New construction, less parking
“We’ve never had to do that,” said Deb Gross, District 7 city councilwoman, referring to the city’s years of decreasing population that forced leaders to manage loss for generations.
She said her Lawrenceville constituents complain most about the parking squeeze. Hundreds of multiunit apartments are under construction or soon will be, and 31 businesses have opened on Butler Street since the beginning of 2015.
“It’s all has happened so fast, it’s like people are getting sideswiped, and that’s stressful,” she said. “If we could just tap on the brakes a little.”
In Pittsburgh terms, it has been fast.
“In 2005, Lawrenceville still had pretty depressed home prices,” said Ed Nusser, the real estate and planning manager for the Lawrenceville Corp. [formerly the Lawrenceville Development Corp.] “In 2000, there wasn’t one house that transacted above $100,000. Last year, we had three sell for more than half a million.”
He said almost a third of residential properties in the past three years have been bought by companies, not owner-occupiers.
“If you lived through the last 35 years in Lawrenceville you should be able to extract value,” said Matthew Galluzzo, executive director of the Lawrenceville Corp. “We don’t begrudge anyone who sells at a high-water mark. That’s the sign of a functioning market. But our work now is to provide balance to keep the authenticity of the neighborhood.”
The Lawrenceville Corp. is trying to manage growth by carving out affordable housing opportunities in the nooks and crannies still available. It targeted seven properties in Upper Lawrenceville Source: Esri to put in a land trust to regulate resale prices and has obtained several parcels near Doughboy Square to build housing to maintain as affordable.
Ms. Gross praised these efforts, adding, “If only we had talked about this in 2008.”
Mr. Galluzzo said Lawrenceville’s success owes to layers of high-quality effort: every Art All Night; the 16:62 Design Zone — a marketing effort to attract creative types to properties from the 16th to the 62nd Street bridges; preservation developers such as Lee Gross, Bill Barron and Joe Edelstein; the proximity of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, which opened in 2009, and a drop in crime.
“I don’t think you can overstate the importance of public safety efforts, the work of our sister organization Lawrenceville United,” Mr. Galluzzo said.
The Pittsburgh Police Bureau’s 10-year report on Lawrenceville shows a yearto-year sloughing akin to a miracle diet: there were 1,556 total crimes in 2005, compared to 376 in 2016. Serious crimes decreased over the same period, to 134 in 2016 compared to 638 serious crimes in 2005.
“I met with a foundation from out of town recently,” Mr. Galluzzo said, “and they asked, ‘What was that magic hammer that allows you guys to do what you’ve done?’ But this has been 30 years in the making.”
As fast as change has occurred in the past six years, Lawrenceville’s 2010 census may be outdated. Its total population in 1990 was a little more than 11,000. As of the 2010 Census, it was a little less than 10,000. It is also unclear what six years may have meant to the rates of vacancy in each of Lawrenceville’s parts — 19 percent in Upper Lawrenceville, 14 percent in Central and 14 percent in Lower Lawrenceville.
“It is hard to put your hands on the population count,” Ms. Gross said, “but what you see are people on the sidewalk. What you can feel is the energy.”
Butler Street’s nightlife is nowhere near the chaotic level of Carson Street’s party atmosphere on the South Side, but for many, this fun neighborhood is increasingly difficult to live in.
At community meetings and zoning hearings, residents already rail about crazy parking, without more apartments. They plead against expansion of clubs that already send too many people out into the wee hours.
At a zoning hearing earlier this year on a proposed apartment building in the old Plant Warehouse — a defunct manufacturer of plastic flowers on Liberty Avenue — several elders lamented what one called “encroachment on our way of life.”
Alina del Pino, a relative newcomer, moved to Charlotte Street 11 years ago. It is residential except for a former gas-light manufacturing site. A new brew pub, Eleventh Hour Brewing Co., is expected to open in that building later this year.
“Why, on our little residential street?” she asked, having already mounted a protest, with 42 names on a petition. She appealed zoning decisions in August that allowed the brewery and is awaiting a decision from the Zoning Board of Adjustment.
Several blocks away, a development proposed by Milhaus Ventures will plant 625 apartments between 39th and 40th from Butler to the Allegheny River.
“That will bring a transient demographic, the techie, Uber people who don’t need to know how to boil water,” Ms. del Pino said.
Renters, the so-called transient demographic, have been the predominant one in Lower and Central Lawrenceville as far back as 1990. Upper Lawrenceville had the highets number of owner-occupied homes and married residents of the three in that census.
Today, Central Lawrenceville has a slightly higher percentage of owneroccupiers and married residents. Lower Lawrenceville has led the three in renters for 25 years.
Tim Smith, an Iraq combat veteran, is one of the neighborhood’s 20-somethings, but he is living provisionally. He moved from Blawnox in August and found a resident on 45th Street who was willing to let him rent a third-floor bedroom for $800 a month. That includes his share of the bills.
“I was thinking Millvale or Sharpsburg because they’re easy bike rides,” he said, “but there are so many nice stores, bars and restaurants here. It’s not a bad set-up.”
Erin Kucic, 28, tends bar at Senti, a chic new restaurant on Butler, and said she was “extremely lucky” to have found an apartment that rents affordably near Doughboy Square.
“Several years ago, two of my girlfriends shared a rent in Lawrenceville, but I don’t know anyone in their 20s who has bought.”
New old-timers
The ’90s was the time to buy. Many who are most active in the community invested then. As the real oldtimers are thinning out, these are the new old-timers.
Among them, Kitty Julian, 45, bought her house on 47th Street for $48,000 in 1998.
“Of 11 or 12 houses on my block, there are only three people who were here when I first moved in,” she said. “Honey Bunch — that’s how I knew her — lived at the end of my block. She was here forever. Her house just sold to flippers. A woman who died recently had been a porch sitter who knew everyone. Her kids sold her house to flippers.”
The flipping isn’t just about quick sales at huge prices, she said. “Much of the work is terrible, colossal rebuilds out of character with the neighborhood. We’re at risk of losing the look that made Lawrenceville so attractive in the first place.”
On the upside, Ms. Julian said, the restaurant scene is thrilling. Several Lawrenceville eateries are getting national notice and rankings. And the prostitution and drug dealing that was so prevalent when she moved in is largely out of sight. “When I first moved here, I went out to the mailbox once and a car pulled up. I thought they just wanted directions.”
Ms. del Pino bought her house 11 years ago from a first-time flipper for $107,000.
“That was high, I knew,” she said. “I moved here from San Francisco to escape gentrification, and I see it taking root here.”
Referring to a property near her home, she said, “They tore down a 170-yearold house and a bunch of fruit trees and built that monstrosity that’s on the market for $800,000.”
Mary Anderson Hartley, 50, helped organize the first Art All Night two years after moving to Pittsburgh from Chicago in 1996. She said Lawrenceville’s appeal was “a no-brainer to me then.” She remembers a $350 monthly mortgage payment on their first home.
Twenty years later, she is fending off developers who write letters hoping to woo her into selling the property her family moved to in 2000 for its yard.
“There is so much housing in Pittsburgh,” she said. “The best thing that could happen is for other neighborhoods to develop.”