Roxborough residents support Ridge Avenue apartment building after developer revises design

Over a year after receiving withering criticism from neighborhood groups and city-appointed design experts, a developer brought forward a new version of a Roxborough apartment building to rapturous reception.

Located at 6174 Ridge Ave., the five-story project from MGMT Residential includes 94 units, 71 underground parking spaces, and 21,700 square feet of commercial space.

That makes it a story taller, with 12 more units, 54 more parking spaces, and 14,700 more square feet of commercial space than the earlier version did in 2022.

“We think it has come a long ways in being a lot more responsive to what the neighborhood needs,” said John Carpenter of the Central Roxborough Civic Association.

The configuration of the apartment building has also been changed: Its horseshoe shape was flipped around to face an existing pocket park in the rear as opposed to the sidewalk. MGMT set the building farther back from Ridge Avenue to potentially allow sidewalk dining if restaurants are established in the vast new commercial space.

A beloved mural will be lost when the existing retail buildings are demolished, but MGMT will include space for three panels for new art on the building.

All these changes mean that MGMT will have to seek multiple variances from the city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment.

The project exceeds the height and residential unit count and doesn’t have the required number of parking spaces under the current zoning. Councilmember Curtis Jones Jr. created a zoning overlay on Ridge Avenue that, among other things, requires one parking space for every housing unit, effectively blocking most apartment proposals. Additionally, underground parking is not allowed under current rules.

But in exchange for the neighborhood’s demands, like expensive parking and restaurant-grade commercial space, groups like the Central Roxborough Civic Association agreed to support the project at the zoning board.

“We struck a deal with the developer that if they worked with us, we would work with them,” Carpenter said. “For example, that extra layer of height [isn’t] allowed by the zoning code, but we knew they needed it to be able to pay for that underground parking. … We supported the extra units to get those really important features.”

After the previous plans were so roundly rejected, MGMT brought in Stokes Architecture & Design, a Philadelphia-based firm with experience in hospitality and restaurants.

That’s partly because the two commercial spaces, one for 19,000 square feet and one for 2,700, have been designed with eateries in mind.

“We’re hoping that the tenants of these spaces will be restaurants, things that promote more energy on the street, more light and more activity,” said Lance Saunders, director of design with Stokes Architecture. “We worked out exhaust for the kitchen through the building in a way that’s completely invisible to the public.”

The project also received almost universal acclaim from members of Philadelphia’s advisory Civic Design Review committee, which had also been critical of the original design a year ago. They voted unanimously to conclude the review (their only power is to ask a developer to return for a follow-up meeting).

The project comes in the midst of a relative building boom in Roxborough. The neighborhood has always been popular, even during the second half of the 20th century when Philadelphia bled population for decades. Its location on the edge of the city, where houses are often larger and have yards, made housing in the area a particularly hot commodity during the pandemic.

A zoning remapping in 2013 was designed to push multifamily housing projects onto Ridge Avenue. According to the Central Roxborough Civic Association, 1,100 new housing units have been built on that thoroughfare alone since 2015, and over half of them went up since the pandemic. That’s why Jones has since created the overlay for Ridge Avenue, erecting a barrier to further apartment development.