Quote on housing that's very apt: "As demand for housing rises, Philadelphia’s neighborhoods can either remain affordable or remain low-density. They cannot do both"

This is true everywhere, not just in Philadelphia.  It's relevant to both strong and weak markets, because even in weak markets, there probably isn't enough housing.

In the discussions about school closures in Salt Lake City, the g word, gentrification came up.  People blamed it for the decline of families in the center city--therefore a bunch of center city schools were on the chopping block--when that is a trend that is national, that people with no children or few children tend to live in the core, while people with families tend to live in the outer city or the suburbs.

Similarly, the West Side of Salt Lake is more heavily minority and equity issues for the West Side are touted all the time.  But it's complicated.  First, the west side is really three sections: the part that is east of the railroad tracks, so it's really part of "the east".  The residential section west of the freeway and railroad tracks.  And farther out, the mostly industrial section of the west side.  

My thing about the west side is that it doesn't have centers, the equivalent of commercial districts on the east side like 9th and 9th ("In Salt Lake City, a dynamic enclave gives new life to neighborhood," Washington Post) or 15th and 15th ("Thinking about the opportunities for success with neighborhood commercial districts: comparing Manor Park in DC to 15th and 15th in Salt Lake," 2021).  

There are two commercial districts on major streets (North Temple, Redwood Road), but there aren't neighborhood commercial districts.  

A lot of retail on the west side looks like this.

There are some putative attempts but they are disjoint urban design wise, not very compact.  There needs to be a focused program to develop them into coherent wholes ("Lee's Market to close its 400 West location in Salt Lake City" and "Lee's Market is reopening in Salt Lake City," Salt Lake Tribune, "Grocery stores in cities: the failure of the "15 minute grocery store"," 2023;. "Fairpark neighborhood in Salt Lake gets new coffee shop: A team of business owners on the west side of SLC saw a ‘desert’ for coffee shops, so they’ve opened their own," Tribune).

Stoneground Bakery sells wholesale and retail, baking and selling from an industrial building on the west side that isn't part of a commercial district.

And, not unlike how there is all kinds of outlier commercial retail space in the other part of the city, space that isn't part of a commercial district, the same is true of the west side, there are a bunch of interesting businesses there, but like how mayors say more people need to work in the office ("'We need more London Underground commuters on Fridays to help shops, restaurants and pubs'," My London, "Mayor of Washington, D.C., pushes for workers to return to the office," NPR), these buildings need to be in business districts to better generate economic activity that cross promotes other businesses.

I haven't figured out how to write it up, but Salt Lake City and County have invested in a lot of social infrastructure like libraries and recreation centers on the west side, but they haven't been developed in a manner that promotes the development of centers.

Lack of centers is blamed on disinvestment, but again I think that's a stretch.  

I think back in the day when the center city downtown was so thriving, it was close enough to the west side that there wasn't a big push to develop retail districts there.  There was no need.

Especially because back then and today the population of the city (210,000) and the west side is small.  

Like a lot of Salt Lake west side is mostly single family housing.  People may earn less, so the properties languish some, but as economically deprived areas go, Salt Lake's Westside isn't so bad.

But people claimed such issues were relevant to the proposed school closures on the west side also.  Whereas like in center city it is about demographics, and lack of enough population to support full classrooms at existing schools, even if west side households tend to have more children.  

If you want to support schools, you need more population, and given the housing demographics there, that means multiunit housing.  It is happening, but in the North Temple corridor mostly, and closer to the east side.  

So a lot of this addition to the housing stock isn't going to help the schools on the west side, because it is clustered east.

So this op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "What the ‘poop building’ tells us about affordable housing in Philadelphia," feels very relevant to me because it's merely about numbers and demographics.  

I wrote about this wrt retail within the entry on the Bridge Park ("Revisiting the 11th Street Bridge Park project as an opportunity rather than a folly: a new revitalization agenda for East of the River, DC"), but it's the same about housing affordability.  If you want it, you need a lot of housing.  Just like if you want retail, you need way more people than you realize--many thousands, not hundreds.

A sign on a fence in 2021 expressed the opposition of some West Philadelphia residents against the construction of an apartment building at 48th Street and Chester Avenue. Photo: Tom Gralish, Philadelphia Inquirer.  

Otherwise, especially with single family housing districts, there isn't enough to keep it low cost as demand rises and supply doesn't ("Understanding the DC housing market: demand for urban living, not the construction of new housing, is the driving force").

The article discusses how a Philadelphia neighborhood could have had as redevelopment a multiunit building with 76 units, 20% affordable.  Instead, to placate resident opposition, it will become 22 luxury rowhouses:

Philadelphia’s neighborhoods can either remain affordable or remain low-density. They cannot do both. Squirrel Hill, a cozy corner of Southwest Philadelphia, was given this choice. We overwhelmingly chose the latter. Other neighborhoods would do well not to copy our mistakes. 

... One neighbor, objecting to density, dismissed the apartments as “slum housing.” Meanwhile, the neighborhood group Protect Squirrel Hill referred to the four-story mixed-income project as a “monstrosity,” fearing an apartment building would gentrify the neighborhood. 

... But new development did not cause the neighborhood to become whiter, wealthier, and less affordable. Take a walk around the neighborhood and you will see that essentially no new development has occurred. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau estimate that the number of housing units here decreased by 132 over two decades. The building that once stood on the site of the dog park hosted 61 apartments. 

... When housing supply is constrained, property owners have more power to dictate prices; new residents and existing tenants must compete for units. Research supports this intuition, finding that new apartments lower, rather than raise, the risk of rent hikes and displacement. Even market-rate development “frees up” low-income units; blocking development has the opposite effect.

... Neighbors used the guise of housing justice to block the development. Other times, we wore no such mask. But in each case, we have chipped away at affordability, walkability, and the urban fabric that makes this neighborhood diverse, unique, and sustainable. When we frame the fight over an apartment building as a community-stands-up-to-greedy-developer story, the tenants who might have called the new building home are forgotten and erased. And when a building gets blocked, those tenants don’t vanish into the ether.

(There is a project in my neighborhood where a church is selling out to be redeveloped as housing.  Someone complained about it as "gentrification."  While there are apartments on that street, the fact is our zip code is the highest income in Salt Lake.  By definition it can't be gentrification.)

The article mentioned how one person against the development suggested a bird sanctuary or a cat oriented project instead of the dog park it would replace.  That's like the anti-76ers arena people suggesting small ground up grassroots development projects for Market Street, the downtown retail district of Philadelphia ("Penn professors spearhead workshop reimagining uses for proposed 76ers arena site near Chinatown," Daily Pennsylvanian, "Community groups say forget 76ers arena plan" WHYY/NPR).