Pittsburgh Mayor Gainey claims 1,600 affordable housing units delivered during term; city data shows only 201 new units completed since January 2022, with 70% initiated before his tenure

May 11, 2025 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) –

For months on the campaign trail, Mayor Ed Gainey has trumpeted claims of aggressively attacking Pittsburgh's affordable housing crisis in ways no mayor has in decades.

In speeches and debates, the mayor has repeatedly said his administration has "delivered" 1,600 units during his first term.

"We have built more affordable housing than any administration in the last 20 years," he said during a candidate forum in March, echoing it many times since.

The city's own data shows a starkly different picture. While Pittsburgh has for years faced a shortage of thousands of affordable homes and apartments, only 201 new units have been completed during Mr. Gainey's time in office.

Add in the preservation of hundreds of existing affordable dwellings, and the number of completed projects during the past three years climbs to 500.

But 70% of those were already in the works when Mr. Gainey was sworn in as mayor in January 2022 , a Post-Gazette analysis of public records found.

Consider Prestigious Hills , the largest project to be completed during Mr. Gainey's administration. The city's Urban Redevelopment Authority approved millions in financing for the project the year before Mr. Gainey took office.

During the early months of Mr. Gainey's administration, the URA would approve another $1.3 million loan to support the construction - but the work didn't add any new units. Instead, it rehabilitated 117 townhomes and apartments that have been part of the city's housing stock since 1969.

The yearslong push to complete Prestigious Hills is emblematic of the challenges the city faces as it tries to build enough units to confront a critical shortage in affordable housing, even as aging homes and apartment complexes compete with new developments for scarce public funding.

"At the same time we're trying to get new units built that are affordable, the units that were built 30 years ago are falling apart," said Megan Confer-Hammond , chief operating officer of the Fair Housing Partnership of Greater Pittsburgh . "So they either need substantial money put in for capital renovation or they'll become so uninhabitable we'll lose them."

City officials say it's typically cheaper to maintain what's already there. A study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found that rehabilitating an affordable housing unit is, on average, about 40% less expensive than building a new one.

Those preservations have been the bulk of what the city has done during the past three years.

In 2022, the URA financed the renovation of Laurentian Hall, a 36-unit senior housing facility in Garfield that needed to replace its elevator, roof and boiler.

The same year, the agency funded improvements to Arch Court Apartments - another senior housing building in the Mexican War Streets - to make the units accessible to people with disabilities.

A year later, the URA helped save a 22-unit apartment building from being sold to a buyer who could have raised rents to market rates. The government loaned a local investment firm $850,000 to buy the building, under the condition that it cap rent for households earning less than half the region's average income - $53,650 for a family of four.

Maintaining the city's existing stock of affordable homes and apartments, while important for the city, doesn't chip away at a housing crisis that's been years in the making, experts say.

An affordable housing task force formed in 2016 - when Mr. Gainey's challenger in the mayor's race this year Corey O'Connor , was a member of City Council - found that the city needs to build more than 17,000 affordable rental units to meet demand. A more recent estimate from the 2022 housing needs assessment done by the city puts the housing shortage at more than 11,000 for households with the lowest income.

Mr. Gainey says the city can accelerate the pace of affordable housing construction by enacting his proposal to require developers citywide to set aside 10% of every large project for low-income housing.

A competing bill under consideration in City Council would take a more localized approach: It would give each neighborhood the power to decide whether affordable housing should be required in new developments within their own borders.

Mr. O'Connor supports that neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach, which Mr. Gainey has attacked as being too friendly to developers.

Executives for development companies including Walnut Capital have donated the maximum allowed by law to Mr. O'Connor's campaign, prompting accusations that he switched his stance on inclusionary zoning after receiving those donations.

During his time as a member of council, however, Mr. O'Connor voted for affordable housing requirements targeted at a few neighborhoods, including in Bloomfield and Lawrenceville , where the rules are still in place.

Since Mr. Gainey has taken office, those zoning rules have resulted in just five new affordable housing units. Another 27 are under construction - part of a Lawrenceville development that will have 267 rental units in all - and 167 are in the process of securing funding.

Some in the real estate industry say the affordable housing requirements can have the opposite effect of what policymakers are trying to achieve and can stifle development of low-income housing.

"Developers look at an affordable housing mandate as a tax on what they do," said Colin McNickle , the communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy . "The more you tax something, the less you get of it."

Mr. McNickle also pointed out that affordable units don't generate as much money as market-rate rentals - something that can make the projects financially unfeasible. The result is that developers are forced to choose between raising the price of their other units - which can drive tenants away - or simply building less housing, he said.

"The housing advocates then are going to call these developers greedy, but we do have to remember [their goal] is to make a profit," Mr. McNickle said.

With the primary race between Mr. Gainey and Mr. O'Connor raging, it's unlikely council will take action on either Mr. Gainey's citywide zoning requirement or the competing legislation until after the May 20 primary.

That will keep the issue at the forefront of what has become one of the most hotly contested primaries for mayor in decades.

As Mr. Gainey has sought to justify his campaign claims that his administration "delivered" 1,600 affordable units, the city launched a website in April that purports to back up that number with a list of projects in various stages of development.

Nearly 1,000 affordable housing units are under construction, according to the data the city posted. Another 1,300 are in the process of securing funding.

That data doesn't show the whole picture, the Post-Gazette found.

It leaves out any projects that closed on their financing before Mr. Gainey took office. But it also doesn't show the number of affordable units that get demolished to make way for construction - another obstacle in Pittsburgh's efforts to add enough low-income housing to meet its needs.

Some of the largest developments in the works won't actually add to the affordable housing stock, according to city records.

The redevelopment underway at Bedford Dwellings, the oldest public housing community in Pittsburgh , involves the construction of townhouses, apartment buildings and a senior housing complex.

In nearly every case, those new units will replace existing housing that will be demolished. Additional units won't be added to the project until its later phases, which are years away.

Mr. O'Connor and his allies have sought to tie the mayor to the persistent shortage in affordable housing at a time when home prices and rents are rising, and the ability to own a home is increasingly out of reach for families.

The city's own government is the largest owner of crumbling homes, a stock of housing that advocates say could help address the crisis if officials would make it easier for nonprofits and others to buy and rehabilitate the houses - something Mr. O'Connor has proposed.

For Mr. Gainey , the push to build more affordable housing has been a recurrent theme during his three years in office, and he put the issue at the center of his own campaign, arguing that he's addressing longstanding problems that his predecessors failed to deal with.

"We are in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, a crisis that has been coming for decades," Mr. Gainey said last year, while pitching his inclusionary zoning legislation. "We cannot kick the can down the road for the next generation to deal with."

CAPTION: PHOTO: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette : Mayor Ed Gainey claims to have "delivered" 1,600 units of affordable housing, but work has been completed on only 500 - and just 201 are new construction. PHOTO: Sebastian Foltz/Post-Gazette : Allegheny County Controller and mayoral candidate Corey O'Connor has accused Mr. Gainey of inflating his accomplishments on affordable housing, and Mr. Gainey has accused the challenger of being too cozy with real estate developers. PHOTO: Benjamin B. Braun/Post-Gazette : The mayor at a groundbreaking ceremony Oct. 2 in Uptown. It marked the demolition of four properties to make way for a $22.8 million affordable housing development with 34 units.

CREDIT: By Hallie Lauer and Jimmy Cloutier Pittsburgh Post-Gazette