In part one of this series, we explored the issue of “rotrification”—what happens when decay and blight cause neighborhoods to rot away and become uninhabitable.
ELDI spin-offs Main + Elm Development Company and Rising Tide Partners are working together to address this issue across Pittsburgh by helping communities create a healthy mix of housing options on abandoned and blighted properties.
But how exactly do they do that?
For one, Huck explains that they only work in neighborhoods where they have been invited by local community groups, collaborating with them to identify their needs.
Typically, Rising Tide then helps those communities acquire the property to make their visions a reality and Main + Elm comes in to provide project development support.
“We feel that the community should be in the driver’s seat,” said Pelling. “We make decisions with our community partners. Sometimes we have to wrestle with what’s the best use for a property, but because we have to make decisions together, we figure out a solution that’s best for everyone.”
This inclusive and proactive form of community development—where nonprofits help communities acquire the land and find the funding to tackle wide-scale blight—is uncommon.
For context, Huck says that, collectively, Pittsburgh community development corporations are only developing 25-50 homes a year.
“There’s plenty of land and properties out there, but there aren’t many of us who do this kind of work,” he said. “We clear the titles, we get control of these abandoned properties, and we leverage public and private subsidies to ensure that neighborhoods have a healthy mix of income levels. The private market doesn’t do this.”
They don’t do it, because the money isn’t there. With this kind of development, Huck explains that developers earn, if they’re lucky, around 10% of a deal in project fees and need to seek other funding, such as government or foundation support, for day-to-day operations.
Yet there are neighborhoods that have found success through a community-driven approach. In East Liberty, for example, ELDI has been working for over 25 years to reverse misguided Urban Renewal era developments that resulted in high concentrations of poverty in the neighborhood and hundreds of blighted homes.
To revitalize the neighborhood, we created two community plans which have served as our guides for mixed-income development.
According to the Housing Needs Assessment, East Liberty today contains over 50% of Pittsburgh’s subsidized affordable housing stock , along with a 12-18% gain in upper-income households since 2015. At the same time, it has only lost less than 5% of low-income households since 2015.
As city living becomes popular again, for-sale urban homes at a range of price points are more needed than ever.
“What we’ve got to realize is that affordable and mixed-income homeownership development is an important part of addressing our city’s blight problems, and it should be supported in multiple ways,” said Huck. “It’s not self-sufficient just from the fees, because these deals take time. But the work is needed, so we’re building that conversation. We’re going to take a run at it.”
