Pittsburgh’s Affordable Housing Crisis:

Privatization of public housing and other utilities has become a key tool for cities that face fiscal austerity and an increasingly competitive, globalized marketplace. Steady reductions in corporate taxation over past decades and the financial crisis of 2008 have constrained city budgets in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, accelerating privatization and other austerity measures and fueling a global housing crisis. Yet, privatization policies have generated little public scrutiny and debate. Over time, housing has become more subject to market pressures and less accessible to many residents, particularly the most vulnerable.

This white paper investigates the many unrecognized costs of privatization and public-private partnerships relative to their benefits in helping address the affordable housing crisis and remedy Pittsburgh’s deepening racial inequities. We identify three fundamental problems the loss of public assets, private extraction of public resources, and diminished local democracy. We identify alternative approaches that can provide more cost-effective and democratic ways to provide stable, safe, and affordable housing for residents.

Decades of economic globalization have generated what experts are calling a global housing crisis by pushing up the costs of housing while simultaneously restricting the earnings of the world’s working people. Globalization policies have reduced the supply of public housing and housing assistance while fueling global housing markets and the intensified financialization of housing.

The financial crisis of 2008 and related austerity policies have significantly exacerbated these trends. A 2020 National Low Income Housing Coalition report found that, in every U.S. state but North Dakota, the average renter earned less than the average two-bedroom housing wage. The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened this crisis and will have lasting impacts on housing security for many families—particularly people of color who were already disproportionately impacted.

Pittsburgh’s long-standing problem of racial inequity has recently come under heightened scrutiny, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn national and global attention to the systemic harms suffered by people of African descent. In 2019, Pittsburgh’s Gender Equity Commission released a report that ranked the city among the worst in the nation for the well-being of African American residents.  The ensuing discussion prompted the city and county to declare racism a public health crisis and inspired Pitt law professor Jerry Dickinson’s local media essay, “Pittsburgh is America’s apartheid city.”

In Pittsburgh, this global housing crisis has fueled an ongoing exodus of Black residents, a trend that began before the closure of the region’s steel mills and has continued over several decades. The 202 census documented a further 13% decline in Pittsburgh’s Black population over the decade, tying this decline directly to the lack of affordable housing in the city.

A contributing factor is ongoing, systematic discrimination by residential lenders, which aggravates the effects of many years of redlining. A 2021 report found that between 2007 and 2019 just 7% of $12 billion in home loans went to Pittsburgh’s minority residents. Pittsburgh’s rising housing costs can be linked to policies that prioritize the development of luxury housing over affordable family housing, and such policies have been shaped by the disproportionate influence of powerful private actors—including Pittsburgh’s large nonprofit entities—in development policies. Local news outlets have recently documented horrific conditions in Pittsburgh area properties owned by corporate landlords and by the city’s Housing Authority, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of weakened public institutions to protect residents.

The international community has long recognized housing as a fundamental human right, and this right is well-established in a large body of international and national laws. Housing insecurity contributes to other serious human rights violations, and a recent UN investigation of police killings of people of African descent argued that improving Black people’s access to secure and safe housing is key to mitigating police violence and other effects of systemic racism. Yet, governments at national and local levels have not prioritized the implementation of this right in their policies. Instead, trade and financial agreements and austerity politics routinely supersede human rights obligations. The influence of private actors in local and global policy processes plays a large role here.