Lawrenceville has seen dramatic changes in recent years. Lawrenceville is now the safest neighborhood in Zone 2 Police's area, our neighborhood schools have improved, the business district has taken off and added jobs to the neighborhood, and vacant and dilapidated properties have been repurposed for new green spaces, community amenities, and new housing.

At the same time, however, rapid shifts in the housing market are displacing many residents, excluding a large population from these improvements, and threatening the neighborhood's identity as an historically working class community.

• As just one measure of displacement in the neighborhood, over half of the community's Housing Choice Voucher units were lost between 2011 and 2016, a loss of 120 low-income families in just five years.
• While Lawrenceville is one of the fastest growing millennial neighborhoods in the country, the community is not growing for everyone, recently losing significant populations of its black residents, long-time owner occupants, children, in addition to all of the Somali Bantu community that used to call the community home. 

This displacement occurs at the same time that Lawrenceville is seeing its biggest housing boom in decades. Consequently, there's a need to preserve housing opportunities for ALL as the neighborhood grows.

Inclusionary zoning (IZ) was one of the key recommendations out of the City of Pittsburgh's Affordable Housing Task Force, and would require new residential developments of a certain scale to provide a percentage of those units for low and moderate income residents. While IZ alone won't solve the affordable housing shortage in Lawrenceville, it can be an important piece of the puzzle along with other efforts: had it been in place, the proposed IZ policy would've created over 50 new units of affordable housing in the past 5 years.

Please sign this petition to show your support for immediate adoption of an Interim Planning Overlay District (IPOD) for inclusionary zoning in Lawrenceville.

For more information or to get involved, please contact Lawrenceville United at 412-802-7220 or info@LUnited.org.