The latest trend in downtown Louisville life? Fancy pet accommodations
But unlike other job transplants, he’s a little different. Seven Wetherbee has four legs, a beautiful golden coat and a passion for chasing tennis balls. For this new Louisvillian, a love the outdoors plus a desire to live in the city’s urban core meant a dated apartment complex just wasn’t going to cut it.
The uptick in newcomers like Seven’s owners — people interested in living in urban apartment style-living but who still want a dog — has reshaped how developers think about apartment amenities.
Apartment complexes are increasingly catering to the 68 percent of American households that own pets, with in-house dog parks, indoor grooming stations, exclusive pet-walking services, and various community events. Your bourgeois pet accommodations, if you will.
Rewind to 2014 and the Germantown Mill Lofts was still in front of the planning commission, the Residences at the Omni was just a dream, the Edge on 4th was home to an empty office building and Main & Clay Apartments was 15 different parcels on a single city block.
Today, they are all new communities for city residents. Some on two legs. Some on four.
Life for Seven, a 5-month-old golden retriever puppy, and his four-legged neighbors would have looked quite different just a few years ago.
He’s not limited to a few-hundred-square-feet, a leash and whatever grass spot his people, engaged couple Matthew Wetherbee and Kaitlyn Kiely, might be able to find outside.
It’s just yards and an elevator ride from the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his people at Main & Clay Apartments to a dog park, a poolside courtyard and a community of four-legged friends.
If he’s supervised, he’s just as welcome to roam the club room and downstairs coffee lounge as his owners are.
The three of them moved to Louisville from Boston in October, so that Wetherbee could participate in a clinical trial for a spinal cord injury that’s paralyzed him from the shoulders down.
Eventually, Seven will be a service dog capable of hitting elevator buttons and retrieving whatever may be needed, but for the moment, he’s very much a puppy.
He’s buddies with the property manager, Gelina Reed, who also lives onsite with her 65-pound mutt, Major. She greets the dogs by name and throws “yappie hour” events.
It’s luxury, urban living for everyone — even if some are sipping on wine in the courtyard and others are chewing on bones.
Two miles away at Germantown Mill Lofts, Shawnna Tilton, the property manager, keeps a bowl of treats in her office.
Those treats wouldn’t have been there when she worked at a different property a decade ago. Back then, finding an apartment complex that would eagerly take an animal much larger than a cat — or even a cat — was an anomaly.
But most people aren’t going to get rid of a dog or a cat because they want to live in a specific building, so properties have become increasingly accommodating.
And more prevalent than the rise in pet ownership is an overall desire to live in downtown and its edge neighborhoods.
“I cannot believe all the young people that are moving into Louisville,” Tilton said. “Louisville is really coming into itself. It’s a really cool place to live.”
It’s a movement that’s been happening in waves and in different pockets in the city for more than a decade. When more people live in an area, it starts to feel more like a neighborhood, said Rebecca Matheny, the executive director of Louisville Downtown Partnership.
There’s been a dynamic boom in the last three years or so, but it’s been growing steadily for more than a decade with earlier upscale residential additions such as Fleur De Lis on Main.
Residents walking their dogs helps add to that neighborhood feeling, too. And it’s not exclusive to Louisville. In downtown Los Angeles, for example, some real estate developers revitalized blighted districts by targeting pet owners, Matheny said.
They waved pet deposits in their thick-walled, loft-style buildings with concrete floors. The chance of the dogs damaging industrial buildings was slim, but the likelihood that those people, their animals, and the added foot traffic could benefit the neighborhood was strong.
There’s something about having dogs around that just uplifts pedestrians and puts people at ease, Matheny said.
That wasn’t always the case, though. There’s been a dynamic mentality shift, Main & Clay property manager Reed said. For years, apartment communities viewed allowing animals as a nuisance rather than an amenity, but now it’s one of the more common search criteria, according to data from apartments.com.
Potential residents are asking, “‘Are there going to be dogs in the building?’ and now they’re excited about it,” Reed said. “It’s part of the socialization of the property almost.”
Pets today are considered part of the family, and even a bonus to residents who may want animals but don’t have the time to care for them, Tilton said.
So much so, Germantown Mill Lofts, which opened about three years ago, is investing upwards of $30,000 to build a state-of-the-art dog park outfitted with pet-friendly turf at the loft-style complex. There’s also got an indoor grooming station in the works, too.
They’ve partnered with Rebecca Williams and her pet-sitting service LouPetville to make sure the animals have care when their owners go out of town.
These new, luxury apartment buildings tend to be hubs for transplants, who don’t necessarily have good friends and relatives on hand to watch their pets when the time comes to travel back home, Tilton said.
Williams has been pet-sitting animals since she was a teenager, but it’s only been in the last couple of years that her house calls have turned to loft calls.
“It’s growing exponentially,” Williams said. “There are so many people coming in, and a lot of the people we see at the different lofts have recently moved here from larger cities.”
There are limits, of course. While many of the new apartment complexes have an industrial feel and lack carpet, these are still apartments and not farms.
Most complexes that do allow animals, have restrictions on traditionally aggressive breeds and sometimes on size. Germantown Mill Lofts has a 40-pound, two pet limit, Tilton said. The building can’t take much more than that, and it’s important to balance keeping the people with and without pets happy.
At Main & Clay, dogs as large as Reed’s mutt aren’t the norm, but they’re not unwelcome either. Major has a few neighbors about his size — including his best friend, a golden retriever named Finn — but in general, the trend is toward smaller dogs, Reed said. She sees a lot of applications from people with Yorkies, English bulldogs, and Frenchies.
Residents, in general, tend to be conscious of the lifestyle they’ve chosen and how that affects the animals they have, Tilton said. They know that a move doesn’t just affect them, it affects their dogs.
But at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily take a traditional four walls, a shingle roof and a white picket fence for a dog to feel at home.
Actually, Seven has adapted so well at Main & Clay, Kiely said moving into an actual house may be an adjustment.
They’ve got a routine. She starts her mornings with a cup of coffee and a small group of dog moms in the courtyard and usually ends the day the same way, just replacing coffee with wine.
Seven gets to run, play and wrestle with dogs in a way he wouldn’t if he was an only furball in the house.
And chances are, he’ll miss the courtyard and all his puppy friends when they’re finally gone.
“They’re all just like buddies and they play and they wrestle,” she said. “When the time comes when we have to leave and find a house, he’s not going to get near as much stimulation as he gets here.”
Source: courier-journal.com
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