With my oldest home from South Carolina for the weekend, we spent a wonderful morning stopping at Rothrock coffee for a smoothie after taking yoga together. She hasn’t been home for a year. “Let’s go through downtown” she said. Thinking it might be interesting to see if the rainy cool Saturday meant fewer State Patty revelers, we headed downtown to cruise the lap around Beaver Avenue to College Avenue.
Hearing the reactions from a person who grew up in State College, attended Penn State and left for the world beyond Centre County just about two years ago offered some new perspective.
“Wow. State College is starting to feel like a small city.”
“Who is going to live in all of these new high rises?”
I felt like the proverbial frog who’s been put in a pot of cool water with the temperature gradually going up. How many of us are ignoring the changes to our little town just as the frog who can’t quite figure out why the water is getting warmer?
Will we notice when it starts getting too hot and our way of life is no longer what we are used to and what we value?
We counted four major high rises under construction or proposed for sites within the Beaver Avenue and College Avenue circuit.
The Metropolitan looms as one pulls into town from North Atherton, with parking space at street level and some retail space under a very tall apartment building. A few short blocks after turning on to Beaver, we see the Hyatt Place/Target high rise which will soon have hotel and some residences above the Target and H&M stores. That monstrosity can be seen from campus and from other points in town because of its height. Next to what we used to call Skull fraternity house (the site of the former Canyon Pizza) sits an empty lot which will be the site of another high rise building. Some of those neighbors, including the Skull members, are raising concerns about visual obstructions with the planned building.
Circle back toward College Avenue (around the detour) and you see the site that used to be Kildare’s as one enters town from the east. Plans for a high rise apartment and a street level grocery store are underway for that site. Continue down College Avenue and we came almost full circle to the intersection of Atherton and College and the proposed site of yet another high rise – this one taking out the buildings that house West College Realty, California Tortilla, Zola, Golden Wok, and sadly, the two older houses on the corner. The beautiful flower beds that always make waiting on Atherton Street heading north a little more pleasant will likely go too.
Who will be renting all of this space?
We’ve been promised that enrollment at Penn State is being managed with little or no plans to increase undergraduate numbers. Last year’s hitch, partially attributed to the new records system LionPath, created an exception to the rule for incoming freshmen but enrollment is reportedly staying the same at University Park. Rising tuition costs, along with proposed increases in room and board fees may mean that fewer state and regional high school students are applying for college. It may mean that online degrees or programs and majors closer to home are becoming the more affordable option.
In the meantime, the folks who deal with on-campus housing are renovating and updating the old dorms and building new ones. We heard last year at freshman orientation that the plans for the next eight years includes building new dorms (as we are seeing now on Park Avenue and last year in South Halls) or renovating old dorms to modernize and expand capacity.
If enrollment is projected to stay the same or go down and the World Campus numbers are growing, who is going to be living in all of these new spaces?
Are any of these new spaces being designed for workforce housing or for the young professional market (such that it is in Happy Valley) who are basically squeezed out by big city rents that only groups of student sardined into shared bedroom space can afford?
It goes beyond that. Is anyone looking at the big picture to see what all of this development is going to do to the “landscape” of State College? Does anyone care about the disruption of the small town feel that defines State College?
I’m not a big person for government thwarting business development through regulations. However, I think that there needs to be more discussion about how high is too high on College or Beaver. Just because we can, does that mean we should?
What is going to happen to our little town? Will anyone over the age of 21 or families with children or our retired community want to go downtown? How and when did this loss of our way of life start to happen?
Sometimes we need a fresh set of eyes to see what the rest of us are missing.
