Former councilman Udin discusses ailing urban core

As a boy, Sala Udin and his family were relocated from private housing in the lower Hill… As a boy, Sala Udin and his family were relocated from private housing in the lower Hill District to public housing in a place called Bedford Dwellings.

“Everything in that apartment was brand new. It was bright, there were no holes in the windows, there was a brand new refrigerator, a brand new stove… I thought my daddy had hit the money. I thought we were doing well,” Udin remembered.

“But it was really concentrated poverty.”

Udin, president and CEO of the Coro Center for Civic Leadership in Pittsburgh, spoke in the Cathedral of Learning on Monday.

His lecture, entitled “Challenges of Race, Poverty and Sprawl: the Hole in the Donut” focused on how underrepresented groups are trapped in poverty and prevented from attaining a higher quality of life in the form of better housing, better schooling and better job opportunities.

Udin, a native of the Hill District and a former Pittsburgh city councilman, said that the current poverty problems in Pittsburgh and other American cities are rooted in the social reform of the 1950s and ’60s.

“There was a terror in the neighborhood