You Can’t Build that Here - Palm Garden Apartments
For our sixth entry in our “You Can’t Build That Here!” series, we climb to the top of Mt Washington overlooking the Golden Triangle.
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 873 Boggs Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15211 - the Palm Garden Apartments. This is a collection of 3 apartment buildings built in a triangle formation.
Each building is 3.5 stories, with a total of 54 studio and 1 bedroom apartments spread among the 3 of them, renting for around $800 a month each, which is very affordable considering the average rent in Pittsburgh today is $1,512 a month.
Initially, these buildings were constructed as luxury apartments in 1937. The rent at the time was $42.50 to $47.50 a month, compared to an average home renting for $26.00 a month.
Here is a 1939 aerial shot of the apartment buildings, two years after construction.
The 2.25 acre (98,000 square feet) lot it sits on, 15-N-75, is zoned P (Parks District).
If we look at the conditional use table, we see that only Single Family Residential are permitted by right in Parks Districts. So any apartment buildings, like those at the Palm Garden Apartments, are prohibited from being built by right. They require a zoning variance. (And if anyone remembers the recent Irish Center redevelopment debate this past year, a Zoning Variance in a Park district can be extremely contentious.)
Even if multi-unit apartment buildings were allowed by right, though, Palm Garden Apartments would be prohibited because it is more than 3 stories tall.
Other pieces of zoning policy that don’t constrain these particular buildings are:
Setback requirements (30 feet in front, 20 feet in rear, 20 exterior side, 5 feet interior side yard)
Minimum lot size requirements (3,200 square feet)
A floor area ratio of 1:1 (this particular lot is very large - 98,000 square feet, so the approximately 48,000 square feet of building is not constrained)
Parking minimums - a minimum of one per unit.
That last restriction is particularly absurd because the apartments are 150 feet/3 minute walk away from the Palm Gardens PRT station on the Red Line and the several bus lines that stop at that station on the South Busway. It is one of the most transit accessible locations in the entire city.
So here we have an example of one time luxury apartments that were built in a transit oriented area that are now immensely affordable housing. We should build more of these, but the zoning code instead explicitly says “You can’t build that here!”
By Jack Billings with contributions by Chris Beam and Clayton Manley.
