You Can’t Build That - Park View Flats

For our twelfth entry in our “You Can’t Build That Here!” series we depart Dover Gables, head north on Negley Ave to Centre Ave, and catch the 71A to the Euclid stop in Highland Park.

We’re looking at 1401 N St Clair, formerly known as the Park View Flats. It’s a four story brick building with 16 two bedroom apartments and beautiful balconies. As its name suggests, this building is right next to Highland Park.

Each entry in our series highlights a currently existing building that would be illegal to build under our broken zoning code. We need to get busy fixing the zoning code to allow great buildings to be built in our most desirable neighborhoods. 

A two-bedroom-two-bathroom apartment in the Park View flats is currently listed for rent at $1850 which is slightly less than the median rent reported by rentometer. It’s a bit hard to get a true median rent since rentometer stopped letting you manually select the distance from the address that it analyzes. As you can see below, rents in Aspinwall, East Liberty, Garfield, Morningside, and Shadyside are included in the analysis. Based on the number of lower rent markers from other neighborhoods, the median rent is likely higher than indicated in Highland Park, making this apartment more affordable than most Highland Park 2 bedroom units.

It’s unclear when the Park View Flats were built but they first show up in the 1903-1906 historical maps.

Highland Park was once connected to the rest of the city via streetcar lines. Those days are over, but it is now served by three bus lines. Two of those lines have a stop directly in front of the Park View Flats. The 71A to Oakland and the 71B to Downtown.

This building is also two blocks from Highland Park’s commercial strip on Bryant St., which houses several restaurants, bakeries, a market, and various businesses and shops.

So why exactly can’t you build a building that would give 30 people direct access to public transit and amenities like playgrounds, tennis courts, green space, local shops, and restaurants? Well,  it’s because this address happens to be currently zoned R2 - L (two family residential, low density).

This means that regardless how much land you have, you cannot build more than two apartments on it. This building is on a substantial 7450 square foot parcel of land. An industrious builder trying to observe the zoning code might want to go to the city and try to split the the land into two separate parcels and build a duplex on each. But because this area is zoned R2-L, which means low density, she couldn’t actually do that because the low density designation requires a minimum lot size of 5000 square feet. From a construction perspective, you can easily build a single family home on a 1000 square foot lot so why the minimum? This discrepancy between what is possible and what is allowed should give you an idea of the level of restriction that is being imposed on new construction in a zoning district that has great buildings like the Park View Flats already in it.

There are even more restrictions having to do with how many floors you can have and how far back from the curb you need to build.   R2-L requires front, rear, and exterior setbacks of 30 feet. Park View Flats, which is built up to the sidewalk, violates all of these setbacks. R2-L has a height restriction of 40 ft, not to exceed 3 stories.  Park  View Flats is clearly 4 stories.

Each one of these restrictions means that if the 16-apartment Park View Flats were destroyed today, you’d only be able to replace 2 of the 16 homes that would be lost. Each one of these restrictions constrains the supply of housing in our city, driving up rents and housing costs and forcing would be residents out.

We at Pro-Housing Pittsburgh believe that there is no good reason to have this level of restriction in the City of Pittsburgh. Our most restrictive zoning district should be a medium density district that allows for small apartments buildings like the Park View Flats to be built anywhere in the city. We want to stop staying “You Can’t Build That Here” and start building homes.

By Vlad Kaplun with contributions by Jack Billings.