Facts are a stubborn thing.
As Pittsburgh City Council continues its debate on making “inclusionary zoning” (IZ) a citywide affair – and not just in a few select neighborhoods – the director of an anti-IZ group put up some salient facts in a Post-Gazette commentary.
“Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) sounds like a noble idea,” writes David Vatz, who heads up the nonprofit group Pro-Housing Pittsburgh. “The pitch is simple: force home builders to pay for and set aside a percentage of new units at below-market rates, and presto — instant affordability! But here in Pittsburgh, as in countless other cities, the results have been anything but magical.”
In fact, he notes (as we often have, too), it’s a failure.
Vatz reminds that IZ was implemented in 2019 in Lawrenceville, in Polish Hill and Bloomfield in 2021, then in Oakland in 2022.
Citing a January study in which he was a co-author, Vatz says that “after the implementation of IZ in Lawrenceville, the rate of new housing construction in that neighborhood decreased by 30 percent, with an estimated 909 market-rate units not being built or in the planning stages.”
“It rose by 36 percent in the Strip District and 18 percent in South Side Flats, where [inclusionary zoning] was not implemented. Lawrenceville’s black population dropped by up to 25 percent, while it grew in South Side Flats,” Vatz and his colleague found.
“What IZ has done, undeniably, and perhaps this is its only true success, is give politicians and activists a way to signal that they care about affordable housing, without producing actual affordability,” he notes.
And this is the experience that Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey and many members of City Council want to replicate citywide?
It’s not as if Pittsburgh’s poor results are an outlier. We’ve documented inclusionary zoning’s failures in cities across America. (At Large, 6/20/25). As does Vatz.
“This dynamic has played out in city after city,” he writes. “In places like San Francisco, Boston and Portland, IZ has produced only a trickle of affordable units while worsening the overall housing shortage.”
The bottom line when it comes to inclusionary zoning is quite simple for those like Vatz & Co. who have taken the time to strip the cheap veneer off the equally cheap particle board underneath:
“The problem with IZ is straightforward,” Vatz writes in his P-G commentary:
“It doesn’t create housing, it restricts it. Home builders already face high costs, long permitting delays, and uncertain financing. Adding a legal requirement to build units at a loss is not a recipe for more housing — it’s an incentive to build elsewhere, or not at all. Because it requires compliance without sufficient offsetting subsidies, it’s in effect a tax on new development and one that reduces the reasons to build.”
And the real solutions to promote and create more affordable housing are just as straightforward, Vatz says.
“If Pittsburgh is serious about housing affordability, we need policies that encourage more housing by making building easier and cheaper,” writes.
“That means treating affordability as a supply-and-demand problem that requires more homes. And that means revising outdated zoning rules that create housing scarcity, eliminating policies that delay construction, and incentivizing new housing across the income spectrum.”
Those are the facts. It’s not rocket science. But it is market science, something far too few of our elected officials can comprehend. And that’s just unacceptable from Pittsburgh’s supposed “leaders.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
