Pittsburgh Business Times - Corbett Announces $3M Grant to Kick Off $20M ARC House Redevelopment on North Side

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By Tim Schooley

After doling out multi-million dollar grants to projects downtown and in the Mon Valley in recent weeks, Gov. Tom Corbett turned his attention Monday to the city's North Side, where he announced a new $3 million Economic Growth Initiative grant to help spur a new $20 million mixed-use project on East Ohio Street.

The project is centered around the restoration of what was most recently known as the former ARC House building, a halfway house for recovering alcoholics that closed years ago, leaving empty a 20,000-square-foot historic former bank in which it operated.

With the new funding from the state, a team lead by North Side-based October Development and assisted by the North Side Leadership Conference expects to push forward with a project to build a new 120-room hotel, a 300-space parking garage and a 36-unit apartment building on a stretch of East Ohio Street that is an active junction for nearby Interstate 279 and Route 28, a collection of roadways that generates 100,000 passing cars each day.

Mark Fatla, executive director of the North Side Development Conference and a spokesman for October, thanked Corbett and the Commonwealth for funding he expects will help with a big project to transform a gateway location for all the North Side neighborhoods.

"It's an incredibly important site for the Deutschtown neighborhood and for the North Side as a whole. It's about remaking that entry point. Right now, what you see is a beautiful but vacant bank building and a bunch of empty lots and vacant and decaying structures. It's not what the North Side is," he said.

A core component of the project is a plan to restore the former Workingman's Savings Bank in what Fatla said will be a new restaurant and banquet facility.

In an announcement of the new grant, Corbett continued his campaign of rebranding what were formerly known as RACP grants, through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program for which they were named, into his new EGI grants, with funding decisions going to projects based upon "their job-creation potential, their economic impact, as well as their viability and construction readiness."

Corbett said in a prepared statement: "This investment will continue our mission of making the city of Pittsburgh a premier, worldwide destination. "Bringing people and jobs to North Side area will ensure that we can continue to build a stronger city and state."

Fatla said financing for the new development project is in place but still to be finalized; he declined to divulge other funding sources except for the North Side Community Development Fund, a subsidiary of the North Side Leadership Conference.

It's a project larger than October has taken on in the past. The development company has mostly built a mix of single family homes and smaller commercial properties, along with the ongoing development of a collection of smaller projects at the junction of Butler Street and Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville called Doughboy Square.

Yet Fatla indicated the North Side project, which has been in the planning stages for nearly five years, also will have other development partners which he declined to name until all the agreements are finalized.

The hotel will be new a Comfort Inn by Choice Hotels, with the hotel brand working to implement a new urban model used elsewhere that will be the first in the region here.

Construction of the project has yet to be scheduled and is to be coordinated to follow a PennDOT reconstruction of East Ohio Street, which has also yet to start but is expected to be completed some time next year.

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