Northern Liberties grows up as high rises for families come to Philly’s most gentrified neighborhood

Xavier Steward has lived in Northern Liberties his entire life, from the last years of its industrial past through the initial rush of new development and its current transformation into a neighborhood of high-end apartments.

“When I first lived here, it was a lot of warehouses,” Steward said. “I remember right around Second and Brown used to be a chicken warehouse. Now it looks like a little New York, like Soho or Brooklyn.”

Steward’s contractor father lived in the neighborhood for even longer and told his neighbors to buy their properties if they could in the 1980s, as artists and actors began moving into the cheap rowhouses squished between gargantuan brick warehouses and factories.

Since then, the neighborhood has gone through more rises and falls than the Roman Empire. But its current ascent is seeing 5,200 new homes in mostly mid- to high-rise projects permitted over the last four years, according to the Northern Liberties Neighbors Association (NLNA).

The centerpiece of the action is a 1,126-unit apartment complex from the Post Brothers, a high-end development that the neighborhood hasn’t previously seen.

“Northern Liberties is an exceptional place to live, and that drives a lot of investment, but beyond that, you’ve got one dominant player in Post Brothers,” said Ori Feibush, a Philadelphia developer who made his name in Point Breeze and also has big plans in Northern Liberties. “They are building an enormous number of units, and driving why a lot of that density is being built in that pocket.”

The current development boom can be seen throughout the community.

“I’ve really seen the whole thing change, and it was crazy to see that in real time, honestly,” said Steward, who is 24. “It is good to be here for what it is today because everyone says, ‘Oh, I wish I lived in NoLibs.’ When I tell people I still live down there, they’d be really surprised.”

With its plethora of studio and one-bedroom apartments, and a revived nightlife culture, the neighborhood definitely attracts a young adult crowd. The big question is whether Northern Liberties, and developers such as the Post Brothers, can retain these residents as they start having families.

When Philadelphia developer Bart Blatstein opened the Piazza in 2009, the 414-unit building was seen as the epitome of new development for a specific type of new Philadelphians: those fresh out of college with money to spend. In 2014, the Pew Charitable Trusts found that, of the neighborhoods it determined had been gentrified since 2000, Northern Liberties had the highest median income.

That’s partly what attracted Post Brothers. The company, founded in 2006 by Matthew and Michael Pestronk, began its business in such Northwest Philadelphia neighborhoods as Germantown and Mount Airy, then moved on to such emerging areas as Callowhill and West Philadelphia beyond University City.

But they had bigger ambitions and decided that Northern Liberties would be a good place to enact them.

“For us, as a large-scale developer, we’re trying to build a real company and control our own destiny, and that means we really want to be in super-premium locations,” Michael Pestronk said. “We obviously knew about [Northern Liberties] before but hadn’t viewed it as an established market. Then it dawned on us that, hey, this is actually a super-nice neighborhood.”

Post Brothers came in at a time when the Piazza had gone into decline under Kushner Cos., which bought it in 2013. According to Pestronk, rents fell over the period between Blatstein’s era and their own. Local retail vendors were chased out of the building’s first floor and weren’t replaced. Events in the courtyard, once known for its concerts and DJ sets, fell off — one lowlight included a mac n’ cheese night — to the disappointment of residents and then-teenagers such as Steward.

In 2018, when Post Brothers purchased Kushner Cos.’ stake in the Piazza, they saw it as their entry point into the neighborhood. At that point, the complex neighbored a huge swath of underused land to its east, which Blatstein still owned and planned to develop. Acquiring that land gave Post Brothers space to build their own project, even larger than Blatstein’s original and with up-to-date, high-end amenities.

“If you have a really large project, you can have bigger amenities, different features, different services and you can amortize that over 600 or 1,000 units,” Pestronk said. “A gym that’s better than a new Equinox. A coworking center that’s better than a WeWork and doesn’t smell like spilled beer. We can deliver features that form a competitive moat around the property.”

Dubbed Piazza Alta, the project’s scale sets it apart in the neighborhood. The first phase was completed at the end of 2022, with almost 700 rental units and amenities such as a state-of-the-art co-working space already open. A swim club is scheduled to debut next month.

The Post Brothers’ approach to Northern Liberties also demonstrates another way the neighborhood is growing up. Since more of their customers have children, especially under the age of 5, the number of two-, three- and four-bedroom units in their properties have grown. Kid playrooms and spray grounds are another feature of the complex, and Post Brothers added a playground to the central area of Blatstein’s Piazza.

“Our average renter is getting older, so we are certainly designing more and more for young families,” Pestronk said. “For better and worse, I think that the starter home has become a bigger, better apartment for a lot of people.”

Rents run from $1,850 a month to almost $13,000 a month for the penthouse, and 70% of delivered units have been leased, Post Brothers said. More than 400 units are planned for the second phase of the project, which they say will begin construction as soon as the second quarter of this year despite rising interest rates.

The majority of new units in Post Brothers’ development, and in the newer buildings overall, will still be studios and one-bedrooms. Pestronk says that’s partly because they had a hard time getting banks to finance family-size apartments. Even so, in their newer developments — such as their mega project on Broad and Washington — even more will be two-bedroom and larger apartments.

The child-friendly amenities and larger apartments, along with the new townhouses that have added to the single-family stock, complement the neighborhood association’s quest to retain its younger cohort. The community’s demographics currently have a crucial gap: The organization reports that the neighborhood’s two fastest growing age demographics are people under 40 and over 55.

“Our challenge in Northern Liberties, as in many other gentrifying neighborhoods, is to convince middle-class, mostly white, younger folks” to stay, said Jeff Hornstein, president of NLNA.

For the neighborhood to truly grow up, it needs not just more apartments — and larger ones — for high-income residents, but also public schools to keep them in place past their child’s fifth birthday, Hornstein said.

“The question is are these parents going to be willing to put in the elbow grease to make [under-enrolled local schools] a school of choice,” Hornstein said. “Because there’s a fair number of empty seats there. That’s the big challenge.”