Dozens of residents attended a community meeting at the Allegheny Center Alliance Church on Nov. 11 to hear about plans to convert a hotel into low-income housing. Registered community organizations can compel developers to hold similar meetings before taking their proposals to city panels. (Photo by Eric Jankiewicz/PublicSource)
Pittsburgh’s five-year-old Registered Community Organization Program gives communities voice, but has also allowed some neighborhoods to “splinter,” observers say.
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As Pittsburgh looks to spur affordable housing and retail developments and stem the loss of Downtown businesses, some neighborhood advocates are asking: Who gets to weigh in on the details?
Underlying most development funding streams are tax credits, giving residents justification to weigh in on the decision making process. The public also has a stake and voice in zoning and planning decisions.
The Registered Community Organization [RCO] Program, legislated under then-Mayor Bill Peduto in 2018, lets communities force developers to engage and at least listen to community requests. The program is administered by the Department of City Planning and organizations must gain the approval from their local councilor to become an RCO.
In the Hill District, an RCO has pushed developers to fund community projects.
The RCO program, though, is limited in scope and creates opportunities to divide and fracture communities, especially when multiple organizations represent the same geography, according to elected officials and others interviewed for this story.
“The big issue with this is that the Department of City Planning doesn’t have capacity within their department to manage all these organizations, particularly when they splinter off,” said Chris Rosselot, policy director for the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group [PCRG]. Rosselot’s umbrella group of community organizations was formed in the 1980s as a response to redlining. He noted that Philadelphia might serve as a model for training city staff and providing more funding to the program.
City Planning Director Jamil Bey said his staff continues to improve, and “we are learning from our experiences with the RCO program and discussing ways of improving it and making it more efficient. This too requires time and input from the RCOs, [planning] staff, city council and the mayor’s office.”
The mayor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The RCO process is demanding
RCOs must be nonprofit community organizations or collaborations of community organizations reflecting specific geographic areas.
“I think a good thing to remember is that a lot of these community-based organizations are volunteer based,” said Rosselot. “These are grassroots, volunteer-based groups that may not have the time or wherewithal to set up structures to help them succeed.”
Rosselot said that the majority of PCRG’s organization members are “lower capacity, meaning low staff resources, they may not have a lot of funding through foundations or the city.”
Rosselot said that the time and resource investment required to complete an RCO application can result in more privileged and better-funded organizations completing the process while others fall short, further skewing inequality issues.
RCOs can tap into federal funding through the city’s Neighborhood Economic Development program. The funding is made available through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] and is meant for things like business district revitalization, affordable housing improvement and organizational development. City groups cannot access the funds unless they are RCOs or community development corporations.
“So it creates a barrier,” Rosselot said.
“For me, I want the developers to have a relationship with the community and we can’t do that with only one meeting.”
One of the key powers of an RCO is the ability to compel developers interested in building in the neighborhood to first attend a development activities meeting [DAM] before presenting to city decision makers including the City Planning Commission.
Sonya Tilghman heads Hazelwood Initiative. She said the neighborhood’s future holds a flurry of development between Hazelwood Green and the rest of the community.
“We became an RCO because there was no [other] way to get the city to mandate developers to meet with us,” Tilghman said. “Downside is, two things, people getting confused about a DAM meeting [versus] a regular monthly meeting. Sometimes people think that the DAM meeting is the only way to talk to the community but there’s other meetings. And there’s a perception that if you’re not an RCO the city isn’t listening.”
Tilghman said that another downside of the system is that it only requires a single meeting between developers and the community.
“For me, I want the developers to have a relationship with the community and we can’t do that with only one meeting,” Tilghman said. “We, the community, have been fortunate that to date anyone who wants to do major development here has come to us and we’ve told them that we want more than one meeting and integrate the company into the community.”
And when there’s more than one RCO …
The RCO system allows neighborhoods to have more than one registered organization. Councilor R. Danielle Lavelle cautions against creating more than one RCO in a community.
Lavelle said that if a neighborhood has only one RCO, that group gets to call the DAM, but in neighborhoods with multiple developers a single meeting is held under the authority of the Department of City Planning.
“Once you have multiple organizations you actually weaken the residents’ hand because now a developer can just go past them and submit an application to the city and request a [development activities meeting],” Lavelle said.
“At the beginning of the meeting, RCOs can announce themselves but it’s the city at the end handling everything,” Lavelle said of the multi-RCO scenario. “They record everything and then it gets referred to the Planning Commission.”
In worst case scenarios, Rosselot said savvy developers can co opt the RCO system “by creating turf RCO groups” tailored to helping their projects win approvals.
In Manchester, which Lavelle represents, the neighborhood is considering the impacts of the planned $740 million Esplanade development on the community, and competing groups are vying to represent the neighborhood amid a desire for growth and fear of gentrification.
Lavelle has been supportive of Esplanade.
“Part of what they’ve been discussing in Manchester, there’s concern about more affordable housing in the community,” Lavelle said. “There’s not a unit, if you’re using government money, that costs less than $350,000 to make. If I’m trying to provide more resources I have to generate more revenue.”
He continued, “The Espanlande will generate revenue that will be deployed to create units in Manchester. It could be used for anything but primarily for subsidizing affordable housing.”
Lavelle ultimately endorsed two rival organizations as Manchester RCOs, of which the city, as of Tuesday, had approved one, the Manchester Chateau Partnership Alliance. The other, Manchester Neighbors, awaits the city’s decision.
“In spirit, it makes sense and it should help everyone — on the community side and developer side — but if you’re not funding it at city level to help grow the program, it’s a challenge.”
Could the alliance work with the neighbors on processes like DAMs? “At this time, I do not have enough information to accurately answer this question,” answered LaShawn Burton-Faulk, who leads the Manchester Citizens Corp., is spearheading the alliance and chairs the City Planning Commission. “I am unsure how coordination would occur or who would be responsible for that.”
Ultimately, Rosselot said, “it comes down to resources and funding to assist community-based organizations to help them succeed and manage this program. The [City Planning] budget needs to reflect a commitment to prioritize this program.”
He continued, “In spirit, it makes sense and it should help everyone — on the community side and developer side — but if you’re not funding it at city level to help grow the program, it’s a challenge.”
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter, and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
