In order to produce our non-stop stream of content, we’re constantly romping all over town, snapping photos of various projects and development sites. As such, we have numerous lunch spots that we favor in various neighborhoods, and sometimes we try to arrange our photography sessions around whatever cuisine we’re thinking about on a given day. This time of year, pretty much every day is a good day for soup. That means that it’s never a bad thing to be in Fishtown/South Kensington/East Kensington, relatively close to Good Spoon Soupery. The 1400 block of N. Hope St. is right around the corner from Good Spoon, and a few days ago, with a full belly, we discovered two dueling projects on this little block.
The west side of the block is dominated by a bunch of foundations which are related to a project we’ve already covered. You may recall, we told you about a year and a half ago about a project that was bringing five homes to Howard Street, six homes (and a drive-aisle entrance) to Hope Street, and one home to Master Street. The homes on Howard are farther along than the homes on Hope Street, but somehow just about every home in the development is already under agreement at a price around $500K. Wowza.
On the east side of the street is a project that we confess we find a little confusing. Here, developers have built a row of five new town homes, each only rising two stories. The developers bought this property a couple years ago, as part of a large warehouse building on Front Street, and knocked down a junky one-story section of the warehouse on Hope Street. In its place, they’ve built these new homes which we imagine will be offered for sale. We feel like we must be missing something, because we can’t think of too many examples of developers building new two-story homes and offering them at market rate prices. And with a project across the street getting top dollar prices for the neighborhood, it seems like an especially odd choice.
Does anyone that lives nearby have any insight into why the developers built two-story homes on this block? Try as we may, we can’t figure out the thought process behind the decision.