Mayor Bill Peduto’s 2019 budget proposal eliminated $5.3 million in funds for the Urban Redevelopment Authority [URA], reducing the city’s contribution to the authority from $8.4 million in 2018 to $3.1 million for 2019.
During the URA’s budget hearing on Nov. 29, URA Executive Director Robert Rubinstein, stressed to council that the cuts to his agency’s budget, largely to its “housing development” programs, would be harmful for the city.
“Money allocated in the capital budget, while certainly appreciated, is woefully short in terms of advancing the goals that we have collectively as a city,” Rubinstein said, referring to the city’s shortage of more than 17,000 affordable housing units.
Housing advocates then began calling on the city to restore the URA’s funding. In an email blast about the proposed cuts sent on Sunday, organizers with Pittsburgh United, a social justice nonprofit that works with other community nonprofits, were still trying to wrap their heads around the cuts. They wrote that the cuts would mean the $10 million Housing Opportunity Fund — established last year and funded through the real estate transfer tax — would be reduced by more than half and used to make up for reductions elsewhere. Their claim turned out to be misguided; the cuts were to the URA’s housing programs such as rehabbing old homes, upgrading facades and gap financing for new apartment buildings.
Then, on Wednesday, Council members R. Daniel Lavelle and Rev. Ricky Burgess introduced an amendment to the proposed 2019 budget to restore $2.5 million of the URA’s funding, about $2.3 million of which would be earmarked for housing programs. If the funds are restored, the URA would receive a total of $5.6 million for 2019. Between 2014 and 2016, the city supplied the URA with an average of $8 million per year.
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https://www.publicsource.org/proposed-cuts-to-ura-budget-may-not-be-as-deep-but-pittsburghs-affordable-housing-advocates-remain-concerned/
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