Despite a waning office market and struggles by the companies of Robotics Row, people keep moving into the Strip District.
That’s one of big take aways of the new State of the Strip Report for 2023, an annual neighborhood benchmarking exercise by Strip District Neighbors, a community organization.
“The Strip District continues to transform as a residential community,” said Pam Austin, president of Strip District Neighbors, at an event July 13 to announce the report’s basic findings at Cadence on Smallman Street. “Our pipeline is the most abundant in the city.”
According to the new report, the population of the Strip District grew by 316% since 2015, reaching an estimated total population of 3,214 residents, a figure that’s grown dramatically in part due to demand and in part since before a recent boom in the past 20 years, it was a neighborhood with very little residential population at all.
Given high asking rents and a recent residential sale that eclipsed $2 million for the first time, the report projects the Strip District’s population will double again in the next two to three years, based on a pipeline of 2,111 residential units in the works for the urban fringe neighborhood along the Allegheny River, with many projects announced or approved by the city along Smallman Street in the past 18 months.
Average apartment rents in the Strip District range from $1,520 for a studio to more than $2,800 for a two-bedroom unit, according to the report.
The report totaled up 17 new restaurants and retailers that opened in the Strip District in the last year, many of them opening in the Strip District Terminal — City Winery, Sandbox VR, among others — as well as elsewhere along Smallman Street.
It was an expansion trend that significantly outpaced only two retail closures in the last year.
The neighborhood’s office market, once one of the most active places in the region for new office development, drawing in a variety of major tech firms, has not fared as well, in keeping with the office sector as a whole.
The report noted “extreme headwinds” in the office market even as it welcomed some significant newcomers to the neighborhood, noting the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission inked new offices at the Strip District Terminal and Oshkosh Corp. set up an innovation center in the tech flex Factory 26.
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