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Originally Posted by glowrock
While I certainly agree that the Seagate building isn't the highest and best use for that particular piece of land, I'm not against it being there. Same goes for the Hampton Inn across from the Heinz History Center.
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I'm actually fine with those particular uses of the land that they are directly sitting on. Those are not the coolest structures ever, but not the worst either, and you can get to some pretty intense uses of land with structures that size.
The problem in my view is all the parking.
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Nowadays, as development efforts are finally getting some real traction and Pittsburgh is no longer declining/stable, finally seeming to grow both in population and overall economic status once again, I think we can be more choosy.
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I somewhat agree with that, but I also think you can get TOO choosy, which even in a regional growth scenario means you end up pushing too much development out to far-flung greenfields as opposed to infilling your existing urban footprint. And this is not at all a theoretical concern--NIMBYism has had this effect in many other older U.S. cities that are much farther along the redevelopment track than Pittsburgh.
To lay my cards on the table, at the end of the day I am not going to care all that much about exactly how cool-looking the design of various projects ends up being. That doesn't mean I won't bash unnecessarily poor design, such as the Oakland Portal apartment projects. But my central issues are intensity of land utilization and creating continuous walkable areas, and I will take a project with a merely OK design that furthers those purposes over holding out for some purely hypothetical supercool (and superexpensive) project that no one with money is actually talking about doing.