Nearly every chair is filled in Dave Pegg’s Barbering &
Shave Parlor mid-morning in mid-August.
Owner Dave Pegg, who has operated his own barbershop for six
years, opened a storefront in the Applegate Building in Sharon, Pa. this
spring.
Business at the Sharpsville Avenue shop has been steady
since the move, Pegg reports. “It stays busy. It’s been great,” he says.
“He’s doing very well. There’s a ton of foot traffic down
there. It’s really an intimate but rustic-feeling barber shop,” says Riley
Atterholt, development director for JCL Development, which owns the Applegate
Building.
Redevelopment of the building – where a gift shop will join
Pegg’s shop later this year, followed by a new restaurant set to open February
– represents just one component of the public and private-sector efforts to
revitalize downtown Sharon.
This month, consultants hired by the city will begin work on
two studies, one focusing on developing a strategy for addressing blighted
properties and the other exploring the feasibility of a neighborhood
improvement district, reports Melissa Phillips, community and economic
development director for the city of Sharon.
These studies follow a volunteer-led mapping initiative that
took place last September. About 70 volunteers spread through the city and
assessed each of the city’s buildings.
“The good news to come out of that is that overwhelmingly
there were far more good and excellent structures than blighted property,”
Phillips says.
Unfortunately, the blighted structures are the most
noticeable ones so the bad “seems to outweigh the good, even though the numbers
aren’t necessarily there,” Phillips concedes.
The blight study will be done through the Housing Alliance
of Pennsylvania.
The city has designated an area bordered by Hull Street to
the north, Jefferson Avenue to the east, East State Street to the south and
Sharpsville Avenue to the west. Workers have made infrastructure improvements,
including installation of a bike lane and curbing for sidewalks. And the city
has taken down 15 houses, mostly held by owners who died, Phillips says.
Before the city can move forward on demolition, it goes
through a “very substantial due diligence process” to identify the owner and
give them or their estate the opportunity to remediate the property.
Sharon does its best to voluntarily care for the abandoned
properties, which the city still doesn’t own, but “we don’t have enough employees
to do that,” Phillips adds.
Using Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership and Youngstown
Neighborhood Development Corp. as “inspiration” and conducting research on what
other communities across the country are doing, the city has developed a
“three-pronged approach” that is contingent on state approval. To read the full story from Business Journal, click here.
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