Executive orders are more typically associated with the federal government — and recently, with the extensive changes being made to it by President Donald Trump.
But on Friday, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey signed two executive orders of his own — which he says will enshrine housing discrimination protections in city policy. Part of the goal is to blunt the impact of Trump’s own actions.
“We are fighting to ensure that fair housing laws that may get rolled back in D.C. [do] not impact what we do here locally,” Gainey said Friday. “Let’s be clear: Trump and the MAGA machine are using executive orders to move fast and break the federal government and producing an enormous amount of human suffering in the process. I'm using the executive orders to fight, to strengthen our local safety nets and protect our civil rights.”
Under the new policies, landlords and developers who take city dollars will need to formally certify their compliance with local anti-discrimination provisions as described in the City Code.
Developers who receive public city subsidies also will not be allowed to refuse subsidized housing vouchers, commonly known as Section 8 vouchers, and won’t be able to discriminate against tenants in general based on their source of income. That includes Social Security, disability benefits and child support.
The moves, Gainey said, were partially in response to the ongoing rollback of anti-discrimination protections by the Trump administration. They also align with the mayor’s ongoing “Keep Pittsburgh Home” initiative aimed at promoting affordable housing.
Using executive orders to create such a mandate appears to be unusual for a Pittsburgh mayor, and could prove controversial. Executive orders have generally been used in the past to create set policies within city government itself, or to set in motion a task force or other process that will be codified in subsequent legislation.
A call to Craig Kostelac, president and owner of the Landlord Service Bureau, which has opposed earlier efforts by the city to impose rules on rental properties, was not returned Friday afternoon. But Gainey’s initiative Friday is not the first time the city has tried to make accepting Section 8 vouchers mandatory — and those measures have previously faced legal challenges.
Back in 2015, Council President Dan Lavelle introduced legislation forbidding landlords from discriminating against tenants’ source of income — meaning that landlords wouldn’t have been allowed to refuse subsidized housing vouchers, commonly known as Section 8 vouchers.
But the Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh filed suit against the city, and successfully argued that forcing landlords to accept the vouchers was too burdensome, and that the city did not have the right to impose additional bureaucracy on their businesses. After a yearslong court battle, the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Apartment Association in 2021.
Lavelle said linking the rule to anyone who receives city taxpayer funds is a way to still accomplish some level of anti-discrimination, even if it only applies to landlords and developers who take city money. He said he spoke with Gainey about how to make these protections happen.
“The mayor essentially said, look, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good,” Lavelle said. “There's good we can do, and let's build upon that.”
When asked whether he was concerned that landlords might just decline city resources to avoid following the rule, Lavelle noted that the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, on whose board he serves, already requires landlords who receive its funds to follow this policy. Alongside tax subsidies, funding from the URA is one of the ways that landlords can receive taxpayer money.
“We just started to roll it out with the various projects that we have with the conversion projects downtown,” he said. “This fortifies it, because it's not in all our documents or in all of our subsidies.”
The previous legislation that Lavelle put forward did not require developers to commit to following local anti-discrimination laws, as Gainey’s orders do, he noted.
