In communities around Pittsburgh, there are streets designated as “private.” Sometimes they’re winding roads on college campuses, or they could be narrow spans seemingly tucked away in city neighborhoods.
Listener Chris Zurawsky lives in Squirrel Hill, where he often encounters these streets.
“You see some street signs, official city signs, and there’s a ‘PVT’ at the end or it says ‘private,” Zurawsky said. “Does that really mean that we can’t use those?”
Another listener, Laura Cunniff, once lived on a private street in Bloomfield.
“How did this happen? How many of them are there in Pittsburgh, and can history tell us any stories about additional responsibilities, or perhaps perks, of living on one?”
Let’s start out with a quick explanation: Public streets are maintained by municipalities and must meet certain standards for road construction. Private streets are maintained by private communities and are not required to meet the public construction standards.
“[Private streets] have been designed by an engineer, maybe to less standards, less pavement thickness, less subbase thickness to maybe different slopes that are not in accordance with the city design standards,” says John Cenkner, a civil engineer at Cenkner Engineering and professional land surveyor. When a street is designated as private, the city doesn’t have the responsibility of maintaining it.
Cenkner says developers often don’t want to shell out the cash to bring newly built private streets up to code.
“It might be a street with a cul de sac because maybe six or seven houses on it and dedicated as a private street because they don’t want to spend the money to build it in accordance with city standards,” he said.
This situation comes up fairly often for John Barrett. As manager of the growing South Fayette Township, he works with a lot of land developers and engineers.
“With new housing plans that come through the township for land development, those roads are meant to be public, but are private until the developer turns them over to be ‘dedicated’ to the township,” Barrett said.
Typically, he said, about 85% of the homes in a new development need to be constructed — and utilities need to be in place — before the township will consider dedicating the streets and infrastructure. Then, they do an inspection to make sure they’re built to township standards, including sending cameras through sewer lines.
“Then we would bring it to our board of commissioners and formally accept them into our road network,” Barrett said. “That formal process allows for those roads to receive liquid fuel dollars from Pennsylvania.”
He’s referring to the “Municipal Liquid Fuels Program,” which is a fund financed by the state’s tax on liquid fuels (gasoline, diesel) allocated to municipalities for road construction and maintenance. The amount allocated to communities depends on how many miles of roads and bridges it maintains.
Living on a private street
In other cases, homeowners themselves might have a reason they want their street to stay private. Owners of many old, historic homes in Pittsburgh want to maintain their character, so they don’t ask the city to dedicate their street. That might mean they’re along brick-laid roads or have some other distinct feature, which is the case for Briar Cliff Road in Point Breeze near Frick Park.
Ken Doyno, the president of the architecture and urban design firm Rothschild Doyno Collaborative, has lived on Briar Cliff since 1998.
“It’s a private drive that has about 26 houses on it. The driving lane and the walking lanes and sidewalks are all combined together with about three feet of wall on either side — almost like it’s been carved out of the earth,” Doyno said. “So the very narrow road makes for a feeling of being on an English cottage lane or something.”
Because it’s so narrow, Doyno said houses are relatively close together, even though they’re on pretty big lots.
“You have a kind of front porch community where a lot of people talk with each other,” he said. “We have a really great, strong community organization because it’s a private road.”
For the Fourth of July, for example, neighbors can easily shut down the street without having to go through a city permitting process, like a city-owned street would require. They hold a picnic and celebration that Doyno said has been happening for decades. Neighbors also create a community newsletter about families on the street, activities taking place and history of the homes there.
The community’s exclusive feel stems from its history as home to some of the city’s wealthier families. Neighbors there preferred to be a little more isolated, and it was actually marketed that way in the early 20th century. A 1935 article in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph described Briar Cliff as a “foliage-hidden place retreat to spend leisure hours away from a busy city.”
Doyno said neighbors there continue to enjoy that relative seclusion. In the deeds to homes on Briar Cliff, property lines extend to the middle of the road, but each includes an easement, which means residents can walk through the street even though technically it belongs to the adjacent homeowner. That’s not the case on publicly-owned streets, where property lines usually don’t extend past sidewalks.
Neighbors collectively pay to have their snow removed and have to cover the costs of any road surface maintenance.
As for listener Laura’s question about benefits of living on a private road, Doyno said it’s a collaborative community. They don’t operate like a condominium association, rather Briar Cliff neighbors have different committees for road issues and social planning.
“This ends up forcing cooperation because we all have dues we give into the collective care and maintenance of our properties,” he said.
The city says it’s almost impossible to determine why some streets are still private in Pittsburgh.
Some, like Mintwood Street in Bloomfield, could have been built as a public street, vacated at some point, and never re-dedicated to the city. Others are bought by private developers from City Council, which is known as a street vacation.
Road standards are continuing to evolve, Doyno said, due in part to a movement away from car-centric planning and toward accommodating different modes of transportation, like biking.
“There’s much more sensitivity about that in the planning and design, and in efforts to calm traffic and make movement safer for everybody,” Doyno said.
If something like a major infrastructure collapse or emergency were to take place on a private street, the city could step in even though they don’t technically own the road. It would likely be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
On the “Who Owns My Infrastructure?” website, residents can see which streets are maintained by the city, county, state or privately. Private streets are a complicated issue in an old city like Pittsburgh, made difficult by unusual topography, a history of annexation and changing street regulations.
