PITTSBURGH | Development Rundown II

[greg42]

Originally Posted by Evergrey

Impressed that they actually have a snow-covered rendering... also loving the yoga rendering.

I'm thinking the snow covered rendering is so they have an excuse to show a huge Christmas tree in that big two-story space at the top.

Plus, yeah, I chuckled at the yoga rendering, cute touch.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by Urbana

Some updated renderings of the SkyVue apartments. It is looking a lot less horrible! Dare I say mildly pleasing?













http://www.skyvueapts.com/#top

I am mildly pleased.

[BrianTH]

I love the overall scale and the towers. The base remains at best "meh" for me, but in that location/context I can live with that.

[Private Dick]

They should put a pool on that podium/courtyard area. Co-eds in bikinis... I'd live there.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by eschaton

FWIW, if I were 26 instead of 36, I'd buy in Millvale. Or Troy Hill.

Originally Posted by Evergrey

Or Reserve Township.

You guys are cracking me up. I just got this book as a gift yesterday.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by Evergrey

This house is obviously a lot older than "6 decades"...



http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/bl...nvestment-group-paid-1-2m-for-house.html

(I feel like I've told this story before but I can't remember so here goes...)

This is a very personal one for me. My cousin who is about 2 years older than me rented the bottom unit of this house for about 9 years while he went to Pitt from about the late 90's - maybe 2005'ish getting his BA & then masters degree in network engineering. He threw such epic parties, everyone came even professors. He had a website up for a decade www.oaklandpartyhouse.com with databases of all the party photos. It was a small 1 bedroom apartment but very full of character. He would pack about 40-100 people into (& around it) routinely!
It was very well known because of the website!

I hate to see that house go, it was a great house but for more urban density I am on board.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by Private Dick

Well, as has already been stated, these biggest of the big wigs are not looking to move to either Pittsburgh or Chicago. Company ownership in this case is almost all billionaire Brazilians who live in Sao Paulo, Rio, NYC, and Switzerland. C-level execs include many of their Brazilian multi-millionaire buddies. None of them are going to live in Pittsburgh or Chicago (Hees jets in and out of Pittsburgh as it is now). As BrianTH mentioned, this is a company with global operations centers scattered all over the place.

Pittsburgh has been Heinz' HQ in name only anyway for awhile now, especially since the takeover by 3G a few years ago. If Heinz was strictly a Pittsburgh company or even a mainly domestic company, then there would be more reason to fret over a corporate HQ move to a bigger city like Chicago. But really, the Chicago market does not offer much more for Heinz operations than Pittsburgh does. Chicago and Pittsburgh will basically be manager-level operations centers for the global business (I'm confident that plans are to make Kraft a global brand like Heinz is). I can see both cities losing large numbers of employees over time in favor of locations outside the US, more than I can see trying to move roughly a thousand people from Pittsburgh to Chicago or vice versa to consolidate operations. That just wouldn't make sense, particularly since the main executives will never consolidate in either city.

Well said and a scary point, imo.

I've had an idea in my head for a few years now: What happens when both the labor AND the capital has all been outsourced from the developed world? We are already seeing it big time. Companies are tripping over themselves trying to reverse incorporate outside the US.
The entire world will be a run down boarded up factory and all the wealth will congregate to a few tiny little specs on a map. That's a crazy thought but it's already going that way.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by eschaton

I'll elaborate the points I made before.

1. That portion of North Oakland was originally called Bellefield, and was built out in a very similar vernacular to Shadyside, Highland Park, Friendship, and East Liberty. The vernacular was slowly eaten away by apartment construction between the 1920s and the 1970s. There really isn't much of old Bellefield left aside from the 200 block of N Dithridge, and the 300 blocks of N Craig and Melwood. The neighborhood vernacular has shifted to being apartments - indeed, the neighborhood is one only two real apartment districts in the city, and has unquestionably developed the highest population density of any census tract.

Yes, most dense neighborhood in the Pittsburgh metro.

Originally Posted by eschaton

2. These houses are quite nice, theoretically speaking. But due to being in Oakland, as long as they are standing they will quite likely never be anything other than slummy subdivided apartments. Or possibly frat houses, or maybe the offices of nonprofits. They will never be "returned to glory" as single-family houses however. It's also almost as unlikely to see them turned into condos.

Yeah, the condition was not too good do to 100 years of partying.

Originally Posted by eschaton

3. Ultimately, the trade off in density is worth it. Most beautiful historic houses have been demolished in the name of "urban renewal," or for things like parking lots and autocentric commercial strips. These are going to be knocked down for a residential highrise, with commercial on the ground floor. I have no doubt that the new building won't have as much charm, but IMHO the density boost is more than worthwhile.

Note that these have not been the only houses demolished in Greater Oakland lately. As part of the new apartment project in West Oakland they knocked down these two. I believe a hotel is being built there now. CMU is planning on demolishing this building soon as well. I don't think, as Oakland continues to redevelop, it's really tenable that many single-family houses will be retained in the most intense areas of development. And IMHO this is fine, 70%-90% of people are renters, and most of those who aren't own condo units.

I agree that these couple of houses are actually the exception to the neighborhood, not the other way around.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Austinlee

I agree that these couple of houses are actually the exception to the neighborhood, not the other way around.

One further point on the matter...

I've been arguing for years that something needs to be done about Oakland, because it was very clearly "full" for all intents and purposes. That's why over the past two decades we've increasingly seen students and people with university-affiliated jobs spill into Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Friendship, Bloomfield, Highland Park, and now Lawrenceville and East Liberty.

To a great extent this has been a good thing for these neighborhoods, as it provided new residents in areas which otherwise would have declined even more steeply. But it hasn't been a great thing in a lot of these areas if you'd like to buy an old subdivided home and turn it back into single family housing. Or see an old building go condo so you can buy a unit. Or even just (until very recently) have higher-quality rental options. The student market meant there was a large proportion of people willing to pay inflated prices to live in poorly-maintained dump, so long as it was on an Oakland-convenient bus line.

I ultimately think therefore that if you care about East End neighborhood preservation more generally - about maintaining beautiful, historic housing options in this portion of the city - sacrificing buildings in Oakland is the best bet. Not to mention the most sensible from a planning perspective.

One final aside - I think the argument for preservation of similar-scale buildings in Downtown is much stronger for several reasons. One, Downtown is pretty universally (aside from some of the churches and bad modern towers) a zero-setback area, meaning the vernacular is already as urban as can be. In contrast, these houses are in "streetcar suburb" residential vernacular, set pretty far back from the street. That side of the block having zero setback would help tie a bunch of things together in the area, including the residential streetwall a block up, and the rickety commercial streetwall further down. For the same reasons, while it's possible to include the facades of old urban commercial buildings (or rowhouses) in modern construction, you can't really do it with the facades of these old houses - they're set too far back on the property.

The pumping station across the street is going to look like more of a sore thumb/gap in development once the new highrise is built however. I'm not sure what could be done though - it's just sited very poorly on that parcel from an urban perspective.

[Evergrey]

Originally Posted by eschaton

One further point on the matter...

I've been arguing for years that something needs to be done about Oakland, because it was very clearly "full" for all intents and purposes. That's why over the past two decades we've increasingly seen students and people with university-affiliated jobs spill into Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, Friendship, Bloomfield, Highland Park, and now Lawrenceville and East Liberty.

To a great extent this has been a good thing for these neighborhoods, as it provided new residents in areas which otherwise would have declined even more steeply. But it hasn't been a great thing in a lot of these areas if you'd like to buy an old subdivided home and turn it back into single family housing. Or see an old building go condo so you can buy a unit. Or even just (until very recently) have higher-quality rental options. The student market meant there was a large proportion of people willing to pay inflated prices to live in poorly-maintained dump, so long as it was on an Oakland-convenient bus line.

I ultimately think therefore that if you care about East End neighborhood preservation more generally - about maintaining beautiful, historic housing options in this portion of the city - sacrificing buildings in Oakland is the best bet. Not to mention the most sensible from a planning perspective.

One final aside - I think the argument for preservation of similar-scale buildings in Downtown is much stronger for several reasons. One, Downtown is pretty universally (aside from some of the churches and bad modern towers) a zero-setback area, meaning the vernacular is already as urban as can be. In contrast, these houses are in "streetcar suburb" residential vernacular, set pretty far back from the street. That side of the block having zero setback would help tie a bunch of things together in the area, including the residential streetwall a block up, and the rickety commercial streetwall further down. For the same reasons, while it's possible to include the facades of old urban commercial buildings (or rowhouses) in modern construction, you can't really do it with the facades of these old houses - they're set too far back on the property.

The pumping station across the street is going to look like more of a sore thumb/gap in development once the new highrise is built however. I'm not sure what could be done though - it's just sited very poorly on that parcel from an urban perspective.

I'd love to see that rickety commercial streetwall replaced... pretty pathetic collection of buildings.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Austinlee

I've had an idea in my head for a few years now: What happens when both the labor AND the capital has all been outsourced from the developed world?

Where is consumption? And how is it being paid for, if at all?

Peering into the future, I see one possibility being the Star Trek/replicator scenario: food, water, clothing, houses, and other manufactured things require very little in terms of labor or capital to provide. Apparently green energy is also very cheap. Therefore almost the entire economy becomes about the provision of services, and quasi-service things like art and made-to-order meals. There may be a few resources like well-located land that cannot be easily "replicated", but you end up with something that looks a lot like socialism because it may be very difficult to alienate people from their labor and deprive them of a fair return on its value when virtually all the other necessary means of production are so cheap and abundant.

When you look at the trends in manufacturing and energy, this is not such a hard future to imagine. The transition to this state could be pretty rough, however--you can imagine armed goons running around smashing "illegal" replicators as the wealthy elites try to protect their ability to rent-seek (note even in this scenario, the arms may be cheap, and it is the goons' services that may be costly--but if arms are cheap, and the goons increasingly don't have much of interest to spend the elites' "money" on, there may not be enough goons around to preserve the old system for long).

There is also the question of why we even need human beings to provide services, since automatons might be able to do all that even better. In which case it becomes more the Wall-E future than the Star Trek future.

Anyway, I have no idea what is actually going to happen in the future. But I do know the developing world can't just dispense with the developed world unless and until all industries can be structured non-globally from financing and supply through production and consumption--in which case, the developed world should just do that too.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by Evergrey

I'd love to see that rickety commercial streetwall replaced... pretty pathetic collection of buildings.

I've seen old pictures which show they didn't look quite as bad back in the 1920s. But the Centre/Craig business district is a pretty typical Pittsburgh "infill" commercial district. You can quite clearly see the tops of the houses sticking out. IMHO it wouldn't be the end of the world from an urban design perspective if those blocks were cleared out and completely rebuilt with modern storefronts (with oodles of apartments above), although it would probably take a lot of work to consolidate ownership, along with pushing out the more interesting local businesses.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by eschaton

I ultimately think therefore that if you care about East End neighborhood preservation more generally - about maintaining beautiful, historic housing options in this portion of the city - sacrificing buildings in Oakland is the best bet. Not to mention the most sensible from a planning perspective.

I see that as trying to bail out the Titanic with a bucket. Oakland can't possibly absorb more than a fraction of what is going on around the East End, and in general market forces alone are never going to protect historic properties in urban areas from the destructive nature of the disinvestment/reinvestment cycle. Indeed, pack more people and businesses into Oakland, and you may actually just stimulate more demand for projects in the rest of the East End--it is a big world out there, with plenty of potential demand if you just slightly tweak locational preferences.

I see the only viable approach requiring three components:

(1) You need tough historic preservation codes with strict enforcement;
(2) You need to give developers a pretty free hand to maximize the land-intensity of new projects on land not encumbered by historic properties, even if that means putting big new buildings right next to small historic buildings; and
(3) For the long term, you need to be investing in turning more areas into desirable locations for urban development, which includes things like investing in rapid transit service expansions.

But because we live in an imperfect world, I am willing to make some compromises so as to do the best we can.

[Evergrey]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

I see the only viable approach requiring three components:

(1) You need tough historic preservation codes with strict enforcement;
(2) You need to give developers a pretty free hand to maximize the land-intensity of new projects on land not encumbered by historic properties, even if that means putting big new buildings right next to small historic buildings; and
(3) For the long term, you need to be investing in turning more areas into desirable locations for urban development, which includes things like investing in rapid transit service expansions.

(4) Silence the NIMBYs and their frivolous, misguided complaints about 'increased traffic', 'blocked vistas', 'loss of parking', etc.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Where is consumption? And how is it being paid for, if at all?

Peering into the future, I see one possibility being the Star Trek/replicator scenario: food, water, clothing, houses, and other manufactured things require very little in terms of labor or capital to provide. Apparently green energy is also very cheap. Therefore almost the entire economy becomes about the provision of services, and quasi-service things like art and made-to-order meals. There may be a few resources like well-located land that cannot be easily "replicated", but you end up with something that looks a lot like socialism because it may be very difficult to alienate people from their labor and deprive them of a fair return on its value when virtually all the other necessary means of production are so cheap and abundant.

When you look at the trends in manufacturing and energy, this is not such a hard future to imagine. The transition to this state could be pretty rough, however--you can imagine armed goons running around smashing "illegal" replicators as the wealthy elites try to protect their ability to rent-seek (note even in this scenario, the arms may be cheap, and it is the goons' services that may be costly--but if arms are cheap, and the goons increasingly don't have much of interest to spend the elites' "money" on, there may not be enough goons around to preserve the old system for long).

There is also the question of why we even need human beings to provide services, since automatons might be able to do all that even better. In which case it becomes more the Wall-E future than the Star Trek future.

Anyway, I have no idea what is actually going to happen in the future. But I do know the developing world can't just dispense with the developed world unless and until all industries can be structured non-globally from financing and supply through production and consumption--in which case, the developed world should just do that too.

I think we will see a whole new way of worldwide living in the post-capitalist global economy. Open source everything, co-op food and working arrangements. Sharing economy. More consumers relying on perhaps simple apps to exchange goods and services like Airbnb instead of relying on middleman agents who are often more inconvenient AND more complicated and expensive.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Oakland can't possibly absorb more than a fraction of what is going on around the East End, .

But in my opinion Oakland CAN absorb a lot more residents. Look no further than the new Skyvue 300+ units, the mid-rise at Centre and N. Dithridge we are talking about which is 330+ units and more like that. These are sizable net gains and frankly, for cities like Manhattan, these population densities are still rather yawn inducing.

[Austinlee]

FYI, i need to make a new development thread. It's going to be hard for me to find the time soon but i can make it happen.

What are the major projects we need to showcase on page 1? I need some suggestions on the best, biggest projects to start with.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Evergrey

(4) Silence the NIMBYs and their frivolous, misguided complaints about 'increased traffic', 'blocked vistas', 'loss of parking', etc.

Indeed, and that is part of what I had in mind in (2).

Strictly speaking, though, I think it is smart to let them have their day to complain. You politely listen, then ignore them.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Austinlee

I think we will see a whole new way of worldwide living in the post-capitalist global economy. Open source everything, co-op food and working arrangements. Sharing economy. More consumers relying on perhaps simple apps to exchange goods and services like Airbnb instead of relying on middleman agents who are often more inconvenient AND more complicated and expensive.

Yes, that too.

Random observation, but driverless vehicles could really help here--they should greatly lower the cost of point to point transportation of goods and services.

[Austinlee]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

Yes, that too.

Random observation, but driverless vehicles could really help here--they should greatly lower the cost of point to point transportation of goods and services.

Right on. Reliable transportation continues to put so many millions just out of reach of millions of American's jobs. That would be transformative.