Over the past twenty-five years, East Liberty has undergone an impressive transformation. From crime, blight, and disinvestment to a sought-after destination to live, work, and play. But with that progress, has also come scrutiny.
East Liberty is often held up as a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of development and as a prime example of gentrification. Yet the reality is more nuanced, rooted in decades of community visioning, careful planning, and lessons learned along the way.
So what is gentrification—and is it what’s happening in East Liberty?
Defining the term
Merriam-Webster defines gentrification as: a process in which a poor area (as of a city) experiences an influx of middle-class or wealthy people who renovate and rebuild homes and businesses and which often results in an increase in property values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents.
That displacement piece is crucial, and it’s what makes East Liberty’s story different.
Let’s take a closer look.
A neighborhood once in decline
In its mid-century heyday, East Liberty was Pennsylvania’s third-largest shopping district, home to nine theaters, streetcars, and over 500 local businesses. But by the 1980s and 90s, decades of urban renewal era changes had taken their toll. Large swaths of the neighborhood were demolished to make way for suburban-style developments that ultimately failed, leaving behind blight, vacancy, and concentrated poverty.
By the time ELDI was founded in 1979, East Liberty’s commercial heart was nearly unrecognizable. As our Executive Director Maelene Myers recalled, “While there were good people there, the East Liberty I came to was suffering from vacant buildings, blight, crime, and drugs.”
Building a shared vision
In the mid-1990s, as local morale hit rock bottom, we gathered the neighborhood’s long-time residents to imagine something better. Through hundreds of community meetings, the dreams and hopes of those residents resulted in the 1999 East Liberty Community Plan, A Vision for East Liberty. In it, a bold vision for a mixed-income neighborhood where people of all income levels could live, work, and thrive was mapped out.
That plan, and later the 2010 East Liberty Community plan, became ELDI’s guiding frameworks, ones focused on reversing disinvestment while maintaining affordability. The community’s goal was never to replace residents, but to rebalance the neighborhood and restore stability.
“A new mixed-income population will create a market for housing, services, and shopping. Economically secure households, along with the changing neighborhood image, will attract larger markets for retail development and business expansion.”
-1999 East Liberty Community Plan
Increasing property values while maintaining affordability
Through years of patient land recycling, crime reduction, and bold partnerships with local and national developers, East Liberty began to change. Our early strategy of acquiring problem properties—once magnets for crime—helped reduce neighborhood crime by 49% between 2008 and 2012, which correlated with a 120% increase in property values. This was a crucial part of not only attracting interest and investment into the neighborhood but also of ensuring that East Liberty’s long-time residents who were homeowners saw an increase in their equity.
As the market stabilized, we reinvested our gains from increased property value into long-term affordability and community infrastructure, from our efforts to revive Enright Court to the two-way conversion of Penn Circle and creation of Cornerstone Village Apartments, among many others.
“One of the things I’m proud that we’ve been able to accomplish is that you can’t point to a building here and say, ‘That’s the affordable housing,’” said ELDI Board President Lenore Williams. “Because everyone, no matter their income level, deserves to live in something that looks wonderful and well-maintained.”
Today, East Liberty has the second-highest concentration of Low-Income Housing Tax Credit units in Pittsburgh at 509 units, and 38% of all rental housing is secured as long-term affordable.
Important lessons learned
Of course, not every chapter of East Liberty’s story went smoothly. In 2015, the Penn Plaza Apartments became a flashpoint when more than 200 residents were displaced after the property’s private owners issued 90-day eviction notices. Though the City intervened and a Memorandum of Understanding extended relocation timelines, many residents still struggled to find new homes.
That experience reinforced an essential lesson: replacement housing must be built first, and relocation counseling should begin well before residents are asked to move.
The successful relocation of residents from East Liberty Garden Apartments reflected those lessons in action, with active case management, early planning, and guaranteed new affordable units funded through the Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant.
Progress in perspective
Like the City of Pittsburgh as a whole, East Liberty’s population declined steadily throughout the 20th century—from 12,000 residents in 1960 to just under 8,000 in 1990. But after decades of loss, that trend began to reverse, with the neighborhood’s population growing by 5% between 2010 and 2020.
Today, East Liberty is home to 6,187 residents, nearly 60% of whom are minorities, reflecting the diversity envisioned in the original community plan.
Conclusion: diversification, not gentrification
So let’s return to our initial question—was East Liberty gentrified?
According to the definition we began with, gentrification requires not only an influx of higher-income residents and rising property values, but also the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents. That displacement component is essential, and it’s the part of the definition that doesn’t align with East Liberty’s story.
While East Liberty has certainly seen new investment and shifting demographics over the past twenty-five years, it has not experienced the widespread, systemic displacement that defines gentrification. Instead, our neighborhood’s transformation was guided by a community-driven plan created by long-time residents themselves—plans that specifically called for a mixed-income community.
While property values rose, those gains were reinvested in preserving and expanding affordable housing, helping to elevate the net worth and security of East Liberty’s legacy homeowners. New market-rate development arrived, but alongside it, we maintained one of the highest concentrations of income-restricted units in Pittsburgh.
As our former Board President, Rev. Dr. Patrice Fowler-Searcy once said, “East Liberty hasn’t been gentrified; it’s been diversified.”
Looking ahead: the issue bigger than gentrification
East Liberty’s evolution reveals a broader truth about revitalization: stability requires balance. Neighborhoods need both affordable and market-rate housing, both legacy residents and new investment.
When done intentionally, revitalization doesn’t erase the past, it builds on it. And the risks of not addressing disinvestment are often far greater.
It’s what Kendall Pelling, Executive Director of ELDI spin-off Rising Tide Partners, has called “rotrification”—what happens when decay and blight cause neighborhoods to rot away and become uninhabitable.
As he told PublicSource, “Displacement doesn’t just happen because there’s a hot market, and the evil developers come in and buy things up and raise the rents.”
Instead, he estimates that more neighborhoods are suffering from neglect than gentrification. That’s why restoring aging housing stock in ways that preserve affordability and dignity is critical.
“A community plan sets out a vision for what residents want,” Pelling explains. “But you can’t just wish affordable housing into existence. You have to enable the community to actually own the property.”
That’s exactly what we’ve worked to do in East Liberty: create a framework where ownership, equity, and opportunity coexist.
Now, as many of the goals of East Liberty’s community plans have been realized, we are turning our attention to another essential element of neighborhood stability: homeownership.
By expanding opportunities for homeownership, especially for those who cannot afford to buy at market rate and who have historically been excluded, we can help safeguard a healthy, mixed-income community for generations to come. Because at the end of the day, we are staying faithful to the vision set forth by East Liberty’s residents all those years ago: that everyone—no matter their income—deserves the chance to invest in their neighborhood, build generational wealth, and share in its success.