O'Connor questions Gainey's 1,600 units of affordable housing, but skips mayor's walking tour invite (2025)

With less than a month to go before the May 20 Democratic primary, the race between Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and his challenger, County Controller Corey O’Connor, has entered an ominous phase: They are now arguing about their earlier arguments.

And their hour-long debate, broadcast Tuesday night on WTAE-TV, was dominated by the latest chapter in a dispute about affordable housing that began on a WPXI forum last week.

That fight began when Gainey claimed last week the city had delivered 1,600 units of affordable housing during his administration. O’Connor said he’d “love to walk with you” to see them, but when Gainey’s campaign announced plans to carry out a walking tour on Wednesday, O’Connor declined to join it.

“I am not going to attend a campaign rally for the mayor,” he said during the debate Tuesday night. “He knows he cannot walk around the city and produce 1,600 new units of affordable housing.”

“My opponent asked for the walking tour,” Gainey shot back. “I didn’t ask him, he asked me … We invited him. Now, all of a sudden, he’s not coming.”

Gainey called it an example of the “difference between rhetoric and results.” He said he was proud of “what my administration has done in three years. We’ve built — we’ve delivered 1,600 units of affordable housing.”

Gainey’s slight rephrasing reflects the fact that much of the argument turns on the rhetoric each campaign is using to describe the results.

The administration has assembled an online housing tracker to document its efforts. And Gainey’s 1,600-unit number appears to include both new affordable units built or underway with city involvement and cases in which city agencies were able to preserve units that had been affordable but were at risk of being lost.

In a rebuttal video posted online shortly before the debate, O’Connor accused Gainey of manipulating the numbers. He based that assessment on his own review of the data on the tracker — a review that considered only affordable units that were built new, leaving out those the city helped to preserve.

Using that filter, O’Connor determined that only 201 new units of affordable housing had been built during Gainey’s term so far (though the tracker shows another 630 units currently under construction).

“We need 6,000 units. We can’t have a couple hundred units pop up here and there,” O’Connor said during Tuesday night’s debate.

The rest of the discussion Tuesday night revisited now-familiar areas of dispute. Gainey touted the fact that the city finished 2024 with a $4 million surplus, despite earlier warnings of red ink: O’Connor did not dispute the surplus but noted it was far lower than the $28 million surplus that the city had originally projected.

Gainey also suggested that the Fern Hollow Bridge, which collapsed days after he took office, had decayed on O’Connor’s watch.

“We had went decades without properly inspecting our bridges,” Gainey said. “My opponent should know: He was on City Council.”

O’Connor noted that the city had invested in repairing other bridges, including the Greenfield Bridge, which was hung with netting to catch falling debris for years prior to its rebuilding. And he sought to turn the tide by once again blasting Gainey for failing to invest federal COVID-19 relief dollars in city vehicles and other needs.

Also familiar was a replay of the debate about how best to convince the city’s large nonprofits, who are some of the region’s largest employers, to contribute to the city’s needs.

O’Connor proposed a return to the approach used by previous Mayor Bill Peduto, in which the city would negotiate for specific asks from nonprofits that coincide with their mission. O’Connor said he would “be specific, especially with our hospitals, and get them to purchase new ambulances” on which they rely.

“You need a leader who’s gonna be direct [and] meet with our nonprofits,” he said. “Not come up with press release after press release saying, ‘Oh, we’re so close to doing it.’”

Gainey said the city had “made progress” in negotiations, though the evidence he cited was a written commitment from Highmark to join a pilot program if others participated, too — a commitment that Highmark itself said merely articulated the position it had held all along.

In the meantime, the city has been pursuing challenges to the tax-exempt status of individual properties owned by the tax-exempts. That has produced only negligible revenues for the city, but Gainey said it provided “leverage” to the city.

“The only time I’ve seen UPMC come to the table and cut a deal with anybody is when [then-attorney general] Josh Shapiro filed a lawsuit,” he said, citing a 10-year agreement by Highmark and UPMC to accept patients with each other’s insurance plans.