You Can’t Build That Here - Dover Gables
For our eleventh entry in our “You Can’t Build That Here!” series, we’ll take a quick ride on the East Busway to Negley Station in Shadyside.
Each entry in this series highlights a currently existing building that would be illegal to build under the existing zoning code. The purpose is to highlight how flawed our zoning code is.
Today, we’re looking at 555-575 S Negley Ave, also known as Dover Gables - a community of two-story attached townhouses with forty units and two pedestrianized courtyards. It’s about a three minute walk to Negley Station, providing easy access to downtown Pittsburgh, Oakland, the East End, and more.
While none of these units are currently on the market, unit 12 was sold in 2023 for $357,000 – about $50,000 less than what the median house in Shadyside sold for in March 2024. The typical unit has two or four bedrooms, two bathrooms, about 1,100-1,200 square feet of space, and one parking spot in a nearby garage.
Photo of Dover Gables courtyard by Cbaile19, August 2023
A brief history of the neighborhood
Dover Gables was built in 1925, well before most of Pittsburgh’s zoning ordinances. The Pennsylvania Railroad served the neighborhood at Shadyside/Roup Station, which provided commuter rail service until it was discontinued in 1964. In 1983, Negley Station was opened at the same location as part of the East Busway, providing transit access once again to downtown and beyond.
Shadyside station, 1928
A 1923 map of the location of Dover Gables, then the location of the home of E.H. Myers.
The northern half of Dover Gables is subdivided into twenty units, most of which are owned by individuals, whereas the southern half is considered one plot of land, the entirety of which is owned by Motheral, a property management company that primarily rents their units to students.
These two halves lie within different zoning districts. On the northern half, every lot, such as 51-M-343, lies within Residential Single-Unit Attached, Very High Density (R1A-VH). On the southern half, lot 84-J-59 lies within Residential Multifamily, Moderate Density (RM-M).
Essex House, a sixteen-story apartment building, is located a short walk north of Dover Gables. Claybourne Apartments, which is nine stories tall, is also nearby. Both of these buildings are much taller than Dover Gables. Pittsburgh’s current zoning code surely must allow a modestly-sized townhouse development like Dover Gables, especially if it’s next to a major transit station, right?
The answer, as you may have guessed from the title of this series, is absolutely not!
Setbacks, oh my!
For starters, the entire community violates the minimum rear setback standard. Section 925.06 of the Zoning Code defines setbacks as follows:
“Setbacks refer to the required unoccupied open space between the furthermost projection of a structure and the property line of the lot on which the structure is located, except as modified by the standards of this section. Required setbacks shall be unobstructed from the ground to the sky except as specified in this section.”
There has to be space between the structure and the neighbor’s property line. You can’t just build a structure right at your property line – you have to provide some space. Even within the Very High Density use subdistrict, Dover Gables violates the 25 foot minimum rear setback requirement. You don’t even need to hire a surveyor for this – using the measurement tool on the map, you can tell right away that there’s not enough space.
12.57 feet is less than 25 feet.
There are four rows of attached housing in Dover Gables, and no matter where you measure the rear setback, none of the buildings comply with the minimum rear setback requirement specified in either the R1A-VH or the RM-M use classifications. The law requires twenty-five feet of space, but Dover Gables has no more than fifteen feet – making this building illegal under the zoning code.
Minimum lot sizes
Remember how I mentioned that the southern half of Dover Gables is considered one big parcel of land? As it turns out, not even that gigantic parcel is big enough to comply with the city’s minimum lot size requirement for multifamily apartment buildings.
There are twenty rental units in the lower half of Dover Gables. Under the RM-M use subdistrict, the minimum lot size for a parcel containing twenty units is 1,800 square feet per unit, or 36,000 square feet for Dover Gables. How many square feet does the lower half of Dover Gables have today?
According to the Allegheny County Real Estate Portal, it has only 30,719 square feet of space – 5,281 square feet too few! This is another violation that makes the present form of this building illegal under the zoning code. Motheral would have to reduce the size of Dover Gables by three units in order to comply with this requirement.
Minimum parking requirements
Dover Gables is right on top of a high-frequency East Busway station that provides peak service every eight minutes to downtown Pittsburgh and every fifteen minutes to Oakland. Nonetheless, the zoning code requires the southern half of Dover Gables to provide one off-street parking space per unit under the RM-M classification. Additionally, the code provides no relief from this requirement even for transit-oriented development.
Motheral owns only eight spots which are situated on Summerlea Street next to the busway. The rest of the parking structures in Dover Gables are owned by individuals. Because the code requires twenty off-street parking spaces, Motheral’s portion of Dover Gables is illegal under the zoning code. In order to comply with this requirement, Motheral would need twelve fewer units within Dover Gables.
Is this level of density appropriate?
Pittsburgh Regional Transit invested $2.5 million into upgrading Negley Station. There has not, however, been a commensurate modification to the zoning designations around this station to take advantage of the improvements that were made. If PRT is going to invest millions into improving our public transportation infrastructure, then the city should be increasing the number and density of housing units around that infrastructure. What good is building infrastructure if we don’t allow more people to use it?
Dover Gables and the surrounding neighborhood is the quintessential example of where taller, higher density buildings should be allowed by-right. Tens of thousands of jobs are a fifteen-minute bus ride away, and a grocery store is just a few blocks away. This is a desirable neighborhood where many people want to live, but can’t, because there aren’t enough units available. I know this because last winter, I was preparing to move to Pittsburgh, and one of the places where I was looking for housing was in Shadyside.
Remember Essex House and Claybourne Apartments from earlier? In early January of this year, I called and spoke with a leasing agent from McQuarters Realty on the phone. The agent informed me that they were completely sold out of one-bedroom units in both of those buildings – not a single vacant unit on any of their 25 floors! These were moderately pricey units, too – between $1,300 to $1,700 per month. Sounds like a shortage to me!
Many people would like to live in this neighborhood because of all of the amenities it offers – excellent access to transit, jobs, and stores. We should legalize the kinds of housing that people want to live in. We should not tolerate a zoning code that doesn’t even allow the kinds of homes that already exist in our city.
Why do we have parking mandates?
Daniel Pearson of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board once observed that “of all the groups in American society, college students are the most able to live car free, especially at a non-commuter school.” The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are prime examples, especially considering that they are located in Oakland, a transit-rich employment center. Students in the city can access Pittsburgh Regional Transit for free using their university ID cards.
But we think that parking reform should not end with respect to just student housing. A consensus is growing across the United States that parking mandates make public spaces worse, block new housing and businesses, and represent a losing investment for municipal governments. We believe that Pittsburgh should not have parking mandates at all – indeed, as recently documented by Strong Towns, parking minimums are harming businesses in the city of Pittsburgh right now.
Once again, even when we look at coveted buildings that already exist in the city of Pittsburgh, our zoning code tells us:
“You can’t build that here!”
By Nicholas Rizzio with contributions by Jack Billings and Andrew Brown.
