Weeks from the May 20 primary elections, affordable housing has emerged as a heated debate topic between the Democratic contenders for Pittsburgh mayor, incumbent Ed Gainey and County Controller Corey O’Connor.
Gainey and O’Connor have argued in recent weeks over how much housing has been built in the city under Gainey’s leadership, which began in 2022, and whether the mayor has done enough.
One thing the pair agree on: Pittsburgh is in need of more affordable housing. A 2022 city study found a shortage of some 8,000 housing units for renters who earn less than 30% of the area median income.
Gainey claims a historically superior record of “delivering” 1,600 affordable units, while O’Connor says the mayor has fallen flat. Experts told PublicSource that both campaigns gloss over how complicated housing policy is — and even how hard it is to measure how much has been done.
Mayor Ed Gainey gave a bus tour of affordable housing across Pittsburgh to members of the media on April 23. The mayor invited opponent Corey O’Connor on the tour during a heated television debate that questioned his effectiveness in bringing affordable housing to Pittsburgh. (Photos by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
“Part of the issue with affordable housing policy in general is different terminology means different things to different people,” said Chris Rosselot, policy director at the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.
Bob Gradeck, director of the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, said there’s no single dataset that can capture housing creation in a given place, and he wrote in a blog post in January of the hazards of taking administrative data and putting it into new contexts. (Both campaigns have done this to some extent.)
And Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh, said there’s no regular data source to measure affordable housing creation, and if he were tasked with researching the topic, the work would take until after Election Day.
201 or 1,600?
When Gainey published an online database of affordable housing projects that have received public dollars under his administration, O’Connor was quick to point out that many of the featured projects had yet to be built and many were marked as “preservation” rather than new construction.
Just 201 units were newly built and have already been completed, O’Connor said, far short of the 1,600 units Gainey tallies.
The gap between the two figures is in part due to Gainey’s counting of preservation projects that ensure units remain affordable when they are at risk of becoming market-rate, and rehabilitation of would-be affordable units that have fallen into disrepair.
According to the mayor’s data, his administration has played a role in preserving 299 affordable units, with another 366 rehabs in progress.
Dan Emmanuel, research manager at the Washington, D.C.-based National Low Income Housing Coalition, said preservation is an “extremely important” tool to decrease affordable housing deficits.
“Cities like [Pittsburgh], the problem is generally less about supply than it is about preservation,” Emmanuel said, noting Pittsburgh’s lack of population growth in recent decades. “You generally have enough units for the people who live there, it’s just a question of if the units are affordable or not and whether they are of sufficient quality.”
Matt Madia, director of real estate services at Neighborhood Allies and the leader of an affordable housing preservation working group, credited Gainey for investing in a preservation loan fund through the Urban Redevelopment Authority [URA]. He also said work remains to be done at the city’s housing authority. That agency has been found to be an ineffective administrator of a voucher program, leaving thousands of people on wait lists.
He suggested the city put more focus on the housing authority, “to make sure that the people living in the public’s housing have safe living conditions.”
O’Connor said in a recent interview that preservation is a key part of his own agenda, and he sought to criticize Gainey’s handling of the statistics, not the initiative itself.
“Preserving is great to have but preserving does not mean new,” O’Connor said. “When you tell people you’ve created 1,600 new units … it’s disingenuous to say that you have new units when you don’t.”
Gainey has used numerous verbs to describe his administration’s role in housing creation, settling on “delivered” as a catch-all for units that have been either preserved or built.
Thousands of units an increase, or iffy data?
Gainey has claimed on the campaign trail that his administration has overseen more affordable housing creation than any other in the past 20 years — a weighty claim considering two administrations during that time period served more than four years.
Experts told PublicSource it is exceedingly difficult to measure affordable housing created over time, making it hard to verify Gainey’s claims.
Asked for evidence, the Gainey campaign referred PublicSource to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, measuring construction permits for all housing units, not only affordable ones, and including projects that received no city assistance.
That data shows a notable increase in units since 2022, with more than 2,000 unit authorizations both in 2022 and 2023, compared to fewer than 1,000 in each of the previous six years.
But there are problems with using such data to compare mayoral records, according to regional economist Briem. The permits are granted before the housing is built. Permits reflected in this data can represent efforts stretching back into previous mayoral administrations or fail to capture all the efforts of the current one.
He also warned that the Census data has not always captured all building activity in the city, causing some unreliability in older data.
The dataset also does not include preservation of housing units, which Gainey does include in the account of his own administration’s success.
Gradeck added that there is not an individual data source that can tell the full story about affordable housing in Pittsburgh.
“You have to pull together things from a lot of different sources and make sure that you do the work to validate it and ensure that it’s accurate,” Gradeck said. “Generally speaking, the sources aren’t there to do what you want them to do, they’re there to administer programs.”
Asked about these concerns, Gainey spokesperson Rowland said that the Census data shows “overall construction has increased significantly during the mayor’s term.” The data, though, refers to permitting and not construction.
O’Connor said annual reports from the URA show that Gainey has not outproduced previous administrations. The reports indicate more than 2,200 affordable units created or preserved in eight years under Gainey’s predecessor Bill Peduto.
Rowland responded that the campaign was comparing the mayor’s record to any previous four-year mayoral term. Numerous campaign statements, though, and signage at campaign events simply compare Gainey’s record to those of other mayors.
Gainey has also highlighted the city’s receipt of 12 Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC] awards over two years, an amount the mayor says is unprecedented. Developers work with the URA to compete for the awards, meant to help developers offer housing at low rent without losing money, which are doled out by the state.
Records from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which awards the tax credits, indicate the claim is accurate. The city received six awards in one funding cycle just three times since 2010, and two of them were during Gainey’s tenure. The other was in 2020. The most common outcome was four awards per cycle.
LIHTC awards fuel some of the projects Gainey showcased on an affordable housing tour last week, which his campaign designed to counter O’Connor’s criticisms. One of last year’s credits, worth $1.4 million, went to the effort to rebuild the Hill District’s sprawling Bedford Dwellings housing complex.
Standing in a parking lot near Bedford Dwellings, City Council President Daniel Lavelle credited Gainey with kickstarting the long-awaited project with a new strategy to garner funding. The city won a federal grant for the project after promising to build enough units to re-house current residents before tearing down any of the old ones.
O’Connor dismissed Gainey’s boasts about tax credit awards, saying “those happen all the time,” and said he would pursue even more awards by targeting less-sought-after 4% awards in addition to 9% awards.
‘Zero plans’ or four pages?
Gainey has accused O’Connor of attacking his record without a substantial alternative plan. “My opponent has zero plans to build affordable housing. None,” Gainey said last week.
Asked for its response, the O’Connor campaign provided a four-page housing policy paper that it has not publicized yet. It starts with calls for improved permitting processes and zoning changes.
The campaign wrote that the city has lost out on hundreds of new housing units because of zoning restrictions or because “permitting approvals were so delayed that a project’s capital stack fell apart in the interim.”
The permitting concerns match what some of O’Connor’s prominent donors in the real estate development industry said in explaining their support for the challenger. They said city permitting is too slow, and Gainey’s administration does not take their calls seeking to expedite decisions.
O’Connor also called for loosening the zoning code to make it easier to build, and said the current zoning code “directly imperil[s] housing abundance.”
He also proposes:
- A new transit-oriented development zoning overlay
- More aggressive repurposing of properties in the city’s own portfolio
- Conversion of Downtown office space into residential.
All three items have been focuses for Gainey. Transit-oriented development was part of the zoning package that he proposed in 2024 and is still awaiting a final vote from City Council; Gainey has looked to the Pittsburgh Land Bank to start repurposing some of the city’s properties; and he collaborated with Gov. Josh Shapiro and some private companies on a landmark deal for office-to-residential conversions.
Charlie Wolfson is PublicSource’s local government reporter. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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