Mayor Gainey hosts affordable housing tour

Making good on a promise that emerged from an April 17 televised debate on WPXI, Mayor Ed Gainey hosted a tour of affordable housing built or initiated under his administration on April 23. Gainey and surrogates used the opportunity to showcase houses and apartments built throughout the Hill District and in Oakland while blasting his opponent, Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor, for not attending the tour and minimizing the scale of affordable projects completed and underway in the city.

Gainey began the tour at the New Pennley Place development in East Liberty. Calling it a “full-circle moment” as he recalled growing up in the neighborhood, Gainey said housing affordability was personal for him.

“I understand how important it is to have safe, decent, affordable housing. Because the areas that I grew up in, if we didn’t have it … it would have been difficult to be able to raise your family.”

O’Connor, who recently faced scrutiny for “racist” mailers sent out by a PAC supporting his candidacy, dismissed the tour as a stunt and said at an April 22 debate on WTAE that Gainey’s claims of developing 1,600 units didn’t square with his own recently released tracker tool. “The mayor turned his housing walk into a campaign rally,” O’Connor posted on social media.

After speaking with Pittsburgh City Councilor Khari Mosley at New Pennley Place, Gainey, supporters, and members of the media boarded a bus that traveled first to the former Letsche School, where developer Michael Polite of Beacon Communities discussed his work with the city to obtain grant funding used to convert the school building into a housing complex with 39 affordable units. Polite said Beacon was further involved in a number of office-to-residential conversions with affordable units in Downtown.

The bus then traveled to a modular development nearing completion a few blocks away, where Lee Walls, founder of Amani Christian Community Development Corporation, and City Council President Daniel Lavelle spoke about the importance of homeownership before leading attendees through two open-concept rowhomes developed by Pittsburgh-based Module, who built them offsite in Carnegie.

The tour concluded with stops at Phase I of the $50 million Bedford Dwellings redevelopment and Mosaic Apartments, a development for LGBTQ seniors, on Forbes Ave. in Oakland.

Asked by Pittsburgh City Paper about the design process for the new buildings, Lavelle said of the new Bedford Dwellings that “this was driven by the community. There were numerous meetings with the tenant council where we took their input.” Dan Rothschild of Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, which designed the Mosaic building, said the apartments’ soon-to-be-installed colorful exterior paneling would function as a welcome sign for the “diverse” Oakland community.

Community advocates praised the creation of affordable housing, especially for the LGBTQ community, as essential during U.S. President Donald Trump’s “campaign of terror” against marginalized groups nationwide. Lavelle and Gainey also pushed back on criticism from O’Connor that OwnPGH hadn’t been created under the current administration by stating that the initiative hadn’t been funded until Gainey took office. Gainey concluded by hailing his office’s successful pursuit of funding for housing more broadly, including state grants for downtown redevelopment and COVID relief funds, as “historic.”

“Affordable housing is what makes our communities great,” he said.

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