Quote:
Originally Posted by hammersklavier
Not really. It's a progression of which space is most economical to develop:
SY > filled SY makes maintenance yards economical to develop > filled maintenance yards makes the Penn Coach Yards economical to develop > filled maintenance + Penn Coach yards makes Powelton Yards (i.e. stuff that Philly District 30 doesn't show developed on the renders but if you talk to staff you quickly find out they want to keep development potential open) economical to develop.
More occupied space creates greater demand for locating in the area, which in turn drives up land prices, making increasingly difficult development parcels (i.e. more and more difficult overbuilding) feasible. This is the long-term future of the yards.
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These things certainly feed off of one another, but I suppose my view is that the SY's features a lot of open space around 30th street station...a lot of buildable land that doesn't require the incredibly expensive capping process. And if their most eager prediction is to take 20 years to build the entire thing out, we have at least 20 years (most likely much more) until the "cheaper land" is occupied and forces the expensive capping process if there is a desire/need to expand after everything else is built.
When you see these two plans...it just seems to me as an argument to never cap if we have enough room for 8 skyscrapers right next door that doesn't require so much capital.
So perhaps a better statement is that SY is an argument against capping the rail yards in today's economic climate...and realistically, in my view...not until the next several decades. If it will take 20 years to make SY viable...that's probably 30 years if you want to be realistic. Then, for a similar density of buildings that would go above the cap, that would need another 20-30 years for it to be economically viable....ie....capping is likely not to be a viable project until 2056 or 2086....ie... in a future Philadelphia that likely doesn't resemble anything of today.
Regardless, we must all agree that capping isn't realistically going to happen until all buildable land in close proximity is build upon.