Southhills developer to revitalize old Lazarus

[Death To Johnstown]

Maybe some more affordable rents can be found in between the stadiums on the North Shore, eventually...

Continental is supposed to pick up the pace after the parking garage (/ T-link & stations) is built. There was residential within the original blueprints, that shouldn't change. The worry here is seeing it to fruition.

[PghUSA]

Evergrey and Tooluther, didn't mean to say you were wrong in your anaylsis, you might actually be proven right, just wanted to provide the "bullish" perspective on the downtown market. I am in agreement with you on the fact that there needs to be some type of mix (what the ratio should be is a good ?) between moderate incomes and high incomes.

[chucka]

Don't forget that the Cultural Trust is also planning a major upscale residential development for their 8th street block. Instead of upscale, that development should be geared to those who have just graduated from college.

Also, right now downtown has three subsidized apartment buildings for senior citizens.

May Building

111 Fifth Ave.

Midtown Towers

643 Liberty Ave.

Roosevelt Arms

607 Penn Ave.

To find out more about these, check out www.pghliving.com

[mjcatl2]

Don't expect many lower priced units. As mentioned before, it is very costly to build or convert downtown (as with any downtown for a decent size city) and downtown should command higher rents/dollars... it makes sense.

[TheGerbil]

I wish I could afford to live downtown. How neat would that be? But I don't expect to ever be able to unless I get a great job.

Ah well, I quite like my current apartment.

As for whether there is enough of a market for all of these developments... So far they have all done very well in sales and pre-sales. So if we're going to hit a wall I don't think it will be too soon.

[blueblackcat]

I don't think we can ever have too much upscale housing. If there is more of housing than there are rich people, it helps drive down prices to competitive levels. What we might see as a result of the new housing is that the housing that already exists will come down in price. What passes as luxury living in Pittsburgh right now is laughable and a terrible deal given the rent, ie Washington Plaza et all. As long as the Downtown housing market doesn't overheat with a large influx of people, we should see both improvements and lowered costs even for regular folks thanks to upscale housing. So the way I see it, the issue isn't that development is starting to take off, the issue is to prevent buyers from creating a speculative housing bubble, or in an even more unlikely event to prevent incoming people from outpacing the new development, neither of which should be a problem for Pittsburgh.

BTW, there have been a lot of "affordable" architecture projects tried in the past and they invariably get outpriced from the tenants they were supposed to serve. If you don't serve the higher-end customers first then the only way to do build "affordable" housing in a supply/demand determined market is to build housing that's as crappy and shoddy as the average housing stock at the affordable price, or to create price ceilings for the market (which Pittsburgh effectively uses on some of its new housing developments). I think we can all agree that one thing Pittsburgh doesn't need is any more crappy housing, and I'm saying the best thing is to shift the entire market towards greater efficiency and productivity.

Also, there are some arguments that catering to rich people displaces everyone else. This is probably very true for the suburbs and sprawl style development where replacing low priced real estate with high priced real estate does virtually ntohing to increase population density, so yes in that case it literally drives out everyone else. Probably Crawford Place is as close of an example as we'll have of that from the top of my head, but it's still higher density than the housing that came before it, but there are also price ceilings and quotas imposed on that development. A high rise condo on the other hand serves so many more people than that piece of land did before. So in theory you might displace a few people by a couple blocks to make room for plenty of others, but at least they can all still live in the same overall community. All I can say is, the the most likely way that the Hill District will ever get revitalized by private buyers is if they get displaced from Downtown, South Side, Squirrel Hill, etc.

When it comes down to it, the idea of attracting rich buyers/renters to come in from the suburbs and other cities is just about the best and only way of helping out Pittsburgh's population using changes to the real estate market. I think the housing stock in Pittsburgh is still hovering around 15% or 20% vacancies. If average people from the suburbs were even considering to move back into Pittsburgh in the first place, this would only drive up prices on already crappy housing stock. If we agree that affordable suburban housing is higher quality than the city's affordable housing stock then it follows that if you build better "affordable" housing in the city that's still slightly lower or equal quality than the suburbs, it will more likely get split up between rich people who want to move in from the suburbs and the city people vacating lower quality housing. The utility wouldn't be very high and nobody would really be much happier about it. So building affordable housing can actually end up hurting competing landlords and owners other parts of the city by lowering their demand, while not doing a good job of attracting either rich folks or average folks from entering the city.

[tooluther]

I What passes as luxury living in Pittsburgh right now is laughable and a terrible deal given the rent, ie Washington Plaza et all.

Washington Plaza may still bill itself as up scale, but truth of the matter is once City Line closed, it was taken over by students.

That being said, Gateway Towers, 151 First Side, The Caryle, Encore on 7th (rentals), and future projects like Caryle II, 8th Street projects, and obviously Piatt Place are certianly not "laughable." We're talking 3 Million dollar penthouses in some of those projects!

as per rents...please see my new thread