October 23: Temple planning $100M football stadium | Lowering state route speed limits | Creeping suburbanization

Inga Saffron laments the city’s unwillingness or inability to hold developers accountable for truly urban design, calling out the forthcoming Soko Lofts in South Kensington and the townhouses replacing Mount Sinai hospital in Pennsport as examples of “the design of exclusion” that could have been “airlifted in from a distant suburban township.”

One possible explanation: the Nutter administration changed the policies without changing the politics. For some insight on what changing the politics entails, check out this interview with Shin-Pe Tsay of TransitCenter on their new report about the preconditions for accelerated pro-urban change in cities, which looks at recent developments in Pittsburgh as one case study. 

Councilman Curtis Jones is upset that only the contractor and excavation officer were held liable for the 2013 building collapse, and he introduced a bill to increase exposure for negligent “contractors, construction supervisors, foremen, site safety managers, expediters, architects, engineers, property owners and their representatives,” reports Mensah Dean.

Dean also reports Council President Darrell Clarke wants to create a new six-month temporary parking permit for guests that can be used for five days at a time. No word yet on what the permit would cost. 

Temple is planning a 35,000-seat, $100 million football stadium on campus, which would be located “a block or two behind the Liacouras Center,” report Marc Narducci and Dylan Purcell. 

Treehugger’s lesson for urban stadiums: build them into the city fabric and don’t surround them with oceans of surface parking. 

Bobby Allyn reads the new housing market report from economist Kevin Gillen and finds, “No other submarket in Philadelphia outpaced the growth seen in Kensington, especially South Kensington.”

Irina Zhorov at Keystone Crossroads makes the case for lower city speed limits. If PA municipalities want to change the speed limit on a state route, the process is a bit cumbersome and expensive. They have “to do a traffic study, pass an ordinance, and then post speed limit signs.” 

In Kensington, immigrants are sparking a youth soccer revival, says Nic Esposito.

House Republicans won’t let transit-oriented development projects get federal TIFIA loans in the new transportation funding bill, even though, as Streetsblog argues, TOD makes transit systems work more efficiently.