Uptown - talk to me (Pittsburgh, Washington: for sale, real estate, apartments)

[nuwaver88]

I drove straight up Forbes this afternoon from Downtown. I guess Uptown starts once you get passed that hodge podge of overpasses leading to various higways and bridges. That part of Forbes alone is unattractive and cuts off Downtown. It is similar on Fifth leading into Uptown. Duquesne has done a nice job of sprucing up Forbes to a degree, yet, there are still a lot of vacant lots and decrepid buildings in a neighborhood that is not very large at all, unlike the Hill District itself, which is a fairly large neighborhood between Downtown and Oakland. I guess Uptown is considered part of The Hill. Still, it would seem that stretch would have been further along in the urban redevelopment stage for the reasons we have given. Duquesne can only do so much. Hopefully, more private investment is on the horizon.

[BrianTH]

So there is an official neighborhood called the "Bluff", and here is a map:

Bluff Map

According to that definition, Crosstown Boulevard/Liberty Bridge is the western border, the Birmingham Bridge is the eastern border, and Fifth is the northern border. Which more or less makes sense as a definition of Uptown, although I would personally include both sides of Fifth. It is tough to draw official boundaries that way (to include both sides of a street), but so often in Pittsburgh that makes sense (because streets are running along the edge of a topographic feature or something similar which is the real boundary, not the relevant street itself).

As for why this area hasn't been redeveloped yet--I think the basic answer is that right when a bunch of other large historic cities with somewhat similar post-WWII issues started recovering and redeveloping areas like this, Pittsburgh got slammed by the steel bust. So the demand and financing for redeveloping these areas wasn't available in Pittsburgh, and we are just now getting to the same point a lot of these other cities were at 20-25 years ago.

Incidentally, if I am right about that, we could be in for an exciting time in the near future, or at least whenever the national economy recovers sufficiently. The 1990s, give or take, was a period of serious urban redevelopment in a lot of historic American cities, and we could be on the cusp of that sort of period in Pittsburgh if my overall read on the situation is accurate.

[Herodotus]

Part of Uptown's problem is that over the last 60 years or so, it, along with the adjacent neighborhood of Soho, lost their identity, and have come to be seen as part of the Hill. Borders in that part of the city are somewhat sketchy, but Duquesne's neighborhood is generally considered to be The Bluff, not Uptown. Uptown was generally considered to be the area between Forbes, and Colwell, stretching from 6th Avenue, out to Jumonville, with the southern border widening to Bluff St/Blvd of the Allies east of Stevenson. Soho began at Jumonville, and stretched out to Robinson St. which was the entrance to Oakland when 5th Avenue was a two way street. Soho was once a very densely populated area, but demolitions have greatly reduced it's size.

[Herodotus]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

As for why this area hasn't been redeveloped yet--I think the basic answer is that right when a bunch of other large historic cities with somewhat similar post-WWII issues started recovering and redeveloping areas like this, Pittsburgh got slammed by the steel bust. So the demand and financing for redeveloping these areas wasn't available in Pittsburgh, and we are just now getting to the same point a lot of these other cities were at 20-25 years ago.

Actually, there was a heavy Jewish presence in Uptown, which lingered into the 70's, well after most of the Jewish population had moved out to Squirrel Hill. I wouldn't blame the lack of redevelopment on the steel bust at all. This area was very much impacted by the riots of April 1968. Though 5th Avenue was spared the arson and looting which destroyed the business districts of Centre, Wylie, and Herron Avenues, massive disinvestment occurred in the Hill after this event. As the then booming heroin trade took over the wrecked corners of Centre Avenue, street prostitution, which had long been on Centre Avenue, moved strongly into the Fifth/Forbes corridor, which declined rapidly. When the US Conference of Mayors held their 1979 meeting in Pittsburgh, the Mayor of Milwaukee declared Fifth Avenue to be the most frightening slum he had ever seen. Gentrification efforts during this era, concentrated on the North Side, which while crime ridden, lacked the long tradition of organized vice that the Hill was known for.

[BrianTH]

Herodotus,

But what you are describing is a variation on a common theme in many cities through the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. But then in the late 80s and 90s, lots of neighborhoods like this in other historic cities got redeveloped. At the same time, those cities had returned to stable or growing populations, had lots of new development and urban investment in general, and so forth.

So what I am pointing out is that there is a divergence in the pattern starting in the 1980s or so. And I think it is hard to ignore that Pittsburgh got slammed with the steel bust at this particular juncture in time. Indeed, the difference in population dynamics alone seems to have obvious and relevant implications: a city with a growing population is going to be looking to infill these areas, whereas a city with a shrinking population is still going to be kicking more neighborhoods out of the lifeboat.

[Herodotus]

I know what you're saying, but the point I'm making is that this area never had a sniff of what you're talking about. The North Side started attracting attention way back in the 60's. Keep in mind also that there was an angry and hostile leadership on the Hill during this time, that was never going to allow any type of development that was seen as designed to push the existing population out. I'm VERY familiar with the Hill of this era. Short of a major population boom inside of the city limits (which wasn't going to happen, steel or no steel), gentrification wasn't going to come to that section of the city. Anything of that nature would have had to get rolling BEFORE the demolition of the Lower Hill, and few were seeing the potential of such areas back then.

[BrianTH]

We're discussing counterfactual hypotheticals, so obviously it is impossible to prove what might have happened. But I'd note a couple things.

First, the difference between a stable or moderately growing population and the mass losses associated with the steel boom would be similar in size to a major population boom relative to a stable population. Just to select one example, New York was experiencing population loss in the 1970s and hit a low of 7,071,639 in the 1980 Census. But it started recovering in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the 2000 Census it was back up to 8,008,278. That is a 13.2% gain in 20 years, which actually is a very moderate rate of annual population growth. Some other examples: Boston also bottomed in 1980 then grew about 4.64% by 2000. Minneapolis largely stabilized in the 1980s, bottomed in 1990, and then by 2000 was up 3.15% over 1980. Finally San Francisco bottomed in 1980 and by 2000 was up 14.4% over 1980.

But now compare those 1980 to 2000 population histories to Pittsburgh's. Pittsburgh was declining in population as of 1980 and had reached 423,938. But then instead of stabilizing, the population continued to decrease, down to 334,563 by 2000. So if Pittsburgh's population had just been flat in this period, it would have been about 26.7% higher than it ended in 2000. And if it had actually grown from 1980 at the same rate as, say, NYC, its population in 2000 would have been about 43.4% higher than it actually was.

So again, my point is just that counterfactually eliminating the losses and assuming instead a stable population or low-growth would be equivalent to assuming a big population "boom" relative to what actually happened. In other words, Pittsburgh's population would have looked very different by 2000.

Second, in other cities with such a stable-to-low-growth population track after 1980, often some very rough neighborhoods, for good or ill, got gentrified on the basis of location. This was a hugely controversial process and often overrode local concerns, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Still, it was a common occurrence when there was serious money to be made with inner-city development.

So I do think that if Pittsburgh's population had stabilized in the 1980s instead of getting kicked down the stairs by the steel bust, we'd have seen a lot more inner-city development than we did, sometimes overriding local concerns. Whether that would specifically have included Uptown is not going to be possible to know, but it would be a logical place, as indeed is indicated by the renewed interest in that area as Pittsburgh is just now reaching a stable population situation.

[greg42]

Most of you probably won't be able to read all of this yet, but the new Pittsburgh Business Times has a front page intro and four-page spread on Uptown and the Hill (mostly on Uptown; the Hill story is about nonprofit groups working to bring back the Crawford Grill).

Uptown & the Hill: Putting the pieces together - Pittsburgh Business Times:


The big one to me is a parking lot owner looking to build as many as 1000 residential units over the next 10 years. He hopes this will be the year he starts converting them, with a 12 unit condo building and 50-100 unit apartment building. They own 150 properties in the 5th and Forbes area Uptown. (Perhaps this monopoly is why more hasn't happened piece by piece already? Hm.) 38 of them are described as "larger parcels". The initial projects are between the 1000 and 1600 blocks of 5th Avenue.

Williams plans apartment, condo complex along Fifth Ave. - Pittsburgh Business Times:

There's also a story on Asylum Coffee (on Forbes, go support him if you want that to survive in Uptown) and one on a new nonprofit called StartUptown hoping to draw startup businesses. All of these are linked from the top link. I believe after about a week they'll be accessible to everyone, and if I remember I'll bump this up then.

[Drover]

I think Uptown could use a Sharp Edge outpost. That alone might suffice to get me to move there.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by greg42

(Perhaps this monopoly is why more hasn't happened piece by piece already? Hm.)

Obviously that would be a familiar story, but I think the URA and the City own a lot of properties there too, and no one has gotten much started until recently. It just may be a matter of timing--but whatever the reason, I'm glad it really does seem about to take off.