193 apartments are planned for a new development on the Delaware River

A 193-unit apartment building is planned on the Delaware riverfront at 901 Penn St. next to the gated Waterfront Square condominium towers that defined an earlier generation of development on Philadelphia’s eastern edge.

The new project is the latest from developer GY Properties, a Philadelphia-based residential company helmed by Israeli military veterans.

The company envisioned Waterfront Square over 20 years ago as a complex of five towers. But after the first three were built, the Great Recession struck, and the company struggled to fill the buildings. The final third of the project was never completed.

Now GY Properties is filling in the land around Waterfront Square with more modestly scaled rental developments. Together with a companion building at 933 Penn St., they have 389 apartments planned for the site. They are also nearing completion on a complex of five seven-story apartment buildings across Delaware Avenue from the Waterfront Square site.

“We started this project in conjunction with 933 Penn, but this one got held up a little bit through acquiring the land and getting certain other approvals,” said Eric Quick, director of design at Harman Deutsch Architecture, which is working on the project along with GY’s other recent developments in the area. “This is phase two.”

Both buildings are seven stories, and the newly proposed structure will have 75 parking spaces, while its cousin will have 57. An expansion of an existing parking lot is underway as well. The units will range from 500-square-foot studios to two-bedrooms of 1,000 or more square feet.

This part of the Delaware riverfront, with its proximity to Northern Liberties and Fishtown, has seen a sustained burst of multifamily development in recent years. Apartment building owners in the area have been competing with each other for renters, and in some cases are offering as many as three months of free rent among other perks.

But Quick says buildings in the area are popular and will fill up.

“The pro formas still make sense, and they [GY] feel there are plenty of renters who still need opportunity,” Quick said.

For the Central Delaware Advocacy Group (CDAG), GY Properties’ latest project is evidence that the zoning changes they pushed for following the Great Recession are working.

The activist organization was born in reaction to Waterfront Square and a panoply of similarly ambitious — if far less successful — projects proposed along the Delaware River. In the 2000s, developers including Donald Trump proposed a series of fanciful and enormous projects that kept land prices high but almost never resulted in new buildings.

CDAG advocated for zoning changes that restricted riverfront development to more modestly scaled buildings in the hopes that speculative developers would be scared off and actual residential dwellings would be constructed.

“Excessive speculation and grandiose plans that don’t have any relationship to the economic reality have been the historic problem on the riverfront,” said Matt Ruben, a long time advocate with CDAG. “This is a good size, but not enormous project, that seems more realistic. It seems like a sensible development.”