Quote:
Originally Posted by summersm343
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Okay. Let me weigh in here because this discussion is going off the rails. Nobody disagrees that 10th and Berks is an improvement over the postwar barracks that were here, because those were straight trash. But this project just isn't as good as it could be, which is made all the more obnoxious because two of the best subsidized-housing projects in the city -- Paseo Verde and the Norris Towers redevelopment -- are
literally right next door.
The Site Plan
The site plan consists of three buildings: a large apartment building occupying the lower half of the block and two smaller rowhome structures around a parking lot on the north side. Parking is almost certainly a financial requirement to make this project work -- it is subsidized and reliant on various public moneys, and public moneys often fail to take local conditions into account. If we look at the PHA's recent redevelopment of the Norris Towers site just north, for example, it clearly has a
ton of parking (in fact, it's relatively low-density on its site); it's just that the parking has been consolidated around the back of its site, facing Warnock, a glorified alley in any event.
What we are really objecting to is that the parking faces 10th and is one of the dominant features of this site when looking from the Regional Rail station.
There are plenty of ways to better integrate parking into the site. One can, for example, make use of its steep grade and have most of the parking slipped under the apartment building with an entrance on 10th -- it's not like the site won't need to be cleared and regraded anyway -- and change the style of the rowhomes to better match the ones across the street, with a drive aisle and small lot around back that is comfortably hidden behind the housing. Perhaps the apartment building's parking entrance can come off this drive aisle as well.
In any event, we can agree that the current parking situation is subpar for the site, and rectifying it really should not cost much more than what they're currently spending on the project.
Berks Street
This...
...should not be acceptable. Yes, they've put a retail space on the corner. But they then proceeded to make nearly the entire Berks Street frontage --
by far the busiest frontage on the entire site -- a long blank wall. That's not just poor design, that's
stupid design! Even if it was just cut-outs to the basement parking I suggested above, you need something --
anything -- to relieve the blankness. Otherwise ... well, there's ivy.
So in summary: This building has problems because it's not a very well-designed building. Sure, it's subsidized, but remember that Paseo Verde, an
extremely well-designed subsidized-housing building lies just across the train tracks:
Source
and that the PHA redevelopment literally across the street to this one's north has none of the problems it does. So yes. It's fair to critique this project for what is quite evidently bad design. Doing otherwise makes you look like a fool -- or 1487, and believe you me,
nobody wants to look like 1487.