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The residents of a soon-to-be vacated Penn Plaza building, in East Liberty, haven’t found a place to live. Last summer, LG Realty (run by the Gumberg family) announced 90-day evictions for residents of Penn Plaza, a two-building, below-market-rate apartment complex. After negotiating with the city and tenants, the owners extended the eviction dates for each building.
Residents in one building, at 5600 Penn Ave., have until March 2017 to move out; tenants in the other building, at 5704 Penn Ave., have until the end of February to vacate. The city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority funded a relocation office at Penn Plaza, spearheaded by Neighborhood Allies, a local nonprofit, to assist residents in finding new homes. With less than three weeks until the move-out date, the unplaced residents, from about 25 units, are taking action.
The residents have formed a “crisis committee,” with support from the advocacy group Action United. Last week, they sent a letter to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s office, informing the administration that dozens of families are at risk of homelessness. Negotiations ramped up, postponing a Feb. 5 rally planned by the unplaced residents and Action United.
“This [negotiation] is happening because the residents got together and will not allow each other to become homeless,” says Action United Director Bill Bartlett. “What is being fought for is that the landlord holds up its end of the bargain.”
The original agreement states that at least 20 units will be made available in 5600 Penn, so some 5704 Penn residents can move in and have another year to find a permanent home. Zak Thomas, of Neighborhood Allies, says the 20 units are currently spoken for, and it’s unclear if the Gumbergs will offer any more units from 5600 Penn. However, the agreement also states that the owners will use “commercially reasonable efforts” to make units in 5600 Penn available as they come open.
According to a count by Action United and details from Neighborhood Allies, there are around 135 units in 5600 Penn and around 85 of them are currently occupied, leaving potentially 50 units that could house the 5704 Penn residents.
Mayor’s office spokesperson Tim McNulty wrote in an email to City Paper that the relocation assistance has been successful “with the overwhelming majority of residents placed, and [the office] will continue working around the clock the next three weeks to assist every last resident at 5704.”
The mayor’s chief of staff, Kevin Acklin, says the city isn’t “going to let anybody fall through the cracks.” He says meetings between the city, Penn Plaza tenant-council members, Neighborhood Allies and the Gumbergs have increased in frequency to every other day. As for the unused units in 5600 Penn, Acklin says negotiations have been “very productive.”
But Action United’s Bartlett says the level of stress for residents is “unbelievable.” He points to Myrtle Stern, an eight-year Penn Plaza resident. “She is [a senior], and her whole life is up in the air. These renters aren’t being treated fairly,” Bartlett says.
“I don’t want to move. I am 75 years old, who would want to move?” says Stern.
In addition to the anxiety of being displaced, Dana Hogan, a three-year Penn Plaza tenant, alleges management has neglected its duties at 5704 Penn for months. “When I first moved in, I thought the apartment was nice, but now there is no heat and an infestation of roaches,” she says. Hogan says she has resorted to heating her unit with her oven.
“This whole thing has taken a toll on me and on everybody in here,” says Hogan.
Jonathan Kamin, the Gumbergs’ attorney, did not return calls for comment on this story.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2016.
East liberty need strong community leaders to combact all of the affordable housing from being torn down. It’s happening all through Pittsburgh. It’s not fair to the many city of Pittsburgh residents that don’t have the money to live in these expensive, luxury apartments that they want to build. The Pittsburgh economy is not constructed like that it never have been. They want to build these luxury apartments for people who don’t have luxury jobs. It makes no sense. Simply put, Pittsburgh is a working class to economy.
I am an advocate of affordable housing and do not believe that anyone should be displaced for the sake of contemporary development (at least not without generous compensation) due to there being many open, and idle parcels of land around the city that can be built on. Though maybe not the ideal locations that development corporations would rather utilize.
But more importantly than the above conviction, I did want to say that I find it to be a mischaracterization that Pittsburgh is solely a “working-class” economy. If anything I would say that is a projection of your reality*, but not what is the reality here on the ground. The working-class characterization of our city may have been historically accurate at one point as we were an industrial hub, but Pittsburgh is a city of many income brackets, and a city that largely in the past has done a very poor job of displaying or catering to it’s higher and more affluent population. This has contributed to the erroneous mindset that we are a working-class city simply because we have a working-class aesthetic, but all of the development, especially the very concentrated developments of the east side of the city are changing that image, though it is unfortunate that many will be the casualty of this rebranding.
In the past I too used to believe something similar that all of these high-end luxury apartments that were going up in the downtown and North Shore area where blind development whose financiers would soon see the error of their ways as there was no one with the disposable income available to afford these new properties. But I was mistaken. In most cases before the buildings themselves were even completed they had booked or sold all of the available units. And with there being a readily available niche market of people with the disposable income chomping at the bit to have parts of the next development as soon as it became available. The truth of the matter is people don’t blindly build anything. Much market research and analysis goes into effect long before shovels ever hit the ground. People are not in the business of losing money, and if they’re going to build several hundred higher end luxury apartments for the East liberty and east side area, then you better believe that they have just as many people if not more capable of affording those places. They wouldn’t be much of a development Corporation if they didn’t at least have that much foresight.
Pittsburgh is a modern-day city, with working class roots and feel, but fields a wide range of income brackets and subcultural experiences. We are no one thing, and to caricaturize or simply characterize us as such would do all that we are a disservice.
* The working class see the world through working-class eyes, the middle-class see the world through middle class eyes, and the wealthy see the world through wealthy eyes.
If you think that Pittsburgh is working class, then you’re probably working class. But if you think that Pittsburgh is middle class then you’re probably middle class. Wealthy people know that they are not the majority, but still fall victim to the same inability to perceive the world outside of their lived experience. Which is why they don’t understand that someone has to lose their house in order for them to have a new “it” destination shopping district.
But such is the way of things.