First Planning Commission presentation of the year is up. There are four items for next week, which are all pretty small:
1. Demolition of three buildings on Forbes Avenue in Uptown
(2027, 2029, and 2031). The plan seems to be to use these and two adjacent vacant lots to build affordable housing in 2019. The homes are pretty undistinguished as rowhouses go, so I'm not mourning their loss that much. The most exciting part about this is that it's going to the Planning Commission, which means the Uptown Public Realm successfully passed late last year (I saw nothing about this in the press). This means, among other things, we have another section of town with no parking minimums!
2. Another demolition project is on the agenda for Downtown:
The Former Duff's building at 110 9th Street. This will be removed for construction staging for the PPA/Cultural Trust project (the Penn/9th garage/condo complex). A second phase of that project, involving a residential highrise facing the Allegheny, will begin planning in mid-2018. It looks like the Cultural Trust does not plan to have its development done in concert with the garage, but send it out to bid separately. This makes sense, because IIRC the PPA picked the developer (since it owned much of the land) whereas the Duff's property is entirely owned by the Cultural Trust.
3. Repair and rehabilitation is planned for the parking garage at the corner of Sixth Street and Fort Duquense Boulevard. This is a pretty boring project with only a few diagrams attached, so I'll leave it at that.
4. A relatively small ($4 million) project is planned for
1720 Metropolitan Street in Chateau (a building occupied by Mascaro Construction). The plan is for a ground-floor renovation, and partial two story addition (adding a second floor to the wing which is currently only one story. I presume this is going before the Planning Commission because it's in a riverfront overlay area.