The Issues

  • Our local economy needs to deliver for its residents. Corey will champion inclusive and strong economic development efforts that will support our City’s small businesses, invest in workforce development, attract new business opportunities, and grow our tax base. Corey wants to make sure that residential and commercial space is occupied, and catalytic investments spur further development and growth. Pittsburgh should have vibrant neighborhoods with strong local business districts.

    Ensuring that people and neighborhoods are flourishing allows us to move past personal politics to instead focus on economic opportunity and success. We must work with all 90 neighborhoods to craft a truly inclusive opportunity agenda that will deliver on each community’s unique needs.

    Pittsburgh needs a leader who ensures that it can compete on a national level with other cities. It needs a Mayor who can bring together our local communities, civic partners, philanthropy, the corporate community, and state and federal leaders to promote alignment with a vision of true neighborhood empowerment.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Strengthening main street development efforts with a “main and main” strategy that invests $10 million across 10 business districts in the City. 

    • Removing more blight to reduce the backlog of dilapidated buildings.

    • Initiating a 90-neighborhood Citywide cleanup program.

  • The City has failed to build enough housing. Instead of just talking about this problem, Pittsburgh needs a Mayor who will actually lean in and work to help residents access housing that’s safe, stable, and, most importantly, affordable.

    Our outdated permitting and zoning system is fundamentally incapable of meeting our City’s present needs when it comes to housing. Its design and use directly imperil housing abundance. In a town where we desperately need new units and construction, as well as upgrades and improvements to the existing housing stock, the City’s inaction will only make this problem worse.

    Corey’s focus will be on bringing more housing to Pittsburgh, keeping housing affordable, helping people stay in their homes, providing resources to homeowners in need of repairs or accessibility modifications, and allowing residents to stay in their homes and communities instead of being priced out.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Finally fixing our broken permitting and zoning system

    • Encouraging housing abundance and affordability across Pittsburgh by utilizing all available funding and strategic interventions

    • Working with the Urban Redevelopment Authority to use the Housing Opportunity Fund to create and preserve affordable units

    • Proposing a transit-oriented development zoning overlay district

  • We can no longer be unrealistic about the City’s budget. Mismanagement and irresponsible leadership has led us to the brink of returning to Act 47. We are sleepwalking toward a financial disaster. Without a long-term vision for how this City grows, modernizes, and operates, we’re going to see fewer investments in our neighborhoods, fewer capital projects started and completed, fewer services available to residents, and fewer members of our City workforce. It is not enough for the City’s budget to get through one or two years. We must prioritize a budget that’s strong and healthy enough to deliver real results for the future.

    Pittsburgh deserves a Mayor who will develop and implement long-term plans based on residents’ needs and the City’s goal with a budget that transparently reflects the reality of the government’s fiscal position.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed:

    • Implementing Strategic Debt Management Practices and Creating a Capital Stabilization Reserve

    • Investigating and Reallocating Idle Funds

    • Reforming Vendor Contracting

  • Currently, the City is struggling to administer its public safety functions. Police and EMS stations are closing overnight because of staffing shortages, severely impacting the City’s ability to respond to emergency situations and keep residents safe. This is unacceptable.  The City has been plagued by difficulties with recruitment and retention for years, placing undue stress on the Police, Fire, and EMS services that comprise the Department of Public Safety. 

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Adequately funding and staffing public safety services

    • Restoring dedicated community and neighborhood resource policing units

    • Further developing the co-responder program

    • Establishing public safety resource hubs

    • Creating accessible, open public safety data dashboards that include all data on crime and year-over-year trends

  • We’re failing Pittsburgh by not thinking bigger and acting faster to grow our tax base, improve each one of our diverse communities, encourage people to raise a family and send their kids to school here, and support the families and children who already call Pittsburgh home. The City must reverse the yearslong trend of losing families, children, and taxpayer dollars to the suburbs.

    We need leadership with a vision and direction to push for greater economic success for each family. That future can start by securing better outcomes for children. We must meet communities and children where they are and provide them with the critical services that they deserve.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Improving and broadening youth programming

    • Creating a Downtown youth recreation hub

    • Using and expanding the resources in the Child Care Quality Fund to improve early education opportunities for families across Pittsburgh

  • Pittsburgh used to be a regional and national leader on efforts to make its operations and practices more sustainable and in line with modern climate recommendations, but now we’re falling behind smaller suburbs. This administration’s failure to aggressively pursue federal funding, especially that from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), represents a catastrophic failure that left untold sums of money on the table, squandering a generational possibility to unlock unprecedented levels of support for sustainability initiatives. 

    As climate change gets worse, Pittsburgh is seeing extreme wet weather events and harsher freeze and thaw cycles. Rather than reactive clean-ups, we need proactive investment in green infrastructure and resilience. We must also foster and develop the workforce of the future that won’t just build green infrastructure, but will also maintain it for years to come.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Reviving the City’s Climate Action Plan which hasn’t been updated since 2018

    • Properly investing in stormwater management and landslide remediation to create a more resilient city

    • Deploying the resources sitting idle in the Stormwater Management Trust Fund

    • Investing heavily in solar and battery backup to offset energy use costs

    • Properly funding and completing the LED streetlight conversion project

    • Pursuing alternative financing models to fund energy efficiency and modernization projects

    • Restructuring and capitalize the Green Initiatives Trust Fund

    • Establishing strategic workforce development partnerships focused on green infrastructure


  • Pittsburgh deserves transportation options as diverse as the people who call it home. Whether they walk, bike, ride, or drive, residents should be able to safely and easily get to their destinations using the mobility options that work best for them. We must modernize our broken and outdated permitting and zoning system to more robustly encourage true, transformative transit-oriented development. We need to understand each community’s unique needs, and tailor our planning and infrastructure investments around what works best for residents there. We have to center people’s accessibility and economic needs to ensure that we have a truly connective system of mobility and travel in Pittsburgh. 

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Developing housing near transit-rich areas that gives residents strong mobility options

    • Reducing fatal and non-fatal crashes

    • Investing in traffic calming interventions based on neighborhood and community needs

  • Pittsburgh must do a better job helping residents experiencing homelessness. The City’s policies on homelessness have been purely reactionary with no thought dedicated toward long-term solutions that actually help our neighbors experiencing homelessness. There has been insufficient planning, leadership, and collaboration with regional partners and stakeholders to deliver real results in terms of meeting people’s needs. 

    We need a Mayor who can and will leverage state and regional resources to secure better investments in wrap-around services for our neediest neighbors.We must collaborate with service providers and other governments to ensure that we have an accurate assessment of people’s needs that can be matched to the appropriate resources and progress can be tracked. Without data to appropriately understand people’s needs, the City is unable to contribute to connecting them to resources and support.

    We must robustly build out housing options for low- and moderate-income residents, while also investing in workforce housing. To do so, we need a leader with the vision and determination to bring sufficient new housing units online to meet our City’s needs so that everyone can have a place to call home.

    As Mayor, Corey is committed to:

    • Advocating for and supporting housing insecure Pittsburghers by appropriately funding rental and housing assistance programs

    • Encouraging the wide-scale production of new housing units, especially workforce housing

    • Leading the City as a true regional partner in fostering and supporting wraparound services for our most vulnerable neighbors

    • Coordinating with stakeholders at all levels of government to ensure that providers have sufficient resources to carry out their missions of helping people experiencing homelessness

    • Prioritizing helping people get off the streets permanently and into housing or support systems, not responding to a negative article in the news by clearing away tents and playing whack-a-mole with people’s lives.