The future of affordable housing policy in Pittsburgh could be decided in a battle between two competing views of inclusionary zoning (IZ). One side, represented by Mayor Ed Gainey’s proposal to extend IZ across the entire city, says that this approach will increase the supply of affordable housing. The other side, represented by City Council member Bob Charland’s legislation for limited IZ, says it won’t. Advocacy group Pro-Housing Pittsburgh says IZ can actually have the opposite effect.
The proposed approaches to solving the city’s affordable housing crisis collided last December in a contentious Pittsburgh City Planning Commission meeting. The Planning Commission deferred a decision on IZ to its Jan. 28 meeting. Last week, the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group released a study calling for mandatory IZ across the city. It supports the Gainey proposal and is critical of Charland’s bill and the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh data used to it.
Whether or not IZ works and is implemented citywide could come down to which camp’s math and data are better.
Fuzzy math
Local governments use IZ to require developers to set aside a percentage of units as affordable when certain conditions are met. Pittsburgh introduced IZ in 2019 in Lawrenceville. The city expanded it to Bloomfield, Polish Hill, and much of Oakland. In those neighborhoods, developers who want to build 20 units or more are required to include 10% of them as affordable.
Founded in 1988, PCRG is a nonprofit research and advocacy organization. Its member groups include community development organizations and community service groups. Its staff includes researchers and analysts with expertise in public policy and housing and a board of directors composed of CDC leaders and community group executive directors.
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh is a volunteer activist and political lobbying group founded in 2022 to promote the production of more housing in Pittsburgh. They’re part of a larger nationwide YIMBY movement: Yes In My Back Yard. YIMBYs want to remove local regulatory barriers that they perceive as impediments to producing more housing.
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh has been effective in turning out members to testify in public hearings to support proposed new development projects, such as the Pittsburgh Irish Center, and to oppose historic preservation efforts.
Last March, the group began compiling data for a report it released in December, the same day that Charland introduced his IZ bill. Jack Billings, an economics graduate student, and David Vatz, whose LinkedIn profile says he works as a tech firm account executive, wrote the 21-page paper, “The Effects of Inclusionary Zoning on New Housing Construction in Pittsburgh.” Vatz founded Pro-Housing Pittsburgh and Billings became an early leader.
The Billings and Vatz paper claims that IZ doesn’t reduce rents and inhibits new housing construction. They used building permits data pulled from the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) and used statistical analyses to demonstrate that IZ doesn’t work.
“Unfortunately, the data that they took was from WPRDC,” says PCRG’s Druta Bhatt, one of the new report’s authors. “This particular dataset that’s coming from the City is notoriously inaccurate.”
Lawrenceville United Executive Director and PCRG report co-author Dave Breingan agrees. He says that Billings and Vatz should have checked their data against other sources. “Simple Google searches would have fixed it,” he says.
The WPRDC data have lots of gaps and errors. “Through no fault of their own, it’s a tricky dataset to use but they don’t acknowledge that,” says Breingan. “It’s challenging to use for all kinds of different reasons. It just doesn’t have the accuracy and precision of data that researchers would love to have.”
But the numbers aren’t the only problem with the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report. University of Pittsburgh housing researcher and former Planning Commission member Sabina Dietrick says that it ignored lots of variables other than mandatory IZ that affected housing production in the period covered by the Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report.
“Something really big happened in 2022,” Dietrick explains. “Interest rates skyrocketed … the authors don’t talk about interest rates and how that affects development and housing,” says Dietrick.
Another flaw, says Dietrick, is the amount of buildable land in Lawrenceville. “The authors don’t talk about available land and available properties. You can’t build new housing if you don’t have the lots,” she says.
The Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report is so flawed that multiple area housing experts and economists declined to speak about it on the record. “I shared it with a couple of economists that I know and they were very dismissive of it, like [they] thought it wasn’t even worth talking about,” says Breingan. “One of them told me, he’s a professor, that [Billings] would fail in undergrad for turning in that regression model that they have included in there.”
“There really is not sufficient data yet to attempt the analysis at the core of the paper,” says Pitt economist Chris Briem. “That would be true in any circumstance, but the timeframe we are talking about includes a lot of events that have significantly impacted development locally and nationally.”
The Pro-Housing Pittsburgh report looks like a piece of well-researched academic scholarship. It has footnotes, charts, complicated mathematical formulas and all the minutiae found in peer-reviewed academic journal articles: an abstract, keywords, and a set of Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes.
Billings admits that the report wasn’t peer-reviewed, in other words, experts in housing and economics didn’t formally evaluate it. “This is not even what I would call a working paper in economics yet,” says Billings. “It’s not been formally peer reviewed in the sense that I have not presented it at economic seminars. I would not present it at an economic seminar at this stage. We simply do not have enough data right now.”
Though Billings concedes that the paper isn’t complete and is something he wouldn’t consider publishing or even presenting at an academic conference, Pro-Housing Pittsburgh did distribute it widely to the press and to public officials like Charland.
Councilmember Barb Warwick thinks that’s a problem. “[Billings] is using it to move policy in the city of Pittsburgh,” she says. “He’s using it to move policy yet it is something that is essentially just some numbers that they were able to pull together looking at PLI records.”
“This wasn’t a strategy to put out good data or to have a fair reckoning of a complicated policy,” says Breingan. “It was to advance a position that they had already made months prior that inclusionary zoning is bad and it’s going to depress housing.”
“I always use the word ‘disingenuous,’” says Warwick.
Shortly after PCRG released its report, Vatz emailed Pittsburgh City Paper, “The PCRG report is extremely misleading in the way it presents [inclusionary zoning] as being a success, and includes many factual errors.”
Dueling statistics
Before Tuesday’s Planning Commission meeting about IZ, Pro-Housing Pittsburgh released a revised version of its report. “We have published an update to our original report which corrects errors and addresses common criticisms and questions,” reads a release the group distributed shortly after midnight Monday.
The updated report includes new data and new building projects, but the methodology critics slammed in the earlier version remained unchanged. The new report still compares Lawrenceville with the South Side Flats and the Strip District. It also doesn’t include other factors such as mortgage rates that economists and housing experts say are essential to studies like this.
“Their search for data in support of their political position continues,” Breingan wrote in an email to City Paper after the revision’s release. “I don’t think the authors have proven themselves to be capable, unbiased, or responsible researchers and their data should be regarded with extreme skepticism until it can be properly vetted.”
A marathon 11-hour Planning Commission hearing on the competing IZ bills included more than 5 hours of public testimony on Charland’s bill by more than 75 people, including 21 on Zoom. Zoning Administrator Corey Laymon recommended that the commission send a negative recommendation of Charland’s bill to the City Council.
Planning Commission Chairperson LaShawn Burton-Faulk cut off Charland’s presentation that included 130 slides and a virtual presentation by UCLA housing scholar Shane Phillips. Burton-Faulk said that Phillips was presenting data not relevant to Charland’s bill.
Most of the testimony by community groups, people from many Pittsburgh neighborhoods and At-Large County Council member Bethany Hallam assailed Charland’s bill as a give-away to developers and as bad for the city. Testimony in favor of Charland’s bill included members representing Pro-Housing Pittsburgh and Council member Anthony Coghill.
The Planning Commission voted to not recommend Charland’s bill to the City Council.
After a brief break, the commission took up Gainey’s citywide IZ proposal and voted to recommend it to City Council. Both bills will go to the City Council for additional hearings and votes.
At some point the battle over contested data and research methods is going to move out of hearing rooms and City Council chambers and into Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods. If nothing else, the fight over IZ is a good reminder students get in math classes: check your work before turning it in.
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2025.
