Pittsburgh’s South Side will hire a manager to promote business district, attract stores

Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood may soon have some help in attracting businesses to East Carson Street.

The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership wants to hire a business district manager, who will be responsible for recruiting and retaining stores and businesses in the South Side’s business district. The manager will work to bring more businesses into the vacant storefronts on Carson Street, keep existing ones interested in staying in the neighborhood, and promote the neighborhood in general.

“The business district manager will be doing a lot of business promotion, a lot of business retention, business attraction, and working to promote the South Side and really elevate the district in terms of the economy of the district, and not just the public safety aspects of it,” said City Councilor Bob Charland, who represents the neighborhood.

The South Side has seen progress with public safety improvements in the past few years after a spike in crime, he said. But it could still stand to see improvement on the business front, with its approximately 26% vacancy rate.

Charland said there was “a strong desire from the district to have this individual working. It’s something they’ve been pushing for for a while. It was definitely a goal for me in my first year to get this program up and running.”

Duties for the position, according to a job listing for it, include building relationships and consensus with business and property owners, studying real-estate trends and coordinating efforts to take advantage of business opportunities in the area.

Other neighborhoods, including Downtown, Allentown, Oakland and Bloomfield, have similar positions, often funded by community development corporations or other neighborhood organizations. The South Side itself has had such a manager before, though the position –—and the South Side Local Development Company, which supported it — shut down in 2012 after the neighborhood’s real-estate market improved.

This time around, the manager will be employed by the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, which currently handles trash pickups in the South Side. But the goal is to eventually spin up an organization for the South Side itself.

“PDP’s role in this really is inherently temporary,” said Aaron Sukenik, vice president of district development at the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. “We’re just giving them the support to get it off the ground in the hopes that it can be sustainably funded and then transition to that South side based entity after the two year pilot period.”

Sukenik himself was the neighborhood’s last business manager, and he says it’s no surprise that the position is being recreated now.

“In community development, I’ve often heard it’s spoken of as like cycles, where you have conditions that need to be stabilized, that need to be reinvented, re-invested in and then preserved,” he said. “That preservation of that relative health from 10-15 years ago is what has fallen off. So now we’re back at the beginning of that cycle, in that stabilization phase.”

The new position will initially be funded through grants from the Hillman Family Foundations, UPMC and the Birmingham Foundation. Charland says they will also seek state and federal money.

A business district advisory committee will advise the new manager, said Sukenik. Ed John, who works with the South Side Community Action Network, said South Side building and business owners on the committee will help provide guidance.

“Currently, I believe we have over 20 applicants for the Main Street manager position, and we have several people from the advisory committee that will partner with the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership to do the interviews and select the manager,” he said. “Then on a monthly basis, the manager will meet with the advisory committee and just review progress, the goals that have been established.”

John hopes the new manager will help bring about reduced vacancies and crime, a diverse set of businesses and an improved image of the South Side.

“East Carson Street is such a tremendous asset and I think it has the ability to attract visitors to enhance quality of life and help businesses thrive. But now, it’s got some big challenges,” he said. “This is a way to try to realize the potential and overcome those challenges.”

Charland says he hopes to see the position filled in the first quarter of next year.