New Trends in Downtown Housing

This post will be a little intellectually lazy, but there are several new urban Pittsburgh apartments and condominiums that have recently come online. I'm going to have to take some time to research some of this development, but I can think of several major ones off the top of my head.

Apartments

The largest project in recent multi-family development is the conversion of the Armstrong Cork Factory in the Strip District. The developers there took a hulking building and transformed it into 297 apartments. Amazingly, after completing renovations in 2006, the complex is nearly full. The downside is that rents are not cheap. Even the one bedrooms are near $1,000 / month.



A smaller, but new, high end loft apartment complex was converted in the Strip District recently called the Brake House. This project is an 18-unit loft concept. The apartments are fairly large and range from 725 to 1,560 square feet. Again, a pretty expensive place to hang your hat.

Condos

151 Firstside was completed recently. It was the first condo. building added in the Golden Triangle since 1968. There are 82 condos there, most of which have sold by now.

The G.C. Murphy building is going to be turned into condos, lofts, 60,000 square feet of retail and a YMCA. This should be completed by 2009.

Big news today was the start of construction on Vista Grande. This is more of a small, 11-unit condo complex, but is on Mt. Washington.

It seems more people want to live downtown, which is probably of long-term benefit to the city. If things really begin to click, there might be more retail that opens up and allows the city to start growing again. Hopefully that is not wishful thinking. Unfortunately, a lot of the housing that is growing downtown is high-end and unaffordable to normal Pittsburghers or most young professionals getting started. Hopefully that will begin to change in the future.

PS...I will be adding to this post because since 2000 there have been a few other major projects downtown. Apparently, I have to Google a little bit to finish this one.