Pittsburgh Zoning Districts - SP Districts in Action

by Carolyn Ristau

We will provide a more detailed explanation of Pittsburgh’s SP (Specially Planned) Districts at a later date. For today, a simplified summary is that the SP is a district where the developer decides what they want to build, how tall they want to build it, and where on the site they want to locate it; then, they have to follow-through on that plan.

Pittsburgh has a handful of these districts across the city. Each district is unique to its site and the plan the developer has for its site. Two of these districts are in early stages of buildout, though years of planning went before the first shovel (or backhoe) broke any ground.

The Lower Hill was formerly the home of the Civic Arena (a hockey and concert venue) and a sea of parking lots. It now has a SP Zoning District as the site is slowly transformed into a dense, mixed-use area. This site has the added complexity of having been a dense, mixed-use neighborhood with a large population of Black and other minority businesses and residents prior to being demolished and transformed into the arena and parking lots in the 1960s.

Hazelwood Green was formerly the location of one of the largest steel mills within Pittsburgh’s city limits. It now has a SP Zoning District as it transforms into a mixed-use neighborhood anchored by robotics and other cutting edge technologies.

In both situations, the SP Zoning District is enabling the transformation of these sites into mixed-use neighborhoods in a way that the other existing districts within Pittsburgh’s zoning code can’t because of the rigidity of their rules. Both situations also include moral and social questions beyond the buildings and rules of construction. A simplified version of these questions is “can these developments meaningfully engage with and support the existing residents and businesses in the adjacent areas?”

urbantraipsing.com is “Keeping an Eye On” these sites and others in different zoning districts but with the same moral and social questions as redevelopment unfolds.