Before she became a Pittsburgh City Councilmember, Barb Warwick (D-5) saw the impact of getting involved on a local level.
A working mother of four, Warwick moved to the Four Mile Run section of Greenfield in 2014. Soon after, the city announced plans for the Mon-Oakland Connector, a system of driverless shuttles decried by residents. Warwick joined neighborhood organizations and Pittsburghers for Public Transit, and successfully fought to stop the project and redirect funds toward long-standing community needs like flood protection for The Run.
“It was like Coalition Building 101,” Warwick says.
Seven years later, when Corey O’Connor vacated the District 5 council seat, Warwick was deeply engaged with the district’s nine neighborhoods that span Squirrel Hill South to New Homestead.
“I got together with my neighbors and [said], there’s a lot of development that’s happening in Hazelwood,” she recalls. “We need to make sure that whoever is in [that] seat really is focused on these areas.”
Becoming a model for grassroots, bottom-up politics, Warwick won in a landslide, then was reelected for a full four-year term last November. Wrapping up her second year in office, she still marvels at what can be achieved locally, with her projects ranging from big-budget asks, like an intersection redesign, to keeping Serpentine Dr. closed to cars at the behest of constituents.
On the City Council, “technically, we’re legislators,” Warwick says. “But at this local level, you really are there as a connection between your constituents and the city. And that’s been the one thing that is so eye-opening to me is how much you can really help people.”
Especially gratifying was reallocating money previously budgeted for the Mon-Oakland Connector, which instead went toward recreation center improvements and updates to Hazelwood’s Lewis Park — “something that people want,” Warwick says.
A self-described playground proponent, Warwick says being a former teacher and a parent inform her politics. Walking her kids to school and being a bike commuter spurred her advocacy for traffic calming, an issue she’s helped bring to the fore with Vision Zero, an initiative that aims to end pedestrian deaths.
The future of the city, Warwick believes, depends on “making it an affordable place to live but also an easier place to get around.” She views POGOH, Pittsburgh’s bikeshare program, as a generational investment.
“My oldest kids are 12,” Warwick says. “If, over the next four years, we could get those e-bikes within a five-minute walk of every house in Pittsburgh, then that will radically change how they get around, and when they make that decision [of], do I get a driver’s license?”
The national political climate will soon put a magnifying glass on local government, she says, as “the safeguards for our most vulnerable people just got a lot smaller.”
“Whether that’s our unhoused folks or our children, people living in low-income communities, whether it’s our trans community, our seniors who are living on fixed incomes, or protections for immigrants, [all] those just got much tighter,” Warwick says. “So now the decisions that are made at the local, city level are going to have a major impact.”
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2024 and Pittsburgh’s People of the Year (2024).
