More on Pittsburgh's "revitalization" from Mike Madison

[raubre]

Originally Posted by kettlepot

San Diego's Downtown used to roll up at 5 o'clock too. To create something different, San Diego pursued a double prong strategy for revitalization. It launched an entertainment area downtown in a concentrated area with restaurants, bars, and theaters to replace the porn shops and tattoo parlors favored by the sailors on shore leave. That entertainment district (the Gaslamp in conjunction with the Convention Center) gave a lively feel to at least part of downtown during the evenings and weekends.

That sounds like what's happening with Liberty and Penn Avenues. Let's see what happens.

[BrianTH]

So just to review some of what has been going on, recently in Downtown there have been foundations investing heavily in building up the Cultural District, public investments in the local parks and public spaces, universities investing in development, tax abatement programs for residential buyers, free architectural consulting and subsidized bridge loans for building owners looking at redeveloping vacant upper floors into residential units, and so on.

And it is working: although it started from a low base, the Downtown residential population has had a high growth rate over the last few years, and there are many more new residential units in the pipeline with low vacancy rates and high presold ratios suggesting demand remains very high.

So, I think Pittsburgh is basically doing the right things to build up the Downtown residential population, and I think it will improve as a nightlife destination as that happens. But it will take some time, because we really are starting from an extremely low base.