The 116th Sustainability Salon will be all about protecting and preserving Pittsburgh's urban and peri-urban forests. A patch of woods in Hazelwood (a hilly neighborhood on the Monongahela River) is being threatened by developers (ironically named Oak Moss) who renovated the oldest residence in Pittsburgh (built in 1792 for the Woods family) into a Scottish pub called Woods House (in itself a fine thing to do). Matt Peters, a local activist and Hazelwood resident, crafted this letter detailing the situation.
From: Matt Peters
Date: September 5, 2021
To: URA public comment, the local City Council member, several other City officials, and Hazelwood Initiative staff
Date: September 5, 2021
To: URA public comment, the local City Council member, several other City officials, and Hazelwood Initiative staff
Subject: Woods Village proposal
To the Board of the URA, an open letter for the public record,
My name is Matt Peters, and I am a resident of Hazelwood since 2010 when I bought my small house with a big yard, just what I was looking for! It is a joy to live here, both for the people I've met and befriended and for what initially attracted me, the abundant forests that give our neighborhood such a vital part of its soul and character.
In my time here I have been an active participant in the civic life of my newfound community, joining in the neighborhood Planning process (we published Our Hands, Our Plan and you can find it on file with the city's Planning Commission), bringing my experience and perspective to the Sustainability committees and Green Infrastructure discussions, and learning about city-living issues like transportation, housing, and other considerations of city life from attending the other sessions and listening to my new neighbors.
During these years I have also been active with our neighborhood's Urban Agriculture Team, serving in a volunteer leadership role since its inception and for these last four years employed part-time by the Hazelwood Initiative to manage the community garden interests they own, mainly the former YMCA. My letter is written not with that hat however, but wearing the hat of my other part-time job, Administrative Coordinator for Heartwood, "People helping people protect the places they love".
Heartwood is a network of grassroots forest activists throughout the eastern United States, the eastern hardwood heartland forests that once stretched unbroken from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River valley. From the Ozarks to the Great Lakes, up into New England and the Canadian shield, a squirrel could roam the continent and never touch the ground, for the canopy forest that supported an assortment of indigenous nations whose population number into the inestimable hundreds of thousands. These ancient forests were consumed within a century or two after the arrival of European colonizers, by the charcoal and tannery industries that built the early Pennsylvania economy. Since about the end of World War II, these forests have been recovering, with national forests expanded and public lands management guided by the ecological sensibilities of the 1970s. Heartwood has focused on public lands management since our founding in 1990, and by virtue of my involvement since I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh in 1992 I have become more than casually familiar with the intimate details of the forest ecology of this Appalachian region.
I am writing today to tell you that further consideration of the Woods Village housing proposal on the site proposed, would be irreparably devastating to our neighborhood's Green Infrastructure and to the City Of Pittsburgh's forest ecology integrity as a whole. This patch of forest is an essential part of a connecting corridor, a bio-highway if you will, that links the habitat core of Schenley Park (such as it is) to the core forests of Hazelwood's officially designated Greenway, the hill at the top of Elizabeth Street on the other side of Hazelwood Avenue (currently receiving attention from teams of Goats and other active forest restoration initiatives!). This connecting corridor consists of the forests along Sylvan Avenue up to Gladstone Avenue, from behind the Gladstone school all the way to Greenfield Avenue a bit under a mile away as the hiker trods, and these forests have been the subject of much attention over the controversial Mon-Oakland Connector proposal, Phase 2 of which would seek to re-open the decommissioned section from Home Rule Street to Greenfield Avenue for driverless automated shuttles, a privately-owned competitor to our city's public transportation system. I believe there are ways to provide for our neighborhood's need for housing stock in this ecologically sensitive area without losing the broad range of ecological services that these young and recovering forests provide, to Pittsburgh's human as well as nonhuman wildlife residents. The Woods Village proposal as presented is not one of these ways.
The particular patch of forest targeted in the Oak Moss proposal can be generally described as a stand of nearly pure Black Locust, Robinia pseudoacacia. This is a native species, common in Pennsylvania's early successional or pioneer stage forests, along with black cherry, red maple, and alas far too many invasive non-native species. Remarkably, this site is relatively clear of canopy invasives like Norway Maple, the common Mulberry, or Ailanthus. The understory is a mix that includes Japanese Knotweed and Mugwort on one side, and the half towards Berwick street is a bit more diverse with more native plants present, and some interesting trees recruiting beyond the seedling/sapling level. In short, these forests are in pretty good shape, considering what they've been through.
We also have the City's recently adopted Climate Action Plan, which states unequivocally the need to "HALT the loss of forest canopy to development" and that is exactly what is happening here. It should be clear by now beyond a doubt, between the wildfires out West and the recent flooding of the New York City subway system, that climate change is here, it's just getting started, it's going to be a lot worse a lot faster than originally anticipated, and it's going to cause a lot of suffering.
It is also clear beyond doubt that forests offer our best mechanism for mitigating and surviving these changes. I refer you to the most recent report issued from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. Included herein by reference is the full report, not just the summary.
This patch of forest is immediately adjacent to the officially designated Greenway, but on the City's online map the site is marked with an orange polygon that indicates, "Held for Greenway", an intermediate category where it is being considered for inclusion in the greenway system. I suggest to this board that the City's resources may have other priorities in the budget in the 40 years or so since the Greenway system was created, and that not a lot of effort and energy has been spent on making sure that our city's forest inventory matches on paper what we have on the ground. Since the Greenway system was originally established in the 1980s, the gradual decline of Hazelwood in the wake of the departure of the steel industry has afforded this forest resource a chance to invest the time to begin developing a viable structure that cleans the air, holds up the slope, absorbs stormwater, and provides habitat for songbirds. I will spare you the links to the scientific studies and peer-reviewed journal publications that show the link between songbird abundance and real estate housing prices; suffice to say it is amazing what one can find with the online tool Google Scholar.
In this letter I hope I am successful in introducing the complexities and subtleties of the ecological arguments for protecting these young forests and allowing them to mature into part of our city's Green Infrastructure. I would like to briefly acknowledge the housing side of these considerations, and start off by saying that I recognize the need to begin replenishing Hazelwood's housing stock. I say to you, let's start with our truly vacant lots, and save our forests for last! That is the prudent and truly "conservative" thing to do. Housing is happening, we are going to build 62 units and more in the Gladstone building. There are empty lots throughout the neighborhood that need attention, and it is the right and proper role of a functioning government grounded in a sane set of ethics to help a community-minded developer who is doing his best to do things right to overcome the challenges prevented by a dysfunctional housing and real estate market. I hope the URA is able to see beyond the false dilemma cartoonified in the worn-out "jobs vs. the environment" blather and recognize that we can have our forests and our housing, too.
I would also like the URA to understand that this proposal is not consistent with our officially adopted Neighborhood Plan. "Our Hands, Our Plan" states that we want our business district to be focused on main street, and we want our residential areas to be quiet and peaceful. To suggest that a "satellite" strip of rental retail space a mere two blocks away is in any way consistent with the goals of the Plan is not a tenable argument. The goal of the proposal being to draw traffic up to the retail space is directly counter to the goals of creating a quiet residential space. Our Neighborhood Plan also has a whole chapter on how we want to improve and expand our forests and Green Infrastructure, which is consistent with the goals set forth in the aforementioned Climate Action Plan.
And a final point, although beyond the scope of the discussion before us here, I say that the URA can best support the revitalization of our neighborhood, and the expansion of all the housing we could ever possibly need, affordable and otherwise, by helping uproot the automated vehicle laboratory from our bottomland field. The irony that this stalled acreage of a development touted as "sustainable" would be driving the destruction of forests must be included in the official record before I can conclude this letter in good conscience.
Thank you for including my comments in your deliberations on this matter.
Forever wild,
matt peters
