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Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
I've had this one in the hopper for a while, but with all of the drama surrounding Trump and the tariffs I didn't want it to get buried. Since this is shaping up to be a slow week, here it is. Next one to follow relatively quickly, provided Trump doesn't shoot an unarmed deaf man or some other news blowup.
Part 5: The Hill District, Continued
In this installment we will discuss two of Pittsburgh’s six or so “project neighborhoods”. In the introduction to this series, I said that:
I want to expand on this a bit; I didn’t start with a list of neighborhood designations that I wanted to use, so I’m playing this by ear. In the last installment I mentioned that Crawford-Roberts was a semi-bogus neighborhood that nobody refers to as such but that warranted separate discussion anyway, and the two project neighborhoods I’m about to discuss are in more or less the same boat. To everyone in Pittsburgh, this is just the Hill District. This has political implications as well, since Hill District leaders have accused the city government of engaging in a sort of divide-and-rule mentality to prevent opposition from coalescing.
The first reason I bring this up is because, while it would be easy for me to have just lumped these two project areas in with the rest of the Hill, I don’t have the luxury of doing that with the other four. As I have alluded to in past installments, Pittsburgh’s topography prevented the city from expanding in the traditional manner, with more or less uniform development radiating outwards from the urban core. Pittsburgh’s development followed rivers, then hillsides within walking distance to rivers, then areas with streetcar access, and finally areas with automobile access. The result of this is that well into the 20th century there was a significant amount of undeveloped land closer to downtown as the crow flies than areas that were developed earlier. This land that evaded traditional development then became a prime location to build housing projects within city limits. The upshot is that most of Pittsburgh’s project neighborhoods are relatively remote areas that otherwise only have a limited amount of development, and they shouldn’t be ignored. But I feel like if I’m going to treat some of these as neighborhoods, I should treat all of them as such.
The second reason is that I’m about to get to Oakland soon, and that neighborhood is a mess when it comes to dividing it up. The area commonly called Oakland is huge, comprises four official neighborhoods, and includes several well-recognized sub-neighborhoods, some of which reasonably conform to the city’s definitions, some of which don’t but have the same name, some of which only refer to a part of the official neighborhood, and some of which are wholly distinct. And a lot of it is just called Oakland without any greater specificity. This made me take a harder look at what a neighborhood actually is than I had initially anticipated. It would be impossible for me to assign every square inch of the city to a well-recognized neighborhood, so I guess the best I can say is to bear with me. With that bit of throat clearing out of the way, let’s dive into it.
5D. Bedford Dwellings: Public Housing in America
Public housing does not have a good reputation. It is synonymous with crime, drugs, poverty, delinquency, and the failure of postwar urban renewal. But this wasn’t always the case, and while contemporary observers of the social problems embodied by such notorious disasters as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago, and a close examination of the history behind public housing suggests that this didn’t necessarily have to be the case. Jane Jacobs suggested in the early 1960s that the problem was due to a lack of “eyes on the street”, and architect Oscar Newman developed a theory of “defensible space” a decade later, but these come across to me as too-pat solutions to a complicated problem. The best explanation for public housing’s failure at a nationwide level is D. Bradford Hunt’s Blueprint for Disaster, in which he examines the history of public housing using Chicago as an example. While a lot of what’s in that book doesn’t apply to Pittsburgh, it’s shaped the opinions I will express below insofar as politics shaped what public housing became, so I’m just putting that out there.
Overcrowding and substandard living conditions had been a problem in cities since the industrial revolution found them, but the problem became particularly acute during the Great Depression, when new construction fell off despite high demand. The National Housing Act of 1937 sought to alleviate this problem. Sort of. There was opposition from developers, who felt they couldn’t compete with government subsidies, particularly in Pittsburgh. Rather than a comprehensive housing program, it was essentially a one-off; projects were planned, but there was no sustained funding for future developments. Furthermore, the whole thing was pitched more as a jobs program for laid-off tradesmen than a solution to the housing problem. Nonetheless, the newly-created Pittsburgh Housing Authority broke ground on Bedford Dwellings in 1938 and completed it in 1940.
Bedford Dwellings is on the outskirts of the Hill District, built on the northern side of Bedford Ave. at the edge of a steep hillside. The site previously contained Greenlee Field, home of the defunct Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro League team, and a brickyard. In contrast to the slum clearance ethos that became synonymous with housing projects, very few people were displaced. At the time, there was no stigma to living in public housing; it was just an option for people who were down on their luck, and in the 1930s most people could sympathize. Public housing was originally intended for the working class. And to be temporary; the idea was that residents would be able to find permanent housing once the market recovered and the shortage was over. In the meantime, it was better that they lived in new, comfortable surroundings, rather than slums where they could fall victim to disease, vice, and crime.
With the start of World War II, the Depression had ended and industrial workers were in higher demand than ever. With Pittsburgh’s mills at capacity, temporary housing for industrial workers became a priority, and the Federal spigot was turned back on. In 1949, Congress authorized the program on a permanent basis, but with the Korean War and other things taking priority, funding became a problem. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, housing authorities became increasingly cost-conscious and were building new projects to lower and lower standards, both in terms of amenities and overall build quality. While the bare-bones nature of these units was often justified on a “beggars can’t be choosers” basis, the postwar construction boom gave potential tenants better options. In the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Housing Authority limited relief families to a quota of 20% of the available units in a development. As the decades rolled on, the lower standards meant that the units they owned couldn’t attract many people willing to pay full freight. This caused a snowball effect—the program was designed so that the Federal government would fund construction, and maintenance would be paid for out of rents. But as more and more residents required subsidies, there was less and less money available.
The death blow for public housing was the Brooke Amendments, passed in 1967. Slum clearance had displaced an uncountable number of low-income families who simply couldn’t afford to pack up for the suburbs. Racism didn’t help. Urban decay didn’t help. And public housing authorities were still charging rents that assumed a working class income. The Brooke Amendments stipulated that a tenant would have to pay no more than 25% of his income in rent, and prioritized housing for the poorest applicants, eliminating any possibility for a mixed-income community. Working families, now required to pay 25% of their income to live in projects, found better housing for the same price, leaving only the poorest of the poor.
This was as true in Pittsburgh as anywhere else. In 1942, 20% of public housing residents were receiving assistance, in line with Housing Authority guidelines. By 1952 these limits had been relaxed, but the number had only risen to 23%. By 1972, nearly half of residents were receiving welfare, and by 1996, a staggering 95% were. The effect on the budget tells a similar story. In 1940, every public housing authority in the nation was self-sufficient. In 1969, the year the Brook Amendments took effect, the amount spent by HUD on operating expenses was minimal. By 1999, HUD subsidies nationwide had increased to 2.8 billion. The 1970s was when, in the words of David Rusk “public housing began to look like public housing”. Once again, Pittsburgh didn’t escape any of these problems. The units were old and, without a maintenance program, leaking plumbing and cracking plaster were ubiquitous. 600 units were vacant in 1976, not due to lack of demand, but because they were uninhabitable. The Housing Authority was mismanaged and facing bankruptcy due to a high rate of delinquency.
In 1974, national legislation aimed to shift some of the burden off of overextended and mismanaged local housing authorities and onto private landlords. Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act established a program whereby eligible families would receive vouchers to rent private housing. The act called for two types of subsidies: “Tenant-based” vouchers simply let a family rent an apartment from a private landlord who was willing to accept the voucher. “Unit-based” vouchers allowed a local housing authority to select units in privately-owned buildings and commit vouchers to them. For whatever reason, whites generally received assistance through the first program, and blacks through the second. The upshot was that the privately-owned “Section 8 ghettos” became indistinguishable from their public counterparts.
By 1980, the transformation was complete. The poorest of the poor were usually single mothers, often on drugs, with children growing up unsupervised and without direction. Residents who had remained from the early days were gradually either moving to greener pastures or dying out. In 1940, the face of public housing was clean, mixed-income apartments for working class people down on their luck. By 1990 it was crime ridden shitholes for people with literally nowhere else to go.
5E. Bedford Dwellings: Its Present and Future
Bedford Dwellings might not be the worst project in Pittsburgh, but there's strong emphasis on the word “might”. I mentioned in my last installment that the Hill District’s reputation for crime is a bit overblown, but 75% of what does happen emanates from Bedford Dwellings at Chauncey Drive. Since the city divided the Hill into several semi-bogus units within close proximity, the knuckleheads drag down not only the project neighborhood but parts of the Middle Hill and Crawford-Roberts as well. It seems like every shooting that isn’t in the project itself is either a street or two off of it or at least involved people who lived there.
The response of the city, of course, is to tear it down. An extension built in the early 1950s was demolished during the late-90s/early-2000s mania to get rid of these hellholes, but this proved ill-advised; it turns out that the people causing the crime don’t just disappear when you tear down their homes but move to other areas. Some of these areas have their own gangs that don’t particularly like people from your old project. Others are already on the ropes and could go either up or down depending on how many shootings are in the news. Wherever they go, the result isn’t good.
So the city has recently viewed public housing demolitions as a long-term process. Part of the original project that was demolished was turned into a mixed-income development in the early 2000s and while I wouldn’t want to live there personally, it’s noticeably better than Bedford Dwellings. There are 25 or so original building remaining, and the city plans on demolishing them all over the next several years, but they aren’t going to do so until they have units available where they can relocate the residents. Some of them will be going to a new mixed-use mixed-income development in nearby Uptown, which is currently under construction. It also looks like they’re doing something with the site of the 1950s expansion, though I can’t seem to find any details on this. Something similar is supposed to go on the current site.
Will this work? We’ll discuss that in the next section on Terrace Village. But before we do that, I want to mention two things. First, in addition to the project, I’m also including Milliones Manor, the former Western Pennsylvania Tuberculosis Hospital that has since been converted into housing for low-income seniors. It has its own problems, but I don’t want to go down another rabbit hole. There is also a street of private homes. The other thing I wanted to mention is that “prewar” is not a good guide to whether architecture is good or not. Bedford Dwellings was built in 1938 in a barracks style that was popular for public housing developments in the early years. When Crawford Square was being planned in the early-1990s, this was specifically cited as an example of what not to do, i.e. build structures without any regard for the context of the neighborhood they inhabit. One of the themes I’m noticing here is that all of the bad ideas attributed to postwar urban planning were actually pretty popular for a long time before, there just wasn’t either enough money or enough motivation to put them into effect.
5F. Terrace Village: Is This the Future?
In 1937, Ruch's Hill was a steep, lightly populated eminence on the outskirts of the Hill District. What this meant for the housing authority was that land was cheap, few people would have to be displaced, and the existing structures were in dreadful condition. In 1939, crews began cutting off the top 100 feet of the hill, eventually moving some 2.4 million cubic yards of material to create a level site for the Allequippa Terrace housing project. Shortly thereafter, nearby Goat Hill met a similar fate, and was turned into a project called Addison Terrace, with the two projects being collectively known as Terrace Village (at least they are true terraces) and now designated as the semi-bogus neigborhood of the same name.
For most of its history, Terrace Village suffered the same fate as Bedford Dwellings and the other housing projects around the country. But with these problems becoming abundantly clear by the 1990s, Federal housing policy began to move in a different direction. A lot of the bureaucratic hurdles were removed, the tying of rent to income was relaxed (though the Brooke Amendment remains in place), and rather than requiring often impractical renovations of distressed projects, money was made available for wholesale demolition. As most of Terrace Village was, by this time, past the point where it was worth saving, Allequippa Terrace was mostly demolished in the early 2000s and replaced with a privately owned, mixed-income development.
The new Oak Hill Apartments have largely been a success, albeit a low-key one. About a half-dozen of the original buildings were renovated and retained, but it's mostly a mix of low-rise apartment buildings and town homes. From what I can find, about 60% of the units are subsidized. When Allequippa Terrace was demolished and moved to private control, background checks and other strict requirements for residents were implemented, but former residents who wanted to stay were permitted to. The area was thus initially slow to improve. But a high-profile murder around 2009 got a lot of bad press for the landlord, and they started strictly enforcing lease terms in an attempt to force as many of the troublemakers as possible out. To be fair, some of the problems endemic to low-income neighborhoods still exist here—loud music, public arguments, smoking in corridors, people blocking traffic while they sit there with their windows down talking to a guy on the sidewalk, youth verbally harassing unaccompanied women—but it's nothing like the old days, with gang activity, drug dealing, and almost daily shootings.
Architecturally, it's a mixed bag. Nominally, it was built in a New Urbanist style, but, like Crawford Square, certain allowances were made that prevent it from being a prime example of the genre. For instance, the original project was built at a time when winding, suburban streets were seen as the intelligent way to allow for automobiles but limit their impact. Oak Hill has retained this street layout; there was no previous street grid to revert to, and tearing up the streets and rerouting all the utilities would be ridiculous. But what exists now makes it impossible to give the neighborhood a true urban feel. The townhomes aren't modernist nightmares like the original barracks-style buildings were, but they don't much resemble anything that previously existed anywhere in Pittsburgh. Frame rowhouses do exist in Pittsburgh, but not really in the Hill, and not in the style in which these were built. The apartments are even worse, in that they ditch contextualism entirely and instead look like something from an exurban college campus. No provision was made for any kind of business district, with the sole exception of a neighborhood store that supposedly has good sandwiches but not good enough to make a special visit for.
Nonetheless, the development was successful enough that, a decade later, a similar project was built on the former site of Addison Terrace. While smaller, this development hewed closer to traditionalist styles, though it is all row houses and no apartments. I think a friend of mine actually owns a house built by the same developer in a different part of the city, because they have the same "trying, but not too hard" look to them as does his house. I've seen Pittsburgh's housing stock described as "disturbingly heterogenous", unlike Baltimore or Philly, which have rows of identical houses. This isn't a difficult feat to achieve organically, but it presents a nightmare for a developer who isn't going to do a custom design for each unit. So it looks like what they did put together a list of architectural features that they could mix and match and hit the randomize button. So half the houses are brick and half are siding, some have dormers and some don't, colors are variable, etc. The effect isn't entirely convincing, but they did what they could, and it's certainly the best iteration of affordable housing we can hope to expect, unless we just want to go full-on modern again.
The one thing that still gets me, though, is the setbacks. Ostensibly, the purpose of these is for privacy, since it's a bit disconcerting to have a sidewalk passerby walking directly in front of your window. Keep him 15 feet away and it solves this problem. But that's all it does, and all you get out of it is an unusably small lawn you now have to maintain. The traditional way of solving this was raising the first floor about four feet above street level and entering via a stoop. That way, people could walk right in front and not see in the windows. The reason they didn't do that here, aside from zoning issues they probably didn't want to fight, is that these houses are all built on slabs (assumption based on my friend's house), and without a basement you can't really raise it up that far. And building basements might not have been an option here, since removing 100 feet of dirt means these could be sitting too close to bedrock, and other parts of the Hill have had mine subsidence issues, so maybe it just wasn't practical here. But combine that with the weird alleys every few houses, the grade issues, and the winding roads, and nobody's mistaking this for part of the old Hill, even as the development creeps into the old Hill.
Given the recent discussions about architecture we've been having here, there's a question I'd like to pose to those in the group who have participated in those discussions: Assuming that modern construction techniques and budgetary constraints make it impossible to credibly recreate traditional urban forms, is it preferable to remain faithful to the existing urban fabric via an ersatz traditionalism as seen above, or should we burn it all down and create a new urban space in the modern mold, similar to what's going on in the Strip District?
5G. A Note on Crime
For all the social pathologies low-income housing projects have been known to cause, crime is the most salient. The trouble with evaluating crime is that it's often context dependent and is subject to our own biases. When we talk about a "bad neighborhood", there is something ineffable that we are trying to express; this superficially means crime, but not strictly. For instance, if you look at the top neighborhoods in Pittsburgh by overall crime rate, Downtown and the South Side Flats are easily the top two, year in and year out. Yet nobody considers these to be bad areas; indeed, they're among the most popular destinations in the city. This second fact underscores the reason the crime rate is so high—crimes require people, and we think of crime rate as the likelihood of being a crime victim based on the number of people in an area. But crime rate only considers the resident population, and one need not be a resident to be either a victim or criminal. So while some areas may have a nominally high crime rate, it's actually pretty low on a per-pedestrian basis.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have the hair-trigger suburbanites who think that anywhere with more than a few black faces on the streets, derelict houses, and Boost Mobile stores is a dangerous ghetto, regardless of what the crime statistics say. These people have invariably never spent any real time in the neighborhoods they criticize and are thus unqualified to cast judgment. In contrast to these are the people who insist that any ghetto isn't really dangerous because all the violence is targeted, or because more money is stolen daily on Wall Street, or there are just as many drug deals in Beverly Hills. And then there are the people who doubt the crime statistics themselves and go with their gut, claiming that they're unreliable due to reporting variations, or that we only need to worry about violent crime, or whatever. The upshot to all of this is that it makes it very difficult to say whether a neighborhood has really improved because a certain cohort will insist that it has, even if it hasn't, and another cohort will insist that it's still bad because they got sketched out once when driving through.
The City of Pittsburgh hasn't provided as much in the way of crime statistics since the big reporting switch a couple of years ago, but the data they do provide is of much higher quality than before. First, they include both total reported crimes and total reported incidents; the old data was skewed by, say, a guy breaks into a house and steals something and is charged with burglary and theft, which get counted as two crimes. The other thing is they started publishing non-fatal shooting data in addition to homicides, since these are obviously relevant but are hard to discern from the crimes charged. In attempting to determine how much of a crime reduction has taken place, I've avoided historical comparisons, since they can be influenced more by global trends than specific interventions. I've looked at sample rates from a variety of Pittsburgh neighborhoods to get a feel for the numbers, and specifically looked at comparable neighborhoods. I'm assuming that reporting rates are reasonably consistent between neighborhoods.
Anyway, Terrace Village had about 58 crimes per thousand people in 2024. That's about half of Bedford Dwellings. It's on par with the South Side Slopes, which we already discussed, and Polish Hill, which we'll discuss next time. These are valid comparisons, in my opinion, as they are primarily residential areas with no significant business district, although Polish Hill has some scattered businesses. On the violent crime front, Terrace Village has about 2 or 3 shootings a year since 2018, which is also comparable to the slopes, and also about half of what Bedford Dwellings has. Polish Hill has only had 2 shootings since 2018. The upshot of this is just to say that the model appears to have worked, providing a significant crime decrease compared with a traditional project and providing numbers in line withworking class white areas a comparable distance to the city center.
Neighborhood Grade: Project for both. As far as gentrification potential is concerned, for Bedford Dwellings it would require a significant number of market-rate apartments or for-sale units in whatever replaces the old project, and even then it would be dependent on a revitalization of the Hill District proper (as it's not a distinct neighborhood), so I wouldn't bet on it. I would assume that once all the troublemakers are gone the lack of spillover crime will lead to some kind of destigmatization that would make that possible, but given the decades-long stigma and lack of any real foundation I wouldn't hold my breath. As for Terrace Village, it may be safer and more racially and economically integrated than it's been in any time since the 1940s, but I don't see it ever becoming trendy. The neighborhood's relative lack of amenities, walkability, or housing to flip mean it won't jump onto the gentrification train even if nearby areas like the Lower Hill and Uptown eventually do. This is a good thing—Pittsburgh could use more affordable, safe, majority-black neighborhoods within the urban core.
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