Bridge to the Future
Pro-Housing Pittsburgh’s 2026 Policy Recommendations Shortlist for Mayor O’Connor
Executive Summary
After six decades of decline, Pittsburgh’s population is finally on the rise. This encouraging milestone comes at a complicated moment for the city. On the one hand, Pittsburgh is now a national leader in healthcare and tech. On the other hand, the city is facing an impending budget crisis, decreasing tax revenue, and overstrained municipal services.
While Pittsburgh remains the least expensive metro area in the country,¹ housing demand has risen sharply since 2020. Despite increased demand and a recent rise in multifamily permits, overall permitting and construction rates have remained well below that of our peer cities.² The result has been a drastic increase in housing prices, with negative impacts for renters, owners, and prospective homebuyers. Combined with increasing interest in Pittsburgh as a hub for clean tech and AI, we could well see a severe housing shortage if current policies continue.
At Pro-Housing Pittsburgh, we believe that increasing housing supply is the best way to welcome new neighbors to our hometown while maintaining affordability. Furthermore, the benefits of additional housing go far beyond finances. A denser, higher-population Pittsburgh will be a happier, healthier, and more climate-smart city, with a larger tax base allowing for better-funded schools, public transit, and municipal services.
We are encouraged to see that Mayor O’Connor shares our values of “yes in my backyard.” We look forward to working with him and his administration to bring about a future of abundant, affordable housing in the Pittsburgh area.
The following document highlights five different policy planks that we believe will have the most impact on facilitating housing construction and improving overall quality of life. In order, they are:
Pursuing transit-oriented development (TOD) in areas near transit corridors
Implementing pro-student policies in areas near university campuses
Changing the zoning code to allow for more sustainable land use
Reforming the city’s current permitting system
Returning to a split-rate property tax or land-value tax system.
We believe that enacting these policies will help Pittsburgh remain an affordable, welcoming city well into the twenty-first century.
Policy Goal 1: Transit-Oriented Development (TOD)
Problem: Current zoning policy places an arbitrary cap on the number of people who can live within walking distance of transit corridors, contributing to car dependency and PRT’s funding crisis.
Action:
Upzone all districts within 0.5 miles of high-volume transit corridors (fixed ROW, rail, and/or bus corridors with ≤ 15min peak headways) to Local Neighborhood Commercial (LNC).
Impact: Allowing more housing and small business close to transit corridors will facilitate car-free, sustainable living for more people. Increased ridership will help to avert the funding crisis currently faced by PRT. Better access to transit will improve access to healthcare, employment, and recreation. TOD may also serve as a pilot program to gauge the effectiveness of upzoning before implementing such a program citywide.
About this goal: Car dependency is widely recognized in the literature as an environmental, social, and public health issue,³ with negative externalities ranging from obesity and social isolation to poor air quality and climate change.³ ⁴ ⁵ On an everyday level, commuting by car is more stressful, more expensive, and more dangerous than taking public transit.⁶ ⁷ However, longer trip times and poor service reliability result in Americans consistently choosing to drive when given the option.⁸
While Pittsburgh’s prepandemic rate of public transit usage was well above the national average (17.3% of Pittsburghers used public transit to get to work in 2019, compared with 5% of Americans),⁹ Pittsburgh Regional Transit is facing a severe funding crisis.¹⁰ Rather than attempting to increase ridership by introducing commuter service to areas where demand is low, the city should instead make it easier for people to live close to the transit corridors that already exist. The best way to do that is by making it easier to build more housing in these areas.
Transit-oriented development reduces car dependency and congestion, improves air quality, and creates tight-knit, walkable communities, among numerous other benefits.¹¹ Implementing it in Pittsburgh will be an extremely effective way to both improve the quality of life for the city’s residents and increase ridership for our transit system.
Policy Goal 2: Densify and Diversify Student Neighborhoods
Problem: Current city policy negatively impacts the lives of students at Pittsburgh’s universities. A combination of low competition, high demand, and negligible code enforcement results in landlords being able to rent out units unfit for human habitation with minimal penalties.¹² Restrictive roommate occupancy limits prevent students from sharing the cost of off-campus housing,¹³ even as rising enrollment results in severe on-campus housing shortages.¹⁴ A lack of grocery stores near campuses forces students to pay high prices or travel to different neighborhoods to obtain basic human necessities.¹⁵
Action:
Upzone all residential districts within 0.75 miles of districts zoned as Educational/Medical Institution (EMI) to Local Neighborhood Commercial (LNC) or Residential Mixed-Use (R-MU).
Make the currently voluntary Rental Permit Program mandatory in order to expand code enforcement.¹⁶
Abolish or raise roommate occupancy limits from the current cap of three unrelated people per apartment or house.
Impact: Upzoning areas within walking distance of universities will lower prices and alleviate shortages by facilitating infill construction, drive out subpar landlords through competition, and make it easier for companies to open grocery stores in student neighborhoods. Making the Rental Permit Program mandatory will hold landlords accountable for code violations, improving the condition of existing housing units. Modifying roommate occupancy limits will allow more students to split the cost of housing, further lowering the price per student. In all, these policies will make off-campus neighborhoods more accessible to students from all backgrounds.
About this goal: Higher education is the backbone of Pittsburgh’s economy, but students at the city’s educational institutions are frequently dismissed as “transient” by full-time residents. Their concerns are often ignored by policymakers, leading to serious issues such as high prices, unsafe off-campus housing, and food deserts going unaddressed.
While individual students are only present in the area for a relatively short period of time, they are our neighbors and deserve an equal seat at the table. This package of pro-student policies will not only improve the lives of students now, but also encourage them to stay after graduation and continue to contribute to the city’s economy. Through revitalizing the housing stock and local economies of student neighborhoods, it will benefit full-time residents and small business owners in these areas as well.
Policy Goal 3: Legalize Multifamily Housing
Problem: Current city policies, such as setbacks, stepbacks, parking minimums, and dual-stair requirements for apartment buildings, increase the land consumption of each building. This results in inefficient land use and prevents the use of existing lots for missing-middle housing, raising housing prices and harming the environment.
Action:
Standardize setbacks (minimum distance from a property line) and stepbacks (reductions to a building’s floorplan based on height).
Eliminate parking minimums for commercial and non-commercial buildings citywide.
Legalize the construction of single-stair apartment buildings.
Impact: By reducing the lot size needed for construction, these policy changes will facilitate the construction of dense infill housing on existing vacant lots. Legalizing single-stair will allow for more ‘missing middle’ housing: small apartment buildings neatly integrated into existing communities.¹⁷ The densification of existing lots will allow the Pittsburgh area to house far more people without increasing suburban and exurban sprawl.
About this goal: Lot sizes within city limits are so small that high percentages of each parcel are rendered functionally useless for construction. While the current zoning code provides some flexibility,¹⁸ multifamily housing is either uneconomical or functionally illegal to build in many parts of the city, even in neighborhoods where similar units have been present with no issues for over a century.¹⁹ This contributes to the city’s housing shortage, drives up housing prices, and pushes development to the suburbs.
On the environmental side, dual-stair requirements and mandated parking minimums for houses, apartments, and stores increase the percentage of the cityscape covered by impermeable asphalt and concrete, This worsens Pittsburgh’s urban heat island and stormwater management problems.²⁰ ²¹
The diversity present in Pittsburgh’s historic housing stock is proof that the city’s zoning code is entirely out of step with how land is already used within city limits. These zoning reforms will remove multiple barriers to urban redevelopment simply by bringing the law in line with the existing reality.
Policy Goal 4: Permitting Reform
Problem: Construction permits take an extremely long time to be approved by the city. The current review system increases the time and cost of constructing new housing and is not flexible enough to respond to natural disasters.
Action:
Create a library of preapproved off-the-shelf multifamily housing plans that homebuilders can construct with limited review.
Create an accelerated permit review process during periods of disaster.
Impact: Preapproved multifamily housing plans will increase the speed of construction and decrease unnecessary costs of building denser housing within city limits. An accelerated review process will speed up the repair of buildings damaged by natural disasters, which is exceptionally important as storms and flooding worsen in our area.
About this goal: Anyone who has ever tried to do repairs or modifications on a house in Pittsburgh knows that obtaining a permit is often the longest step in the entire process. Permit review times of eight or nine months serve as a major impediment to building new housing and performing repairs to existing structures.²²
This not only contributes to the city’s current housing crisis, but also makes disaster recovery more difficult. A resident of the Clark Building and Pro-Housing Pittsburgh member shared that in the aftermath of the April 2025 derecho, PLI took over forty days to approve the permit to replace the roof of his apartment, which was catastrophically damaged by the storm. The permit was only approved after the district councilperson intervened, demonstrating the need for faster permitting timelines. We applaud Mayor O’Connor’s goal of bringing the review process down to four weeks,²² and look forward to seeing the administration’s proposed methods of making it happen.
Policy Goal 5: Land Value Tax (LVT)
Problem: Pittsburgh’s current property tax system is based on the value of structures, not the value of land, allowing inefficient land use to proliferate throughout the city. A land value tax will fix this problem.
Action:
Shift the revenue currently collected by the Real Estate Property Tax, and the revenue collected from the Real Estate Transfer Tax, to a tax solely on land value.
Do so over an extended period of time, such as 20 years, each year increasing land millage and decreasing building millage.
Abolish the transfer tax more quickly than the real estate property tax.
Impact: Unlike most tax policies, a land value tax encourages development and growth while discouraging blight.²³ Under an LVT, vacant land and surface parking lots are taxed at the same rate as parcels containing structures, spurring the redevelopment of existing lots into more economically productive uses. This will be exceptionally beneficial in incentivizing the reuse of currently vacant lots in residential neighborhoods and disincentivizing land speculation from real estate investors.
About this goal: Unlike most of the policies we have suggested so far, this would not be entirely new. Pittsburgh operated under a split-rate tax system from 1913 to 2001, under which land was taxed at a higher rate than structures.²⁴ Multiple studies have found that in the late 20th century, this tax structure encouraged more construction in Pittsburgh than peer cities in the Rust Belt.²⁵ Returning to our roots by implementing a land value tax will significantly contribute to the city’s economic growth and development.
Conclusion
At the beginning of 2026, the City of Pittsburgh stands at an economic and social crossroads. Our ongoing revitalization is an immense opportunity, but it presents a bevy of challenges. In other cities, a lack of housing construction has resulted in declines in minority and working-class populations, economic inequality, and eventual overall population decline as prospective residents instead choose to live in less expensive areas.
The data and policy solutions exist to prevent such a crisis from happening here. If Pittsburgh adopts a forward-looking housing policy, deeply rooted in an ethos of welcoming new neighbors to our doorstep rather than pushing them away, it will expand on its previous successes and build a bridge to a healthier, smarter, more sustainable future.
Policy positions selected by Pro-Housing Pittsburgh membership. Text written by Ben Lyons, with contributions from Amy Zaiss, Dmetri Black, Jack Billings, John Akey, Lucas Godshalk, and Nicholas Rizzio.
Works Cited
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