Pittsburgh housing occupancy limit hurts renters, hinders progress

If you’re a student living off campus, you’ve probably broken city code — without even knowing it.

Pittsburgh’s zoning code regulations forbid more than three non-related individuals to share any rental property as housing, a restriction that students often ignore beyond leaving names off a lease.

Obviously, there’s something wrong when a regulation is reduced to little more than a record-keeping inconvenience. After all, we wouldn’t let resturants ignore healthcode violations.

Some enforcement advocates — including Oakland’s “code enforcement project,” Oakwatch — are attempting to solve the problem of illegal over-occupancy in off-campus student housing by supporting strict enforcement of the current laws.

Yet, enforcement of outdated and increasingly irrelevant codes will only result in the discrimination of those who need housing most, which can include more than just students.

As Portland sustainability expert Alan Durning suggested, occupancy limits are more “a socially acceptable way to discriminate against immigrants, the young, the poor,” because they are “so flagrantly irrelevant or ill-suited to their purported ends.

Nonetheless, Oakwatch has recently endorsed a Rental Registry bill that the city council will vote on this month. The bill would create a registration program for rental properties throughout the city of Pittsburgh that intends to provide “an efficient system for compelling … landlords to correct violations” to the rental occupancy code.

In an October budget presentation to city council, Mayor Bill Peduto announced that he had hired a city lawyer to take noncompliant landlords to court in support of stricter building code enforcement — which includes the 3-renter limit.

But these initiatives fail to consider what makes overcrowding in Oakland an issue: ever-increasing demand for housing.

According to the University, Pitt’s full-time student enrollment for undergraduate and graduate students has increased over the last 20 years from 27,002 to 32,781. An increase of more than 21 percent, this enlargement of the student body has stressed the off-campus housing market in Oakland and surrounding neighborhoods. According to U.S. News Education’s Education Rankings and Advice, 57 percent of Pitt students now live off-campus.

You don’t have to be an economics major to realize how this is a recipe for higher prices for student tenants and lower quality housing. Higher prices, in turn, motivate student renters to increase the number of roommates past the legal limit to decrease individual costs.

Oakwatch member Hanson Kappelman is skeptical of a strain on the Oakland housing market.

“There are students who live not just in Oakland, but in Shadyside, Bloomfield, Lawrenceville,” he said. “I think there’s plenty of space.”

But the vast number of Pitt students who live off-campus in the Oakland neighborhood points to the infeasibility of living in other neighborhoods as a choice for many. Who would choose to live in the often squalid housing available to students in Oakland if housing markets in other neighborhoods were a realistic alternative for all?

Admittedly, students are more likely to break the resident maximum law when it’s sparsely enforced. However, even with Oakwatch’s advocacy for enforcing the code with few or no exceptions, the likelihood that stricter implementation of the three resident rule would increase compliance is minimal.

That’s not to say that students or landlords are adamantly set on defying city authorities. The problem here lies with the particulars of the law itself. Regardless of the specifics of the housing unit — whether it’s a one-room studio or a full five-bedroom house — the code gives the same maximum of three unrelated residents. This stringent requirement has led to absurdities like a January eviction of three roommates of a group of six from a six-bedroom house on Lawn Street.

“It’s not an unusual kind of code,” Kappelman contends.

In a neighborhood like Oakland where living space is in constant demand, any housing rule that leaves rented bedrooms unoccupied is inefficient. Regardless of how commonplace it may be or what its original function was, the “no exceptions” for non-related renters approach in the code exacerbates the problem.

The enforcement-only approach ignores one of Oakwatch’s main goals, improved housing quality. The Oakland 2025 plan, which created the Oakwatch committee, aims to provide “innovative, sustainable housing choices” in the Oakland neighborhood.

Kappelman sees code enforcement crackdowns as the most important step in reaching this goal — code violations breed poor living conditions.

“Landlords who are violating the code are getting an economic advantage over those who are sticking to it,” he said. “People who are living in Oakland are at a disadvantage of falling prey to a variety of issues related to this.”

It’s true that overall lower housing quality in Oakland and widespread, illegally high amounts of residents per housing unit have recently accompanied each other. However, the enforcement-only approach mistakenly assumes that the latter causes the former. In reality, both are effects of the same root cause, arbitrarily low occupancy maximums.

You need only look at a city like Portland, Oregon — a city comparbale to Pittsburgh in living standards — to realize the irrelevance of enforcing excessively low occupancy limits to address quality of housing. Portland, whose downtown area plays host to a university with an undergraduate enrollment more than 20 percent higher than Pitt’s, has a rental residency maximum twice that of Pittsburgh.

Kappelman worries that ignoring one part of the residential code might spill over to other parts of the code and endanger the codes protecting student tenants’ health.

“If a landlord is willing to violate one code, what’s to make you think they’re not willing to violate other codes?” Kappelman said.

But fearing landlords will cut corners doesn’t help student renters, who are afraid to expose their illegal leases to the city.

The only way strict enforcement can help improve Oakland is if the rules themselves make sense.

If the city raised the tenant residency maximum to a realistic level, perhaps even to Portland’s six, enforcement groups like Oakwatch can turn their attention to enforcing more relevant safety code violations, like fire codes. This helps to prevent life-threatening dangers, like natural gas build-ups which can lead to explosions, which is what happened to a house on Dawson street in 2013.

Until then, for better or worse, the city’s three resident cap will remain nothing more than a trick of paperwork for Oakland landlords and off-campus students.

Henry primarily writes on government and domestic policy for The Pitt News.

Write Henry at hgg7@pitt.edu.