Corey O'Connor Wants to Prove Democrats Can Still Govern

Corey O’Connor sits in his downtown transition office fielding calls and reviewing appointments, friendly and businesslike, considerably more buttoned-down than his father, Bob, the late mayor whose ready smile and bouffant hair made him a beloved figure in this city for decades. The younger O’Connor, who will be sworn in as Pittsburgh’s 62nd mayor on January 5, speaks in practical terms about permits, childcare programs, and calling ten companies a week. His message is simple: Pittsburgh needs to get back to basics, and Democrats need to prove they can run cities again.

O’Connor’s victory over incumbent Ed Gainey in May’s Democratic primary made him only the second challenger in recent memory to unseat a sitting Pittsburgh mayor, winning 53% to 47% in what observers called one of the most decisive primary upsets in decades. He followed that with more than 80% of the vote in November’s general election against Republican Tony Moreno. The mandate was for competence over ideological ambition. It was about working hard over empty talk about “doing the work.”

The basics, in O’Connor’s telling, means fixing things that broke under his predecessor’s watch. Having five police chiefs in three years, he says, was “a lot for a lot of people to handle.” His response was to announce his public safety picks immediately after winning the general election, nominating a community-policing focused police chief, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police veteran (and then Frederick, Maryland police chief) Jason Lando, the following week. “Coming out front and saying, look, I’m the mayor, these are my choices. Get them in front of council as quickly as possible so that we can have stability and public safety.”

Then there’s permitting, a chronic complaint from developers and small business owners alike. “If I want to start a restaurant, I shouldn’t have to wait six months to get a permit to open up a bathroom,” O’Connor says. “If New York City can do it in four weeks, why can’t we?” He’s been meeting with contractors, property owners, and small business operators all summer trying to understand the bottlenecks.

O’Connor’s father, longtime city politician Bob O’Connor, served as Pittsburgh’s 58th mayor for only seven months before dying of a rare brain cancer in September 2006. The elder O’Connor was known for his affable style — my mom was a big fan of his hair, which I never fail to mention — and his “Redd Up Pittsburgh” cleanup campaign, which smartly deployed the local dialect to encourage civic pride. Corey, who went on to hold the same District 5 council seat his father once occupied, shares that attention to small details.

“It could be as simple as directional signs that were put up in the 1990s that are faded, that you can’t read anymore. Get rid of them,” he says. “Even our train trestles where you’re entering the city, especially in the Strip District … are there ways to get those things painted just to beautify it? These are all affordable ways to demonstrate pride in your city. It shows that we’re respecting the details.”

When I mention that a mutual acquaintance had remarked that O’Connor notices things that need fixing everywhere he goes, the incoming mayor nods. “Even in our parks. We still go to our parks and playgrounds and there’s weeds growing out of them, swings that need WD-40. How is that possible? If you want to attract younger families and keep them here, you want those parks and other areas to be of the highest quality.”

The question of keeping families in Pittsburgh hangs over everything. Pittsburgh Public Schools enrollment has fallen from nearly 40,000 students at the beginning of Covid to around 18,000 today, with some projections suggesting barely more than 10,000 by 2035. The school board is currently debating a plan to close nine school buildings as part of a broader consolidation effort — one of which is Spring Hill Elementary, just a block from my house — that is down from the 16 buildings originally proposed last year. O’Connor understands the stakes when it comes to these buildings falling vacant.

“Those are prime locations where we need to use those buildings and use them fast,” he says. “Whether it comes down to housing, whether it comes down to even using them for neighborhood organizations that can run recreational programs out of the gyms or swimming pools. Those are vital, and we have to have a full-time partnership with the schools that we’ve never had before.”

O’Connor acknowledges the limitations of mayoral power over schools, which operate under an independent board. But he sees the city’s role clearly. “If you look at the time when you’re in school, the mayor’s office actually is more responsible for kids than the schools are,” he says. “After school, that child’s my responsibility. I have to make sure that families and their kids are safe at the bus stop, and the next morning when they leave for school, they are my responsibility again. Weekends, holidays, summer vacations — the city has more investment and oversight than people think.”

On housing, O’Connor shifts the conversation from the affordable housing debates that consumed his predecessor’s tenure to a focus on homeownership. “Home ownership is a way to create generational wealth in neighborhoods, and we don’t do that enough,” he says. The city owns 11,000 parcels, and he wants to move beyond building ten units at a time. “Why are we not doing 50 to 75 scattered sites in a neighborhood at once with the community organization and somebody to help them through that process, using tax credits? We have to get to where we’re a city that does things in bulk and does them fast.”

He also sees an undersupplied market in transitional housing for unhoused people coming out of shelters who would otherwise return to city streets and bike trails. “We are short a couple hundred transitional units, so we need to close the gap. When somebody’s in a shelter, they must have a place to go as their next step before they can then move into long-term housing.”

The business community’s role in O’Connor’s campaign and his emerging administration has raised eyebrows in progressive circles. Union defections from Gainey and donations from developers and parking garage operators fueled his primary victory. I ask whether the business community will be able to help offset the city’s budget constraints as federal Covid relief money dries up.

“When we talk to our larger nonprofits, we have to think if there is a way that we can make a request that fits within their mission, that saves taxpayer dollars, and we can put those monies into something else.” He adds: “I think being creative and having those one-on-one conversations is helpful. But I also think we have to look at it differently. I look at development as one thing where it's bricks and mortars, buildings, starting from scratch, rehabs. There has to be someone who oversees redevelopment in the city, putting together funding for various business districts.” To that end, he’s already named local litigator Mary McKinney Flaherty as Deputy of Economic Development, with another appointment coming for the department’s top job. His plan is direct outreach on a scale Pittsburgh hasn’t seen in years.

“I want to call ten local companies a week, ten national companies a week, and just say, ‘Hey, what do you need from the city?’ It’s not just big corporations that have buildings downtown. It’s a small manufacturer or a small startup in a neighborhood that’s never heard from the mayor.” He pauses. “It’s as simple as calling a local pizza shop and saying, look, I just want to thank you for investing in Pittsburgh.”

The contrast with his predecessors is implicit but clear. Mayor Bill Peduto, who served from 2014 to 2022, was criticized for having indirect relationships with major companies that were thought to have an undue influence on the city’s affairs, like Uber (he also struggled to lift trash cans alongside municipal workers on an episode of Undercover Boss). Mayor Gainey’s tenure was marked by a progressive agenda that critics said often prioritized symbolism over service even as Pittsburgh was wracked by scandals involving city credit card spending, police chief Larry Scirotto essentially abandoning his post for a career in basketball refereeing, and a controversial police staffing study that found the city’s far-below-average number of police offers was “adequate” for its needs. O’Connor’s pitch, by way of comparison, is old-fashioned retail politics with a heavy emphasis on economic development.

I raise the question of wages. Axios Pittsburgh recently reported good entry-level wage growth for Pittsburgh, but the city has historically offered what many locals jokingly call “the Pittsburgh rate,” salaries often far lower than comparable positions in Philadelphia or New York but theoretically offset by lower cost of living. As Pittsburgh’s real estate market heats up and gets national attention for affordable housing, that uneasy balance probably will not hold.

“If we want to compete on a national scale, we need everybody on the same page looking at what they pay and how they can increase,” O’Connor says. “Costs in Pittsburgh are lower than Philly and New York and Chicago. But ultimately, if somebody’s paying that number in New York and Philly, they can figure it out. So we have to all collectively start pushing that Pittsburgh model to be a little higher.” He sees this as part of business recruitment. “When a new company comes, they need to be helping our residents.”

Childcare comes up repeatedly in our conversation. “When national groups reach out wanting to help Pittsburgh, almost every one of them asks about childcare,” O’Connor says. He mentions the tax credits that corporations can use to expand early childhood education. “Deploy those tax credits in a specific neighborhood, and a childcare center that had ten kids can suddenly accommodate twenty. There are resources we perhaps haven't been aggressive enough about pursuing.”

Looking ahead, O’Connor is focused on the NFL Draft coming to Pittsburgh next spring. “It gives us a way to pitch a new Pittsburgh to the world. We’re not an old steel mill city anymore. We have eds, we have meds, we have engineering, we have AI. Here’s a new city for all of us.” The week will bring the nation’s eyes to Pittsburgh. “But what do we do for a follow-up? Who are my ten calls from companies that were in Pittsburgh that want to expand here now?”

On state and federal relations, O’Connor says Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration has been “over the top with support” on tax incentives and grants. He recalls Shapiro joking that he wants to “cut ribbons” in Pittsburgh every week. “I said, okay, we’ll try to make it work. He sees the potential in Pittsburgh and how we can be positioned to grow quickly.”

The political context matters here. Southwestern Pennsylvania is trending redder in national elections. O’Connor sees his job as proving that Democrats can deliver results in a purple state. “There are Democrats running these major cities that are actually talking about growth, opportunity, and creating wealth in neighborhoods that haven’t seen it before. We should pay attention to the new voices of the party and their new messages. And I think we forgot about that for a long time.”

Pittsburgh likes to call its repeated reinventions “renaissances.” The current one, built on universities, medical centers, and now AI-focused technology companies, has brought growth but also displacement, inequality, and a rising homeless population. Rooted in the mayor’s own deep ties to the city and its history, O’Connor’s agenda is more modest (but also more challenging) than offering false promises about wholesale transformation or rebirth. He wants to answer 911 calls on time with a fleet of functional ambulances, issue permits faster so contractors can build faster, keep parks and other public areas open and clean, and make all the phone calls his predecessors didn’t. 

Whether that pragmatic approach can stabilize a city losing public school children faster than it can build affordable housing remains to be seen. But the voters, having rejected two well-meaning but overmatched incumbents in a row, now seem willing to give competence a chance.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.