In the lead-up to Election Day, PCRG offered Allegheny County Executive candidates the opportunity to participate in interviews focusing on issues including land bank barriers, budget transparency, affordable housing, and declining Black homeownership rates — and how they would tackle them.
Below are highlights from our conversation with Sara Innamorato, which have been edited for clarity.
Joe Rockey did not respond to PCRG’s multiple requests for participation. However, you can refer to Pittsburgh NPR station WESA’s voter guide for information about Allegheny County Executive candidates as well as those vying for other seats in the upcoming election.
What role do you see growing nonprofits playing as county tax bases shrink? And how would you work with them to make that happen?
I know the important work that nonprofits do to make sure that our neighbors are housed, that they're fed, that they're connected to opportunities that really fill the gap of where public policy and government agencies fall short and are a critical component in making sure that our neighbors are cared for and really building a county for us all.
The county works directly with a number of nonprofits through the contract work. The Department of Human Services, with a budget north of $1.3 billion, contracts with a number of service providers which are designated nonprofits to deliver, to actually deliver the services to the people who need them most.
I expect that relationship to continue and to flourish under a county government that's really centered on addressing the needs of people throughout our region.
What would you do to make the county budget more transparent, inclusive of and accessible to community input?
When people ask me what I'm going to do as County Executive, I like priority-based budgeting, which is a process by which you say: here are our collective goals as a region.
We will define those goals by going through a comprehensive planning process my first year in office — which will take hundreds of meetings throughout the county, within our municipalities, with various stakeholders and groups — to really get a pulse on what communities' priorities are and how we capture that in a comprehensive plan. Then use that plan to inform our process of priority-based budgeting.
So saying, you know, if our mission is to create a structure within the county that supports affordable housing and addresses homelessness and allows seniors to age in place, then we should be able to show as a county via a virtual dashboard how much money from Economic Development, from the Department of Health, from Human Services is going towards achieving that mission and that vision.
This is something that the city went through a few years ago. We would like to move the county in that direction as well, using the first year as the planning process. And then, you know, when we're introducing the budget for next year for 2025, then we'll be able to present it in a way that looks like priority-based budgeting and that we'll be able to make sure people understand — not just see line items in a budget spreadsheet, but understand how those investments connect to their lives and their livelihoods and in the nonprofit sector, the people and populations that they are designed to serve.
And that's the way that budgeting should be. It should be informed by the community's priorities, but then it should be written in a way that is digestible, understandable, and applicable to the work that's happening on the ground.
And we're going to structure a budget process that’s going to allow for that level of participation, but also with an eye towards understanding and engagement.
Community Land Trusts can preserve agency, provide residents oversight over proposed changes in their neighborhoods and keep housing affordable. While they can combat the effects of gentrification, they don't directly generate individual wealth for residents or ensure financial self-sufficiency.
Do you support Community Land Trusts?
Yes.
If elected, what would you do to facilitate the creation of Community Land Trusts?
I see the value in Community Land Trusts but it's not going to be something for everyone. It's going to be another tool in the toolbox that allows an individual or family to build some equity through having safe, stable and predictable housing. It allows us to maybe not generate and maximize individual wealth, but it helps us build community wealth at large and keep our neighborhoods vibrant and diverse.
At the county level, I feel like we can invest in that model, especially with properties that are in our ownership that we could rehab, which are going to be much cheaper to do than building new.
In some circumstances it means that we are helping the Community Land Trusts that form whether it's City of Bridges or other community-based ones, access the vacant property recovery program more efficiently and effectively. If we build up our economic development department, we can be a resource for these community-based groups who are interested in pursuing Community Land Trust homes and building them and adding them to the ecosystem that already exists by providing technical resources.
So, either helping to navigate the processes of the vacant property program or looking at how to navigate conservatorship in bringing those homes that are vacant and blighted with absentee owners into productive reuse, that's actually housing folks.
No housing policy is a silver bullet to the housing crisis, but Community Land Trusts are a tool that should be in our toolbox when we're talking about long-term affordability that builds community wealth but also gives equity-building opportunities to individuals and households.
Black homeownership has disproportionately declined in recent years. This is coupled with discrepancies in mortgage lending — of 220 mortgage applications submitted by upper-income Black applicants in Allegheny County, 67% ended in loans, compared to 1,349 loan applications submitted by low-income white applicants with 73% loan approval in 2021, according to PCRG’s latest mortgage lending study.
What commitment would you make as County Executive to reverse this trend? Resources? A comprehensive plan for the county?
We know that this is a way that systemic racism manifests itself in practice. To solve the issue, there's no silver bullet, but there are proactive steps that we can take at the county level to begin to address the disparities that exist between white and Black homeownership in our region.
I think first and foremost — and this is kind of a level up to everything — is making sure that folks at the county are trained in implicit bias because what we're seeing with you know whether it's loan applications for more or mortgage applications or loan applications for small businesses or not. We can set an example at the county and say we are working on addressing bias, closing any sort of racial gaps that we see in our pay or outcomes within our own staff. Look at making sure that we have a racial equity lens in all the programs that we administer.
We know there are disparities in appraisals too. So even looking at the same house, if they know the owner is Black versus a white owner, there's disparities that exist [in property valuations]. And while I don't think that we can force the private sector to really come to begin to address that, we are really asking our lenders in the private sector to also make a commitment that's not just checking a box and creating a position within their organization, but really saying how do you bake this into every aspect and facet of the work that's happening?
Diving into specifics around addressing Black homeownership, I think this is really where we can think about what is working or maybe what has already started in our region and nationally that begins to address these trends.
[What we can do at the county level is] making sure that we're not just designing something like an Own PGH and expanding it to the county. We are going to make sure we're intentional about our outreach, about partnering with Black-led organizations to promote the program and to get folks enrolled in it. Making sure we’re partnering with organizations that are already on the ground doing the work, having these conversations already with the people in their community who have the desire to move towards home ownership — who have the capacity to do so and just need some proper tools and resources.
If elected, what would you do to dedicate more resources to increase its affordable housing inventory?
The first step is really understanding the scope of the problem within the county context. For a long time, we've only had the city housing needs assessment and I think with this most recent one that's come up, what we've seen is a decrease in the number of units of deeply affordable units that we need compared to the last housing needs assessment. The conclusion is that it's not because we've built our way out of that. It's because these folks have moved out of the city and now live in the county because of rising rents and home values within the city proper. So we're seeing more lower-income renters move to the county and we don't have a full sense of what the affordable housing needs are, and where they're highly concentrated.
We need to really go through that process of understanding the full scope of the problem and what interventions are going to work best. We want to prioritize areas where we see property values increasing and you know or we see the possibility of gentrification, displacement.
It's also looking at how we bring more affordable units online in areas that are becoming increasingly unaffordable but have high access to opportunities like good school districts, good-paying jobs, and great transit.
With housing in general, our strength is in diversity. How do we create model public policies, if the county can't, that local municipalities can adopt that can help preserve some naturally affordable housing options? That's where the housing needs assessment comes in and determines how we cater the interventions based on the needs of [a specific] community and really engage the community in that process so that we can have a full understanding of the types of interventions that will be most impactful.
We will go through that process and designate a team within the Department of Economic Development to lead on housing and affordable housing development in our region. And we'll make sure that that team is working across disciplines and across departments to execute best practices when it comes to the creation of affordable housing because we know that there are some creative ways to fund things right now, we can't just rely on the low-income housing tax credit. It's a great tool, but it's highly competitive and the capital stack doesn't work unless there's additional creativity in working with the developers and the community and the team that they build to fully fund projects. That's where the county can step in and say, ‘oh you know we have healthcare dollars over here and we know that based on social determinants of health, housing is a critical component in that.’ How do we leverage dollars from the Department of Health? How do we leverage HUD dollars that are going through Human Services to really make sure that we're not working in silos on this issue, but we're really creating a spirit of collaboration.
There are tens of thousands of vacant, neglected properties across Allegheny County — that are disproportionately concentrated in historically disinvested, low- to moderate-income communities of color. This is detrimental to residents’ quality of life, mental health and safety. Land banks can be a driving force for revitalization and transforming vacant lots and abandoned structures into thriving community assets.
If elected, what would you do to strip bureaucratic barriers that stand in the way of land bank functions, combat vacant properties and support post-industrial land development and recycling?
I want the county to be a proactive partner in the land banks that we currently have in the county.
We have [the Pittsburgh Land Bank] that's run by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, we have the Tri-COG Land Bank which is operating in a number of municipalities and has recycled over 100 properties in our county. So, there's some effective work that's already happening and the role of the county would be to say how do we bolster this work? How do we streamline it? How do we allow more properties to be accessed more efficiently?
I think that's just going to take collaboration and working with the partners that are already doing the work in identifying where there are levers that we can pull, whether that's administrative changes through the county, to streamline bureaucracies and access.
Perhaps it's more resources in terms of dollars, maybe it's more technical expertise that is needed in order to move more properties more quickly. We are here and want to be a partner in that work.
What resources would you dedicate to it and, if they involve funding – where would that come from?
It's hard to say where the funding would come from, right? We're inheriting a budget that is currently proposed by the sitting Allegheny County Executive. It makes sense for it to be under the Department of Economic Development. And we'll have staff that's dedicated to working on this issue and especially with communities.
Having been a sitting state representative, I know that there are dollars that are available from the state but also from our federal partners. It's going to take us collaborating at multiple levels of government and with community-based organizations and key stakeholders to say: how do we design a proposal that we can submit to our friends at the state and federal levels that allows us to draw down dollars and being able to dedicate them towards things like light remediation, moving properties into the land bank, and building up affordable housing? It's that kind of coalition building that I've been able to do effectively and that will be an asset moving into this role and allowing us to draw down those types of funding mechanisms.