The administration of Mayor Corey O’Connor is pushing to build on the city’s housing stock and has targeted a new neighborhood for expansion in the East End community of Larimer.
Perhaps best known as the community in which the original Bakery Square is located along Penn Avenue, Larimer’s long-neglected housing stock is included in what the O’Connor administration is calling a “Request of Interest,” seeking housing developers for a substantial collection of scattered site lots under city ownership the Urban Redevelopment Authority hopes to recruit homebuilders to take on.
Yarone Zober, the city’s director of redevelopment and chair of the URA board, benchmarked what a low bar the city is working from in adding new housing, telling the board the regularly scheduled June meeting Thursday that there were only around 50 permits for new houses last year in Pittsburgh, a city with a population of more than 300,000, comprising 90 neighborhoods spread over 55 square miles…