwick said. “It’s also a pitfall. He’s willing to solve your problem personally but that’s not a sustainable model. The system has to be there so that it solves these issues and not the director.”
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter, and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
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