This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by our political reporters providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
Few subjects in Pittsburgh politics are as hotly argued as zoning policy. And if you thought an 11-hour planning commission meeting would end the debate about housing affordability …think again.
These days, in fact, city officials appear ready to argue about a zoning change that everyone supports.
Earlier this week, City Councilor Bobby Wilson introduced a bill that would change the city’s minimum lot-size requirements — an alteration that would allow developers to put residential units on smaller parcels than the zoning law currently allows. The bill would also delete limits on how many housing units can be placed on a given-sized lot.
“Having the ability to build 50 units instead of 30 is really essential to making housing more affordable,” Wilson told WESA. “It allows you to use the land more efficiently, especially in our historic neighborhoods, where there could be a swath of land that could be developed, and right now it's limited to the amount of units that could go on it.”
There’s broad agreement that the proposed changes could encourage more building, especially in neighborhoods where lots are narrow, such as Bloomfield. Supporters say the change would increase housing density, and as Wilson notes, it could help developers get more bang for their buck.
City Council members like the idea. So do developers and housing advocates. Mayor Ed Gainey does too, presumably, because the measure was taken from a bundle of bills he proposed last year.
But that, ironically, is where the problem lies.
Gainey’s initiative was based on a 2022 city Housing Needs Assessment that found the city had seen growth in higher-income population while losing households of moderate means, particularly among lower-income renters. And administration officials made clear that they wanted to encourage more development while also setting rules to ensure lower-income people didn’t get left behind.
Some Gainey supporters worry that fast-tracking the lot-size bill is doing just what the administration feared — giving developers what they want upfront, but sacrificing leverage to pass other reforms the community needs.
The lot-size legislation “is sort of the golden nugget for the developers. This is the incentive,” Councilor Barbara Warwick said after Wilson introduced the bill. “To take this golden nugget out and pass it separately is to hand the incentive to developers without getting the affordability benefit that we need here in Pittsburgh.”
Warwick helped draft the overarching legislative package, and the key measure she and others are seeking involves citywide inclusionary zoning (IZ)— a hot-button issue that spawned the aforementioned 11-hour planning meeting.
IZ involves requiring developers to set aside a certain portion of living units in new buildings to be affordable, charging housing costs that are affordable to people with lower incomes. The policy is already in effect in a couple of city neighborhoods, but supporters say that expanding it citywide will ensure that less-wealthy residents can be built into neighborhoods, avoiding neighborhood segregation.
Many real estate developers and some pro-housing advocates, however, argue that inclusionary zoning makes new housing more expensive because developers may absorb losses on the affordable units by raising rates on the others.
Council would always have had to consider the bills in Gainey’s housing package separately: Legislative rules limit how many subjects can be dealt with in a single bill. But Warwick says cherry-picking the lot-size bill makes it harder to consider housing policy in a broader context, and to move forward a comprehensive agenda.
And in fact, some avowed opponents of inclusionary zoning thanked Wilson for his move Wednesday.
“Inclusionary zoning being forced into my district is a non-starter, I will tell you,” said Councilor Anthony Coghill, a longtime foe of mandatory IZ. By contrast, reforming the lot-size requirement “is a common-sense thing that I welcome in my district, and yeah, I think we're on the right path. I think it's a good idea to piecemeal this down and keep inclusionary zoning the way it is.”
That frustrates Warwick, who told WESA that proposing lot-size reform “was a good-faith effort on our part to make IZ feasible for developers.”
“Carving it out of the affordable-housing package, so that those developers can get the incentive before we vote on the affordability requirements that people have asked us for, is unconscionable.”
Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak struck a similar tone, telling WESA that it’s “critical” to adopt lot-size reform “in conjunction with the affordability measures. That's why we introduced an integrated package of reforms to our zoning code that both removed barriers to housing construction and established affordability requirements at the same time.
“That is how we hope to see the legislation ultimately considered and adopted by Council,” he said
That kind of legislative horse-trading, in which popular ideas are linked to more difficult choices, is common. And Gainey, who served for nearly a decade in the state House before becoming mayor, has suggested the linkage here.
As he put it during a political forum early last month, “If I’m doing … lot-size reform to give these developers more opportunity to build units — if I’m doing something for you, you can’t do something for me?”
For his part, Wilson said he’s wary of pitting the community’s interest against that of developers because new development will bring more tax revenue to cash-strapped city coffers.
“There's a big tone right now that I'm hearing words from our leaders in the city of Pittsburgh calling people who have been doing development … ‘greedy, real estate tycoons,’” Wilson said at council. “We're just dividing ourselves.”
A public hearing will be held on the topic in the next several weeks. Warwick said she hopes to see concerned Pittsburghers there.
“The public will get their chance at the public hearing to make their voices heard on this,” she said. “And I hope that they do.”
But if it’s anything like the last zoning public hearing, you may want to block out more than a few hours on your schedule.
