By: Jordan Anderson | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette | January 16, 2025 | Read the full article
A caving roof, collapsed floors — the shuttered African Queens record store is a shell of its former self, barely safe to enter anymore.
It’s what happens after more than a decade of abandonment. It’s the story of many idle buildings along Centre Avenue in the Hill District, a once flourishing social, economic and jazz hub decades ago.
But a new multi-million dollar development project promises to bring new life to the vacant site. “African Queens Apartments” will add 12 affordable housing units and 1,700 square feet of commercial space to the historic business corridor.
Rev. Lee J. Walls has spent nearly a decade bringing the concept to life. His organization, the Amani Christian Community Development Corporation, focuses on expanding affordable housing and homeownership opportunities in the Hill District.
“The Hill District right now is a community in the midst of a renaissance, in terms of our culture, our music, our art, our education institutions,” Rev. Walls said. “So we are very much interested in making investments that lend themselves to lifting up our community and providing residents a better quality of life.”
In 2019, a key opportunity for Amani CDC presented itself, when the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh sought proposals for revitalization projects specifically in Centre Avenue. African Queens Apartments was one of seven projects selected.
Still, securing the investment needed to complete the development remains a challenge, as these are the kind of “risky” ventures that conventional banks aren’t willing to throw their money behind.
“You count the number of funders who will stick around for five years to give us the time and opportunity to gain technical expertise, as well as the actual capital to kind of move this project forward,” Mr. Walls said.
That’s where Neighborhood Allies, a Pittsburgh-based community development organization, came in, investing $350,000 in the project to push it to the finish line.
The nonprofit prioritizes Black-led real estate developments, like African Queens Apartments, for a clear reason, said Presley Gillespie, Neighborhood Allies’ president and chief executive officer.
Black Americans represent less than 5% of residential developers nationwide, according to the Urban Land Institute.
“Then you extrapolate that down into the neighborhood level, we know that we have a huge gap of opportunity,” Mr. Gillespie said. “So at Neighborhood Allies, we feel like our job is to reduce that opportunity gap.”
The project is set to begin construction this month and slated for completion in the next 14 months.
The residential units, consisting of nine one-bedroom and three two-bedroom apartments, will serve seniors, veterans, formerly homeless and individuals transitioning out of foster care.
Even a city known for its affordability is becoming increasingly untenable, particularly for low-income renters. Since 2015, the number of low-income households earning under $35,000 a year shrank nearly 4%, the city’s 2022 Housing Needs Assessment found, meaning many of the lowest-income Pittsburghers are leaving the city entirely. Black households in Pittsburgh, already disproportionately cost-burdened, were the only racial group to experience a decline in renter households.
The affordable supply gap also indicated the growing displacement of existing lower-income households, particularly those in Black communities.
More recent studies, like a 2024 analysis from Harvard University, showed similar trends.The study found that the Pittsburgh region has fewer than five affordable rentals for every 10 low-income renters. As a result, residents of communities like the Hill District, East Liberty and Garfield are getting squeezed out of neighborhoods they can no longer afford.
That’s why maintaining affordability in this particular complex, even with a small number of units, was critical, the developers say. The units will accept project-based government vouchers, and rent will remain capped at 30% of residents’ income.
The complex’s ground floor will host commercial space for either one or two tenants, with the goal of attracting businesses that can stimulate longer-term economic growth in the Hill District. That aspect is often left out of conversations around neighborhood revitalization, said Javier Janik, program manager for economic opportunity and investment for Neighborhood Allies.
“I think it’s one of the biggest challenges for the Hill District as we look ahead,” Mr. Janik said. “The demand for affordable housing is certainly always going to be there. We can attract the people with projects like this. But the community also needs the businesses to come in and complete the continuum of community revitalization.”
Despite efforts to preserve the original two-story record store building, Jim Palmer, Amani’s director of real estate and projects, found that extensive decay left only one option — complete demolition.
“Maybe that is a blessing in disguise,” Mr. Palmer said. “Because there are other sites along the center of the corridor that have struggled to incorporate an existing building into the new construction, and those projects have sort of struggled to get off the ground.”
But the design of the new four-story space still keeps the neighborhood’s character in mind. For one, Mr. Palmer said the building’s exterior will feature “lots of” brick and glass, as seen on the Hill District Carnegie Library and other neighboring structures.
“We also incorporate that sort of architectural, exposed concrete look on our building, so it blends nicely into the neighborhood, while, I think, maintaining all the modern expectations of new residential construction,” Mr. Palmer said.
The fact that the original building could not be preserved is one reason the project was named for the record store it’s replacing, Rev. Walls said. But he also envisions honoring the area’s history in another meaningful way.
“In the future, we want to canvas the community about African American women who lived in the Hill District, who made contributions socially, civically and politically, and put their portraits in the entrance,” he said.
First Published: January 16, 2025, 6:40 p.m.
Updated: January 17, 2025, 9:36 a.m.