The first phone call, from an elected official, came in 45 minutes before last week’s McKees Rocks Borough Council meeting. I was busy with another meeting and didn’t take the call.
Not long into the council meeting, while I was still in my own meeting (a five-couple marriage enhancement meeting that’s been going on for months), the text messages started.
Allegheny County Housing Authority had conceded to not rebuild both Uansa Village and Hays Manor, agreeing to allow the borough to find other uses for the land.
The battle was years long and even longer in the run-up, as succeeding generations of elected officials and invested citizenry and business owners had longed for the day when the town’s primary corridor for development potential would no longer be tethered to low-income housing, which severely limited developer interest.
The Stowe/McKees Rocks area, between ACHA, NGO and Section 8 housing, still has more such housing than any other town per capita in the state of Pennsylvania, but having no concentrated plans abutting the reclaimed brown field of the old P&LE railyard and the town’s Carson Street entrance from the City of Pittsburgh will alleviate many of the risk concerns that made developers wary of investing in redevelopment.
This will also mean the successful Roxian Theater, which routinely hosts national acts and sold-out shows, can likely be joined by some supportive “art district” type restaurant and niche entertainment businesses after years of slogging it out without such cohesive and mutually beneficial commerce nearby.
This moment of hope is great.
It also has no guarantees.
It’s up to leaders to dream big, reach far and hone their sales pitch for big development. Now is the time to look upriver to the massive infrastructure work going on ahead of a billion dollar resort-style complex in the construction stage just down from the Rivers Casino, Kamin Science Center and the stadium/ballpark complex on the North Shore.
If that former waste land can birth dreams, this former home of hardworking fabrication, milling and industrial transport can certainly do so as well.
We’re nine miles from the retail heart of Robinson, yet everyone goes there to buy a case of paper or lumber, or to go to a movie.
It’s time to convince developers that folks in Brighton Heights, Bellevue, West End, Sheraden, Ingram and other nearby areas would rather not have a 20-mile round trip for such and would spend their dollars in new retail spaces right here on the best, most easily developed land on the Pittsburgh city line.
It’s not time to buy the “we have to settle for substandard, because we can’t get better” line that has been bandied about during the duration of these conversations around the now vacated rebuilding of low-income plans.
The mere absence of such plans immediately multiplies potential for convincing formerly gun-shy (sometimes quite literally so) developers that a new day has dawned in McKees Rocks, one that will take work, but one that will help lift folks up in our town instead of sentencing them to a perpetual state of mediocrity at best and squalor at our recent history’s worst.
A future can be had where our town can be a destination for folks throughout the Pittsburgh area, taking the proven draw of our celebrated concert venue to a broader, more consistent and supportive reality.
We can be glad an opportunity has opened up.
Now we must make the best of it.
The Rev. James Hogan is a native of Stowe Township and serves as pastor of Faithbridge Community Church. His views do not reflect the views of the West Hills Gazette.
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