When the building known today as 412 Boulevard of the Allies was first constructed by the W.J. Gilmore Drug Company in 1927, the Pittsburgh Press optimistically deemed the structure “an example of Pittsburgh’s progress.” Since then, the building has been home to a revolving cast of assembly lines, oil companies, and art institutions.  In late 2018, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh (HACP), in a joint acquisition with the city’s urban planning authority, purchased the building as their new shared headquarters. The transaction was meant to serve as the inception of a unified era amongst the City and its quasi-governmental institutions, illustrating a new image of organization and proactivity in Allegheny County. 

As the furnishings and documents from the old headquarters were transferred to their new home, so too were the countless problems that had plagued the HACP’s operations for decades. There is no debate that Pittsburgh is one of the many cities throughout the country in the midst of a devastating housing crisis. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that the U.S. has a shortage of over 7 million affordable homes. In Pittsburgh, it would be financially impossible for someone working a full-time minimum-wage job to afford the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment. This is where the housing authority is supposed to help – connecting low-income individuals and families with reliably-subsidized housing. But as this crisis rages on, finding a way to alleviate the enormous backlog of people in desperate need of affordable housing has become the HACP’s biggest struggle.

Established as part of the United States Housing Act in 1937, the HACP was tasked with improving the inhumane living conditions facing poor Pittsburghers during the Great Depression. In the following decades, the authority worked tirelessly to keep up with the demand for affordable housing, starting with the construction of Bedford Dwellings in 1939 and building six more similar apartment complexes within the next five years. As the levels of crime and homelessness rose nationwide throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Congress responded by ratifying a program that would eventually become the housing authority’s largest and most contentious focus: Section 8. 

The Section 8 program, more often referred to as the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program by the HACP, is designed to give low-income, elderly, or disabled renters the opportunity to rent from landlords in the private market rather than living in government-subsidized public housing. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, each voucher identifies the type of unit and maximum rent that the recipient is eligible for. Once they receive their voucher, the recipient must find a landlord willing to accept the voucher within 60 days or risk losing the subsidy entirely. 

Dealing with the time constraints of the HCV program may sound stressful as is, but the most common complaints applicants have about the program begin well before they even receive their voucher. As winter approaches, those without a permanent home are scrambling to find any accommodation they can. However, those seeking reprieve through the voucher program are destined for disappointment; upon accessing the HACP website to add themselves to the waitlist, prospective applicants are met with the following message: 

Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8) Waiting List – Closed 

HACP accepted nearly 10,000 pre-applications between December 10 and December 23, 2018. The list is now closed. 

At first glance, this webpage would be a devastating blow to those hoping for help before winter time comes around. Nowhere on the page does it link any other resources to contact for temporary shelter, nor does it indicate the next time the list will reopen. The fact that this waitlist has not been open in nearly five years seems inexcusable. Many would look at this notice and easily assume that the housing authority must have forgotten about their poverty-stricken constituents. However, Chuck Rohrer, the director of communications for the HACP, insists that the waitlist’s closure does not necessarily represent a lack of emphasis on the voucher program. 

“We house about 20,000 people in the city of Pittsburgh through our housing programs, and HCV is by far the largest of them,” Rohrer says. “We’ve probably got about 1,500 landlords right now in our system, and about 5,500 HCV vouchers that are active.”

In other words, the HACP maintains that they are hard at work trying to clear space on the waitlist for more applicants. Still, Rohrer openly acknowledges the frustrating nature of the situation and the near perpetually closed waitlist. 

“The other thing that is of the utmost importance to HCV is the lack of availability. So our waiting list for HCV is closed now,” Rohrer says. “It’s almost always closed.” But he also reveals an optimistic update on the matter. “We’re trying to get that number down to a manageable number right now so we can reopen it.”

Allegheny County is not alone in its struggle to keep its housing voucher waitlist open. According to Affordable Housing Online, of all 90 housing authorities in Pennsylvania, only 24 currently have their waitlists open and ready for applicants. Most of these still-open housing authorities are located in more rural areas, where the populations are more manageable and the cost of living is moderately cheaper. Housing authority websites for metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia and Harrisburg indicate that their lists have been closed for the majority of this year.

However, the HACP has recently been working hard to get their waitlist cleared and ready to accept more eager applicants, using their recent move as an opportunity to hire even more housing occupancy specialists who will be tasked with quickly resolving these applications. Rohrer guarantees that the list will be open sometime before the end of this year, but the exact date remains to be chosen. Once the list does open, Rohrer will contact local news agencies to publish this, and the waitlist’s web page which has sat untouched for years will finally be updated. 

Although the housing authority used to keep the waitlist open for two weeks at a time, recent strains brought on by a lack of available housing mean that the list must be kept open more briefly. Although the HACP has kept its waitlist closed for so long, the Allegheny County Housing Authority opened up their own voucher program’s waitlist at least one time since late 2018, but it was not for very long. Nonetheless, the organization found itself overwhelmed with the number of incoming applications. 

“The last time the [county] opened their list, last July, they opened up for three days. They took ninety, ninety-five hundred applications in just three days” says Gary Mesko, the main supervisor of the occupancy specialists who are responsible for approving and denying housing voucher applications. Mesko expects that the number of applicants the authority will receive will exceed the county’s count of nearly 10,000 as rents continue to rise throughout the city.

But even if the authority opens the floodgates for new applications, there is still the relentless problem of finding available affordable private housing units that could feasibly accept housing vouchers. The Pittsburgh Housing Needs Assessment, released in 2022, is a report prepared by the HR&A real estate advisory firm that analyzes any notable patterns and alarming changes in just about every aspect of the city’s housing sector. The full report is nearly 130 slides long, but each section tells the exact same story: Pittsburgh is becoming rapidly unaffordable. 

The assessment identifies several concerning trends when it comes to how the socioeconomic makeup of the city is changing. For starters, the city is consistently losing more low-income households each year, while the number of high-income households is increasing at twice the rate. Furthermore, the more desirable areas of the county – areas such as Oakland, Shadyside, and downtown Pittsburgh – are all seeing either stagnation or steep declines in the number of HCV-supported households. Meanwhile, low-income families are being pushed south of the Monongahela and north of the Allegheny rivers to neighborhoods like Carrick and Homestead.

Thankfully, certain neighborhoods have finally acknowledged their wealth disparities and have begun to formulate plans to incorporate households that support a larger variety of socioeconomic statuses. The aptly named “Oakland Plan,” created by the Pittsburgh Planning Commission, was announced in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Housing Needs Assessment as an outline for changes to be made to the North, South, Central, and West Oakland neighborhoods to attract medium- and low-income residents. The website for the plan states the city’s intention to “guide […] the future of public and private investments in the area and recommend […] new land-use regulations” among other infrastructure and mobility programs within the next ten years. 

But until those ten years are up, those living below the poverty line are still solely reliant on the voucher program to stay afloat in otherwise entirely unaffordable neighborhoods. That being said, the authority refuses to keep the waitlist open to amass more than 10,000 applicants at a time. 

Mesko operates his list under the philosophy that “you don’t want your list too long where you create false hope and you create administrative nightmares. You should be able to house everybody or at least get through the screening of everybody within 12 and 24 months.” 

Unfortunately, what “should” happen is not always what does. After all, the authority did take more than twice the expected amount of time to clear the voucher wait list after its closure in 2018. Delays are reportedly very common at the housing authority, and Mesko attributes these to a variety of client-side errors and misguidances. Clients often change their contact information, like phone numbers and addresses, without updating their application. Some who apply to both Allegheny County and the HACP waitlists get approved for a voucher by one organization without rescinding their application in the other list, causing employees to spend the time they could use to help other families in need instead of trying to contact someone who is already adequately housed. 

It’s worth noting that looking up the HACP headquarters’s address on Google reveals that the authority still has not updated their address from before their move to 412 Boulevard of the Allies – something that Gary Mesko pointed out as an issue in the voucher application process – meaning anyone using Google Maps to find the HACP office will find themselves a few blocks too far. 

Rohrer elaborates on this list of common challenges the authority’s staff faces when dealing with HCV applications. He often finds that “family composition could change, there could be changes in health, there could be – and there almost always are – changes in income.”

All of the aforementioned factors directly affect the type of voucher one may receive, the speed at which their voucher may be received, or even the eligibility status of the applicant. But whatever the cause of the delays may be, Mesko and Rohrer hope that reopening the waitlist this year will cause an influx of fresh and up-to-date contact information that will help move people into units even faster. 

But even after receiving all of the housing choice voucher applications, there are many problems that occupancy specialists at the HACP deal with during the screening process. Mesko estimates that, for every 100 applicants that are called in for screening, half of them do not even show up or even respond to the authority’s outreach efforts. 

“Of the 50 [applicants] that we do get, we’re going to deny for criminal background check, going balances, or failure to submit documentation […] we may issue 20 vouchers,” Mesko said. Of these 20 remaining voucher-holders, half struggle to find a home that satisfies their voucher’s constraints, mostly due to the highly saturated state of the housing market in the city as of late. 

Laverne Wagner, associate director of the Occupancy Department at HACP, thinks that this low success rate has much to do with the applicants’ habits after receiving their voucher. 

“You know, some people don’t start until the last 30 days and then they’re trying to get extensions and can’t find a place,” Wagner says. “People wait until the last minute, and then that’s where they’re scrambling.” 

This is not to say that those who apply for vouchers are lazy or not as desperate for housing as they claim; instead, it means that they have a lot on their plate, and they may not understand that receiving a voucher does not necessarily make it any easier to locate an available unit. Wagner believes that applicants often underestimate the amount of time it takes to realize their housing voucher. 

“Having a voucher is like a second job, I’m going to be honest with you,” Wagner says. “You have to make phone calls, you have to e-mail landlords, you have to go see properties. It depends on what you’re dedicated to doing and how serious you are.”

Many individuals who have interacted with the housing authority as clients report different reasons for delays in their applications or the lack of success with finding viable homes – reasons that push the brunt of the blame on the authority’s employees. These negative testimonies are quite easy to find; a quick Google search for “HACP” will reveal countless one-star reviews, angry social media posts, and scathing news articles featuring stories decrying consistent patterns of ignorance and unapproachability by the authority. 

One Public Source article from April highlighted the story of Tamika Johnson, a single mother with five children who says, “On average, I need to email [HACP] like 15 times for a response.” The article outlines her struggles with the short expiration window of the vouchers, as well as with landlords unwilling to trust that the authority will pay their end of the rent on time. At the time of the article’s publication, the woman was forced to live with her children in a shelter in East Liberty, with no sign from the authority of any imminent assistance. 

Another article published in May of this year from NPR’s Pittsburgh news station, 90.5 WESA, reported on a disgruntled former HACP board member Tammy Thompson who vocalized her dismay with the authority’s operations on a local podcast. Echoing the sentiments Johnson expressed in the Public Source piece, Thompson says that applicants are “not getting their calls answered. They’re not getting their emails answered.” When pressed on the largest weakness within the HACP, Thompson again cites “the lack of communication.”

As the leader of the communications department at the HACP, Chuck Rohrer is well aware of the ever-increasing mountain of bad press aimed at the agency. When asked about any pertinent examples of critical headlines he felt especially frustrated by, he cited one “hatchet job” of an article published in 2021 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that featured multiple voucher-holding tenants who had maintenance issues that they alleged were overtly ignored by the authority’s staff. 

The article in question, titled “Housing Misery,” features the story of an impoverished family of ten struggling to live safely in their voucher-supported Northview Heights apartment. Shamsa Mada, the matriarch of the family, explains that she had moved into this apartment after her home in Lawrenceville became too expensive for her family to afford. After moving into Northview Heights in 2014, a public housing complex designed for voucher-holding tenants, Mada has witnessed countless issues that make her concerned for the health and safety of her eight children.

“Her stove […] was broken for nearly a year, she said. Only after calling the police to report the smell of natural gas did it get fixed,” reporter Joel Jacobs writes. The health department has visited her apartment at least six times, “repeatedly finding ‘spongy’ walls, and leaks from the bathtub, among other deficiencies.”

The piece is accompanied by multiple photographs detailing the extent of the unsafe conditions within these housing complexes. In one picture, Mada’s kitchen cabinet doors are seen falling off their hinges. In another, a child’s bedroom ceiling is rife with archipelagos of black mold and large water-filled paint bubbles caused by leaks in the unit above. 

Rohrer does not dispute that these highlighted units are currently unsafe to live in – he admits being sickened when he first saw the pictures in the Post-Gazette article. However, he does offer a simple explanation for why these seemingly egregious maladies that plague these public housing units have taken so long to be remedied. 

“We ended up having to do research on dozens of these allegations that were in the press, only to find that 75% of them never had called in work orders,” Rohrer says. “You never told us about it. You never called the maintenance number.”

These one-sided articles can be frustrating for the communications department, but Rohrer refuses to retaliate by going to the press and contesting the tenants’ claims. 

“I would never let anyone get on the line with a reporter and badmouth a client or call them liars in the press. So we’ll strategically take the high road on stuff like that, even when it’s not true,” Rohrer says. 

Mesko, Wagner, and Rohrer all believe that this mountain of bad press often leads to the public misconstruing what the HACP is truly responsible for. Every day, occupancy specialists at the authority get calls about petty neighborhood quarrels, landlord-tenant disputes, or tenants without a voucher calling and expecting some form of immediate renter’s aid from the organization.

Perhaps the largest misconception about the HACP is that they deal heavily with the homeless population in the city. The City of Pittsburgh’s website describes the housing authority’s main goal as “providing decent, affordable housing for low-income persons.” What the HACP does not provide, however, are services predominantly aimed toward the homeless, such as food pantries or emergency shelters – responsibilities handled by other organizations or non-profits. Occasionally, the HACP will distribute emergency housing vouchers with help from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but these are rare and often only last for a very short period before being shut down. Besides these edge cases, the main goal of the housing authority has always predominantly been to help those who have stable incomes, but for one reason or another are still unable to locate or afford reliable housing.

Even still, many people believe that providing housing for the homeless should be a priority of the HACP, and that the Housing First model should be integrated into the authority’s operations. This model, popularized by Dr. Sam Tsemberis of NYU’s School of Medicine, is built upon the idea that housing is a basic human right; if one is provided with a home, they will be much more successful at building a more stable financial future for themselves. 

Alicia Romano is the CEO of a Pittsburgh-based non-profit named Community Human Services, which aims to provide a variety of resources to the homeless and low-income populations throughout the county. In a presentation on the organization’s various programs and services, Romano speaks passionately about the strengths of the Housing First model and the success it has garnered. 

“You must put a person into a safe home – that means that they have a roof over their head and that means they have a door that locks – before you can begin to address any other goal they might have for themselves,” says Romano. “Unless somebody feels safe and secure at night, unless you can put your head down on a pillow and feel that you are safe, you cannot begin to address any of your other needs.”

Romano claims that Housing First has a proven 88% success rate when it comes to supporting individuals until they can find success in maintaining a stable and healthy lifestyle. This statistic comes from a meta-analysis conducted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which also states that models that did not prioritize housing only resulted in a 47% success rate. 

These statistics have shown to be so promising that the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a Housing First initiative in 2021 called “Housing America.” According to the department’s website, this initiative aimed to “re-house at least 100,000 households experiencing homelessness, and to add at least 20,000 new units of affordable housing into the development pipeline.” 

But Rohrer believes that the Housing First model would not mesh well with the HACP’s voucher program. 

“[The homeless] are not ready to be housed,” Rohrer says. “They’re ready to be helped, but not just put into a public housing system without adequate support. And we don’t have that”

Rohrer explains that the HACP is already understaffed as it is; there is nobody at the agency trained in trauma response or clinical procedures, nor are there any social workers on payroll. When a prospective or current tenant is in need of these types of services, occupancy specialists usually have no choice but to refer these individuals elsewhere. 

For the time being, the HACP remains uninvolved in the fight against homelessness in Pittsburgh. In fact, the continued public debate about the roles of the HACP in combating homelessness has fallen far from the top of the agency’s list of priorities. Over the past few years, the Communication Department has become less and less involved with trying to sway the general public’s opinion in their favor, and more about creating relationships with property owners. Rohrer explains that his job as the head of communications has been dedicated almost exclusively to creating relationships with new private landlords since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“Basically all of our paid marketing over the past three years has gone to landlord outreach, like trying to attract additional landlords to the program,” says Rohrer.

There are limitations to which landlords the HACP can partner with and what they can offer the property owners in return. Rohrer explains that the rates they can offer to landlords and tenants are based heavily on the current housing market condition.

“When the market rate is high, we can’t always extend our rates to keep up with it. Even though we say we have a fair market rate, they don’t always match up with the private market,” Rohrer says. In other words, when rents rise in the private market, the HACP simply does not have the funds to raise their subsidies by a consistently proportional rate. If the housing authority cannot keep up with this rate, they will not be competitive enough to continue to attract landlords.  

However, the HACP has still worked to put forth considerable effort in trying to make themselves attractive to landlords where they can. On their website, the organization outlines a slew of financial benefits for those partnered with the housing authority. For one, property owners are theoretically guaranteed income, as the authority is responsible for covering two-thirds of the cost of rent each month, reducing the impact of tenants who find themselves unable to fork over rent when it comes due. They also are permitted to raise their rent once per year and still be HCV-compliant. If a tenant must be evicted from their home, the landlord will still receive vacancy payments for up to two months while they search for a replacement. 

Although these benefits may seem enticing, many landlords still remain hesitant to partner with the housing authority due to the well-known negative experiences that other landlords report having when it comes to reachability and payment consistency. In fact, landlords who have previously partnered with the authority have recently gone out of their way to express their dismay with the business relationship through multiple forums.

This past June, the authority held a board meeting via Zoom where the public could submit questions and comments to be read aloud by the HACP’s Board of Commissioners. While the board members’ responses were not recorded, the concerns raised by the public provide a more in-depth look into the organization’s weaknesses. 

Disgruntled landlord Danielle Robinson submitted a comment in May 2023 relaying her experience with voucher-holding tenants. She recalls the story of one of her prospective tenants who had secured housing just before the 60-day expiration window, only to have the housing authority take too long to do their required inspection and repairs, resulting in the landlord being unable to take the voucher holder as a tenant. This sent both parties into a spiral, with Robinson attempting to proactively sort out the situation to no avail, as “[the] entire transaction is currently being held up by the HACP.”

Robinson ends her comment with a question many landlords who struggle with the housing voucher process have on their minds: “What is the HACP going to do to rectify this?”

A similar story was shared by a mostly anonymous commenter identifying themselves only as “Reina.” Reina claims to work frequently with disabled clients working through the voucher program, and accuses the HACP of “repeatedly ignor[ing] reasonable accommodation requests […] to include service coordinators, case managers, or another support person in communications.” She explains that the people she works with are afflicted with intellectual disabilities and histories of brain trauma and need a safe and secure home, and that they could not navigate such a convoluted and lengthy process without considerable help. 

Many landlords who decline to show up to board meetings still express their frustrations through the internet. Tolaina Williams, who claims on Google Reviews to be a landlord struggling to work with the housing authority, describes the experience as a “nightmare,” and claims that they have been attempting to contact the organization for months for their checks, “sending emails and leaving voicemails constantly.” Another user, Kayla Holt, writes “horrible service, they can’t even answer the phone.” Justin Waxter simply comments “DIDNT HELP AT ALL.”

Public opinion clearly shows that the HACP continues to fall short of what is expected of them by tenants and landlords alike. To combat this, the authority was recently granted more funding that could potentially aid them in improving the efficacy of their current operations and preparing operational specialists to take on the heavy caseloads they receive after opening their waitlist. In April of this year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development granted the HACP an additional $4.6 million in increased funding. According to the authority’s website, this brings the city’s total annual allocation to over $60 million, a ten percent increase from the previous year. 

The HACP writes on its website that these new funds will be specifically allocated to the housing choice voucher program to help combat the disparity between the increasing number of extremely low-income families in Pittsburgh and the overwhelming lack of available affordable housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development released a statement along with the announcement of their increased allocation that emphasizes the importance of these funds to the city and its inhabitants. 

“We know there is a housing affordability crisis, and this funding will help people who are struggling to find a place they can afford to live, including people experiencing homelessness,” says Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary Marcia L. Fudge. 

Although the future of the HACP’s Housing Choice Voucher Program appears to be promising, the job will not necessarily get any easier for the organization’s employees. The high-stress nature of working in the Occupancy Department has a significant effect on the authority’s staff. Caster D. Binion, who has served as the executive director of the HACP for the past decade, admits that the organization has experienced record-high levels of staff turnover rates within the past few years. 

Binion optimistically promises that he “will be ramping up [the] staff and simultaneously working to train new and existing staff on how to provide exemplary customer service experience.” He vows to include in this training methods of improving communications between the occupancy specialists and landlords, tenants, and other clients, all in an effort to better the organization’s efforts within the voucher program.

Those who have avoided the inevitable urge to quit such a stressful job often cite the impactful nature of what they do as a reason why they choose to stay. Laverne Wagner, who has worked for the HACP for over 37 years in the Occupancy Department, feels that her job will never be done – for better or for worse. 

“When you see someone say to you ‘thank you so much, you helped me a lot’ – it means a lot to someone to know that you helped them,” Wagner says. “I will be here until my job is done. And it may not never be done.”

Gary Mesko, who also boasts an impressive tenure of 28 years at the department, shares a similar sentiment for why he chooses to come to work each day. 

“You don’t realize how many people out there need help until you actually see it day in and day out. We try and help everyone out,” he says, adding, “It’s a pretty cool feeling.”

Wagner and Mesko love hearing success stories about the housing choice voucher program, but those are only a fraction of the stories that employees of this department hear. Often, the reality is that there are people at the end of their rope who have to be turned down for logistical reasons, or simply because they do not understand exactly what the agency does.

It is not uncommon for people to get in contact with the Occupancy Department in desperate need of short-notice housing in the midst of the darkest moments of their lives, a service that the HCV program does not deal with. Mesko admits that these moments of his job are the most difficult for him. 

“A lot of people think we have emergency housing, and we gotta say, ‘No we can’t help [these] people.’ Every day there’s things we can’t do,” he says. While he always provides the relevant contact information for the proper avenues where he can, the process of rejection can often be tough to bear. 

Both Mesko and Wagner are not afraid to admit that the rejection aspect of their jobs still affects their mental health negatively from time to time, even after decades of experience. 

“[It] would be crazy to say I don’t think about that when I go home to my house, to my bed, my head, my food,” Wagner said. “You do think about these people at times and wonder what happened.”

Mesko echoes a nearly identical sentiment, staring soberly out the window of his office and only briefly adding, “You carry this with you.”

It can be hard sometimes to remember that behind every seemingly soulless government organization are countless employees trying their best to help those in need. With the improved funding and training that HACP staff will use to grow and strengthen their practices, the future of the housing crisis in Pittsburgh may soon take a turn for the better. Perhaps the building on 412 Boulevard of the Allies will once more reflect an image of a new, more prosperous Pittsburgh – one where each citizen enjoys the comfort of their own secure home.