Community Statement on the Pennley Park South PLDP

COMMUNITY STATEMENT REGARDING THE PENNLEY PARK SOUTH (PENN PLAZA-ENRIGHT PARK) PLDP

December 13, 2016

The Enright Park Neighborhood Association, the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation and the Friendship Community Group joint in urging the City Planning Commission to either reject or postpone a vote on the current Pennley Park South (Penn Plaza-Enright Park) preliminary land development plan due to its failure to comply with the conditions set by City of Pittsburgh’s ordinance which rezoned this site to AP, Mixed Use Planned Unit Development (Ordinance 2016-0033), as well as the conditions governing review and approval of the PLDP contained in the Planning Commission’s rezoning decision (Zone Change Petition No. 783) and the conditions for PLDP review set forth in Pittsburgh Zoning Code Sec. 922.11.B.3.

In particular, the PLDP and its accompanying process lack the following:

1. The developer provided no open public meetings to present and discuss the proposed project. (Meetings called by the City and neighborhood organizations were not open to the public, and at these meetings, the developer insisted on limiting presentation and discussion to park design.)
2. Numerous necessary drawings are omitted from the PLDP, including perspectives of Phase 2 buildings and ingress-egress diagrams for Phase 1 and 2 loading docks.
3. The proposed reconfiguration of Enright Park fails to meet numerous conditions set forth the rezoning legislation including:
4. The narrow, elongated replacement park is significantly less functional than the current configuration
5. No building setback is provided at the east border of the park to preserve existing mature park trees.
6. The pedestrian right of way leading from the park to South Euclid Avenue is not usable or functional park space and should not be counted as replacement park land.
7. A survey of Enright Park indicates that current park acreage exceeds 2.2 acres. The replacement park should be equal in size to current park acreage.
8. A written agreement outlining planning process for the reconfiguration of Enright Park led by the City Planning Department has not been produced. The agreement was committed to by the City of Pittsburgh and the Pennley Place developer, according to a March 22, 2016 press release by Mayor Peduto.

While it is not the province of a PLDP to articulate a strategy to re-introduce housing affordable to working-class households to the site, we regret the fact that the plan put forward by the developers makes no mention of such a possibility. This is certainly a missed opportunity, and while we laud all of the affordably-priced housing that ELDI and others have brought to East Liberty, we are saddened to see that nothing of that nature is proposed to happen here.