City Councilor Bob Charland presents to the City of Pittsburgh Planning Commission on his inclusionary zoning bill in January 2025. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
Despite a city salary of nearly $90,000, Councilor Bob Charland says aging housing stock, high costs and student debt keep him from buying.
“Pittsburgh’s Public Source is an independent nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region. Sign up for our free newsletters.”
As home prices outpace wages and the city’s housing stock ages, many Pittsburghers are waiting until later in life to buy a home than ever before. That includes Bob Charland, a 36-year-old Pittsburgh City Council member in the rare position of trying to legislate fixes to the city’s housing issues while struggling as a resident to navigate them.
“I think for me it’s not an academic exercise,” Charland said. “It’s not something I have friends or family going through. It’s something I’m going through personally here.”
He said he could afford to buy a place in his 13-neighborhood South Side council district — his city salary is about $89,000 this year — but not one that makes sense for him. Homes within his price range in the district require more renovations than he has time or money to undertake, he said.
“There’s a market that I can afford and it is like, everything that I need, there’s an issue with,” said Charland, who rents an apartment in the South Side Flats. “I want to continue representing the district, and my district is majority renter as well. To have to pick from these 13 neighborhoods, in a lot of ways it feels like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack looking for a house to buy.”
According to Charland, both the lack of affordable homes to buy and the lack of affordable rentals trace back to the same issue: The city hasn’t done enough to spur new housing construction in recent decades.
“Being a single person looking for housing, I am dealing with a lot of the sins of previous councils and previous policymakers that have really shortened the supply of obtainable housing,” Charland said.
Charland is the only city elected official who is not a homeowner. Every countywide elected official owns their home, as do 14 out of 15 County Council members.
In some ways, Charland represents the difference between Pittsburgh’s headline-grabbing affordability metrics and the lived experience of many hoping to own homes here. National publications lead “most affordable cities” lists with the Steel City, but such metrics rarely account for two shortcomings: aging homes that require thousands of dollars in repairs, and relatively high prices in desirable areas.
Need for ‘all types’ of housing
Pittsburgh’s housing problems go far beyond homeownership opportunities; there is a significant swath of the community that struggles to find affordable rental housing, and a persistent unhoused population.
Charland said his situation shows that the Pittsburgh community needs more housing options at almost every rung of the income ladder, despite the political discourse mostly centering around building government-subsidized housing aimed at people making less than the area’s median income.
He said the city does need more housing for people making a third of the area median income, but for people near the middle, “there aren’t a lot of people fighting for them,” he said.
He suggested modifying the city’s zoning code to spur more development and creating incentive programs through the city’s housing authority and the Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Charland took office in 2024 and, as an outspoken critic of Mayor Ed Gainey, has wielded little influence over city policy. His inclusionary zoning policy, rivaling the mayor’s proposal that Charland says would stunt growth, was voted down by the City Planning Commission and council.
But Gainey is on his way out. Charland endorsed Democratic mayoral nominee Corey O’Connor, who was backed by pro-growth groups and construction, development and real estate professionals. An O’Connor win could mean that the rezoning and incentive programs Charland champions would find a more receptive administration in January.
Barb Warwick, an East End City Council member aligned with Gainey, is not done promoting the mayor’s affordable housing policy in the wake of his election loss, saying his inclusionary zoning policy is popular and necessary to maintain affordability in “hot” neighborhoods. She said she is pushing for council to come to a final agreement on an inclusionary zoning policy before Gainey leaves office, though she isn’t sure if that will be possible.
“I don’t anticipate inclusionary zoning coming back to the table next year if we don’t get it done this year,” Warwick said. She expressed concern that O’Connor, who defeated Gainey in the Democratic primary, was aligned during the campaign with developers who are “staunchly opposed to any kind of inclusionary zoning requirement.”
In a post-Gainey city government, she said she will focus on expanding programs through the Housing Opportunity Fund and the Pittsburgh Land Bank while improving operations at the housing authority.
A policymaker and a typical case
Charland makes about 120% of the area’s median income, putting him among the region’s higher earners. The harsh reality in Pittsburgh and many American cities in 2025 is that it isn’t enough, often, to achieve homeownership.
One reason: Student loan debt. Charland said he still owes money on his University of Pittsburgh degree, hampering his buying power, as it does for many Americans.
A 2024 analysis from the Pew Research Center showed a quarter of U.S. adults under 40 have student loan debt, and the median borrower with outstanding debt had more than $20,000 left to pay.
Jeff Philibin, a longtime loan officer based in Lawrenceville, said student debt is increasingly pushing his client base to buy homes later in their lives than they would like.
“If you come to me as a young kid and you maybe have a good income but you also have this really big debt that you haven’t even begun to pay off,” Philibin said, “… it’s almost like you have to go deeper into your career to be able to afford this.
“Back in the day, people came out without as much baggage in terms of debt so they could buy earlier.”
Charland’s location needs are unique in that he legally has to live within the council district he represents, but it typifies a common problem. Many middle-class Pittsburghers can afford to buy in the region, but not in a location they’d like.
“It’s not something I have friends or family going through. It’s something I’m going through personally here.”
city councilman bob charland
“It’s expensive to live inside the city and maintain a discretionary income,” said Julie Block, a local real estate agent since 2016.
Block said buying in the area is affordable, though that often requires making compromises, such as living well outside the city.
“There’s still a possible entry point that is super affordable in Pittsburgh but it often does ask people to have a lot of lifestyle tradeoffs,” Block said.
Charland’s status as the lone breadwinner in a household places him in a cohort that’s increasingly struggling to buy homes, Philibin said. Charland is single and, unlike some other councilors, does not have a second source of income.
“I see a lot of dual incomes,” Philibin said. “It almost takes two people sometimes to afford to save and own a house. I think it’s harder for a single-income household.”
Charlie Wolfson is the local government reporter for Pittsburgh’s Public Source. He can be reached at charlie@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Ember Duke.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.