Good morning and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's Cablecast public hearing for Thursday, July 9th, 2026, relative to Bill 2026-0513.

Would the clerk please read the title of the bill?

Ordinance amending the Pittsburgh Code Title Nine Zoning Code Article One Introduction and Establishment.03 zoning map to rezone parcels 125 G thirteen, one twenty-five G fourteen, one twenty five G fifteen from residential single unit detached low density to urban industrial in the Homewood West neighborhood.

Thank you, Madam Clerk.

And for the record, we are joined by myself, Councilman Kahari Mosley, other members may be joining us shortly.

And our first order of business will be a brief introduction of the legislation by representatives from the Department of City Planning, followed by a presentation by the applicant, Katie Seftis.

Thank you, Councilman.

And members.

With that, I'll turn it uh back over to you.

Thank you.

And I would like to uh invite the applicant uh to come up.

Give a brief presentation as well.

Feel free to introduce yourself and thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, thank you for having us, Councilman.

Um, really pleased to be here this morning to present at a public hearing on the proposed rezoning of these three parcels in uh in the Homewood West neighborhood.

Um if we go to the next slide, I'll introduce our team briefly that'll be presenting today.

Um my name's James H.

I'm the director of real estate development at Action Housing.

Um we are the developer of the site, and with me today is uh Jody Lincoln, uh senior development officer also with Action Housing, and our design partner, Moss Architect, Katie Seftus, will be will be presenting.

Um and I did want to note also in attendance is ML Meyer.

Um she's the senior director of real estate with the URA who you know and they are the property owner of all of the parcels we'll be discussing today.

Thank you.

Um I also wanted to note two projects that we that we sh that we Action Housing have developed um recently.

Um for those unfamiliar with Action Housing.

We are a nonprofit affordable housing developer and supportive service provider located here in Pittsburgh, but we do um work throughout Allegheny County.

Um we currently have about 2,000 units of affordable rental housing that we own and operate.

Um and I'm showing two projects here.

Uh our most recent one, which opened about two years ago, flats on forward.

Um this is a fully affordable rental project located at the in Squirrel Hill at the foot of um of Murray Avenue at the intersection of uh Forward and Murray.

Um, and Penn Matilda Apartments, which was opened, I think about eight years ago, um, located on Penn Avenue in uh the Bloomfield Garfield area.

Um that project was also incidentally designed by Moss Architects.

Um and these these two projects represent um the type of of work that we do.

So to briefly orient you to the project site, um we see the map here with the project site noted in red.

Um this is located in the east end, um just northeast of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Penn Avenue.

Um so you'll note the East Busway directly to the south, and then uh Bakery Square kind of to the to the northwest or the upper left portion of this of this slide.

On the next slide, we have a uh closer view of the project site highlighted in yellow.

Um so in this uh slide you're looking roughly southwest.

Um the frontage of the site is along Kelly Street.

Uh you can see to the right on this slide the commercial uses um that exist along Fifth Avenue, Washington Boulevard.

So there's self storage, beer distributor, fast food, things of that nature.

And then you can see as you move to the left into Homewood West, kind of the transition to more of a residential nature.

And the next two slides um show images of our project site.

So these are our four parcels.

Uh the image on the left shows the three vacant parcels that are zoned R1DL.

These are the three that are up for consideration for rezoning.

Um these have been vacant for over 20 years.

Um again, all four of these parcels are owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority.

Uh the image on the right shows the fourth parcel, which is a vacant um you former UPMC building, which was donated to the URA with an expressed um desire to help forward an affordable housing project.

Hello, so um as James had mentioned, the the lots under consideration, the three vacant parcels are currently part of an isolated kind of pocket of R1DL zoning in the city, kind of within a larger expanse of urban industrial UI zoned uses.

Um the former EPMC building that we saw in the previous slide is the lot currently zoned UI, which you can see kind of bracketed in red.

Um our total project site.

So the the three parcels zoned um R1DL are shown in the yellow that were were under consideration for today.

Earlier it was mentioned that there were 19 parcels that were um rezoned to urban industrial in the fall of 2023.

Those are two on the north side of our site along Kelly Street.

Um, and that was for an anticipated get-go gas station project that has no longer moving forward.

This slide is again kind of highlighting the three lots that we are discussing today that we are requesting be rezoned to urban industrial.

Those lots in combination with the fourth lot that has the former EPMC building together are really required in order to make this project work successfully as a multifamily affordable housing project.

All four lots are owned by the URA, and they were donated or obtained by the URA with the intention of something that's a community-driven purpose being built on these lots.

The lots in question for rezoning have been vacant and not underutilized for at least 20 years.

As you can see in the photo on the right, going back to May 2024, you can clearly see those lots as being vacant.