The 6/7 ZBA agenda has appeared online, which is good, but a bit weird because the agendas for next week and the week after were already posted. Mostly small projects this week like signs, generators, and parking pads. The only interesting thing this week is the proposed urban agriculture project for the former site of St. Clair Village appears to be moving forward.
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Originally Posted by pj3000
Yeah, this area is a tough one... it could be a really cool little hub for the surrounding neighborhood, but it seems rather isolated to pull in substantial-enough commerce from elsewhere. And obviously much of the surrounding neighborhood that could potentially support it is poor.
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Observatory Hill hasn't been that poor historically. It was a a middle-class neighborhood, as I said, with some signs of residential revitalization due to a strong community of preservationists who bought and restored many of the grand houses.
That said, Observatory Hill has been pretty clearly, as I said, headed in the wrong direction. Basically something had to give, what with the gentrification of the Lower Northside and the high number of units which continue to be lost due to blight/abandonment in areas like Perry Hilltop, California-Kirkbride, and to a lesser extent Fineview. In addition, the ill-thought out closure of Oliver HS, which resulted in the movement of the entire student body to Perry HS (which formerly housed a magnet HS program) probably didn't help the local business district. The stabilization of Brighton Heights, while good for that neighborhood, hasn't helped either. I think the last straw was a few years back when Mandy's Pizza closed its branch in the Five Points business district after repeated robberies.
To be clear, Observatory Hill is not a Knoxville or Sheraden. It's not in a quick downward spiral into becoming one of Pittsburgh's emerging ghetto neighborhoods. But local demand isn't high enough to lift the entire North Side, and not enough units of affordable housing are being built in the North Side in general, which means people are being displaced outward disproportionately into Observatory Hill.