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Originally Posted by Brentsters
Fair point. I might be underestimating any feelings about the Strip's club days, but I haven't heard talk of that in a long time. I probably could've used another example of areas that will receive residential attention in the future...like the Lower Hill, maybe Uptown.
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My wife works in the Strip, and is mildly uncomfortable as a woman working overtime late into the night at her office. Although that's more because there are so few "eyes on the street" after sundown than anything. A few thousand more residents might help its safety perceptions improve tremendously.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneW
Fixing up old but still occupied neighborhoods actually tends to reduce density because multi-family buildings get converted back to single family. My neighborhood, Allegheny West, has gone down a lot in population over the last few decades from that effect. My wife and I have this giant 2700 square foot townhouse and it's just the two of us (and three cats and a tarantula). In the sixties and seventies a lot of these places might have had ten or twenty people living in them but now only have a couple and one or two kids.
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I'm guessing Allegheny West has just about bottomed out, since almost all of the multi-family houses have been converted back. Eventually things like the North Avenue warehouse conversions will start bringing additional units on line, and hopefully they'll be some apartments built somewhere as well. Your neighborhood really needs more residential density for the Western Avenue business district to meet its full potential.
Elsewhere these days, I don't see this dynamic happening much. South Side already started growing despite gentrification. I'm expecting Lawrenceville will too this decade, provided enough new apartment projects get off the ground like Locomotive Lofts. Even in East Liberty, the new apartment projects plus infill houses should cancel out the subdivided houses which have been converted back into SFH.
Someplace like Highland Park, though, probably will continue to shrink. Not too many vacant lots for infill, and houses are still being converted back to SFH. Shadyside might have peaked for the time being as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH
Agreed. But the one sour note is that some people are afraid of losing what they like about the core commercial area, and inclined to oppose an ambitious project in the Buncher properties as a result. Hopefully Peduto et al can show some beneficial leadership on this issue.
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I've read about proposals to have the entire core of the Strip commercial area made a historic district, which seems completely wrong-headed. Those ugly one-story warehouses don't need protection just because people happen to like what they house.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH
Indeed. However, one other factor to keep in mind is that there are now a lot of brownfields and such available for new residential that were occupied back in the peak population days. So if you build densely enough in those locations, you can add a significant number of new units before having to change the character of established residential neighborhoods.
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People often talk as if the goal is reproducing the density of the city in 1950. But when you look at where housing is discussed these days, it's more about reproducing the density of 1900 or earlier. By 1950, neighborhoods like the Strip District, North Shore, Lawrenceville, South Side Flats, etc had already lost population steadily for 50 years due to housing demolition for factories and other large nonresidential structures.
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