University City apartment boom continues with 350 more units planned at 40th & Market

The University City apartment boom is set to continue with an L-shaped, 350-unit building at 40th and Market Streets. The developer, Quaker Lane Capital, wants to bring a high-rise to the transit-accessible intersection that is walkable to many major institutions.

The 12-story building’s entrance will be on Market Street, with a 53-space underground parking garage opening on Filbert Street, and an amenity space on 40th Street. The precise street address is 4011-19 Market St. and 18 N. 40th St., which speaks to its block-straddling configuration that brings the project closer to the rowhouse neighborhood to its north.

“At the corner of 40th and Filbert Streets, the project was carefully designed to match the materials of Powelton Village with brick masonry materials, plantings, and low-impact safety lighting,” reads a PowerPoint presentation by the architects, CUBE 3.

The intersection, especially to the west of 40th, is currently dominated by one-to-two story discount retail, fast-food stores, and public services providers.

“On that strip of Market, this is the first large development that we’ve seen,” said Pam Andrews, chair of the West Powelton RCO, a community group that is negotiating with the developer. “That area has been blighted for a long, long, long time.”

To the east of 40th Street is the affordable senior high-rise University Square Apartments and the University City Townhomes, which have been the site of a contested plan to close and sell the existing affordable units for market-rate development.

Quaker Lane Capital is a certified minority business based in Philadelphia, although as a relatively young company most of their completed projects are in Massachusetts.

About a fifth of the units will be earmarked for workforce housing, a designation that often ranges between 80% to 120% of area median income, which is $105,400 for a family of four. Details on that aspect of the project are still being worked out.

“The project is targeted toward professionals in the community, and highly focused toward having a portion of the units as workforce-accessible housing,” said Puja Suneja Peruto, one of the principals with Quaker Lane.

The new building will be aimed at professionals, including those with small families, who work at nearby educational and medical institutions. The units will be a mix of studios, and one- and two-bedroom apartments. Peruto emphasized that the project is not meant to be targeted as shared student living, as there is already an abundance of that kind of housing in the area.

“We view three bedrooms as more what you see in student housing so we didn’t include that in the mix,” said Peruto.

There will be 2,835 square feet of commercial space next to the building’s entrance on Market Street, with 1,350 square feet of back-of-house space behind it. The space is marked as a coffee shop in the renderings, although no decisions have been made for a use yet.

Currently, the existing two-story beige building on Market Street is home to a well-used day-care center, Brightside Academy.

The architects at CUBE 3 say the new building’s brick base will echo the nearby rowhouse neighborhoods.

“A distinct masonry base connects the building to the surrounding buildings and provides more public uses at the ground level,” the PowerPoint reads. “Residential units above the retail create a vertical tower using blocks reminiscent of historical residential buildings [in] Philadelphia.”

The project will go before Philadelphia’s advisory Civic Design Review on June 6. No other approvals are needed. The company anticipates being under construction in 12 to 24 months.

Quaker Lane’s project comes in the midst of a transformation of University City, which for decades saw little new development. But over the last 15 years, home prices have soared in neighborhoods such as Powelton Village, Spruce Hill, and Cedar Park, and long-vacant sites have begun filling in. Closer to the universities, huge student apartment towers are on the rise.

Along major thoroughfares such as Market and Chestnut Streets, meanwhile, sun-blasted parking lots and other auto-oriented uses have been sold for redevelopment. The intersection of 40th and Market, with its proximity to the University of Pennsylvania and the Market-Frankford Line, has similarly attracted developer attention due to its abundance of low-rise buildings — including the fraught case of the University City Townhomes.

Andrews said that some members of her neighborhood group are uncomfortable with the amount of change, but that Quaker Lane had been more open to engaging with the community than most other developers.

“It will change the demographics of the area, and there are people in the community who have been here for decades, and they’re sad to see it,” Andrews said. “We’re trying to work creatively with the developer to get the best possible results for the community. I’m feeling encouraged with them.”