City council approves giving the URA $2.5 million a year for 25 years for affordable housing
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Pittsburgh City Council voted to spend millions of dollars over the next quarter century for affordable housing in the city despite no one being certain where exactly the money is going.
Pittsburgh City Council voted to provide the Urban Redevelopment Authority with $2.5 million a year for 25 years for affordable housing in the city. That money will pay for a bond to fund the efforts. City Councilman Anthony Coghill is the only no vote.
"We don't know if that principal amount will be 25 million or 40 million and we don't have a say so in that and that's really the problem for me," Coghill said.
City Council President Theresa Kail-Smith along with several others shepherded the measure through the council.
"I may not know where the bond goes at this moment but I do trust the administration is going to do what's right for that," Kail-Smith said.
Councilman Ricky Burgess said this money is for projects already in the pipeline, already approved by council and it's needed now rather than later.
"A project that may be on the back burner because we only can do so many a year, now we can double the number of projects we can do over the three, four years," Burgess said.
Burgess and Kail-Smith say affordable housing is a literally growing concern in Pittsburgh.
"We have about a 20,000 gap between affordable housing available and families who need it," Burgess said.
Regarding oversite concerns, Deputy Mayor and Director of Office of Management and Budget Jake Pawlak says there will be people keeping an eye on where the money is spent.
"That includes annual reporting and other forms of reporting back to the city and the city council as well as providing annual audits for the controller," Pawlak said.
