Clockwise from upper left: Kim Lucas of the Pittsburgh Parking Authority board; Courtney Mahronich Vita of the Air Pollution Control Advisory Committee; Justin Leavitt Pearl of the Independent Police Review Board; Emily Kinkead of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority; and Aster Teclay of the Housing Opportunity Fund Advisory Board. (Courtesy photos except Pearl, photo by Lilly Kubit/PublicSource)
The generation brings new questions, sensibilities, skills and demands to the unelected layer of the local governmental power structure.
by Matt Petras, PublicSource
Aster Teclay joined the city’s Housing Opportunity Fund Advisory Board in October and is one of eight millennials on the 21-member board. She believes that generational perspective really matters.
“I’m not a homeowner … and I don’t necessarily fit in with the programs that we serve, but I also represent a population that is huge in Pittsburgh, where it’s like, we want to be homeowners [but] we can’t afford homeownership,” said Teclay, 34.
And conversations about affordable housing extend to renting as well as homeownership.
“When we think about affordable rent, sometimes we think about what that person looks like, and there’s a misconception,” Teclay said. “I’m like, no, I have friends that are teachers, friends that are working the service industry, that can’t afford most of the places that they’re living in and then have a whole bunch of student debt. And having that voice echoed multiple times makes a big difference.”
After 2022 appointments, millennials represent a growing percentage of seats on boards of City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County government agencies. This foreshadows a coming tide of millennials on boards, as younger Pittsburgh leaders age into prominence. These board members bring a perspective more attuned to modern economic hardship, advancing social views and new methods of community outreach.
The number of board seats held by people born in the 1980s to the mid-1990s — essentially, millennials — increased from about 21% at the end of 2021 to 23% today.
Overall, board members are still more likely to have been born in the 1950s, ’60s or ’70s than the ’80s or ’90s. Fifty-six board members were born in the ’40s, and 22 were born in the ’90s.
With this comes a slight increase in people of color, holding about 37% of seats in 2022 compared to about 36% in 2021, among members for whom race and ethnicity was known. That is driven largely by a 4% increase in Black representation.
Women and men hold virtually identical numbers of seats on the 60 panels tracked by Board Explorer.
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