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There is something admirable about Monaca.
While other communities announce transformational visions involving innovation corridors, entrepreneurial ecosystems, catalytic investments, and enough buzzwords to power a small wind farm, Monaca generally responds by fixing the sidewalk.
This may explain why Monaca remains standing.
The borough is now undertaking a $7 million streetscape project along Pennsylvania Avenue. The plan calls for tearing out old sidewalks, installing roughly half a million bricks, adding lighting, benches, bike racks, and other improvements intended to make downtown safer, more attractive, and more inviting to businesses and pedestrians.
On paper, it sounds refreshingly practical.
The last major streetscape project was completed in 1988. That means the existing improvements are old enough to remember cassette tapes, New Coke, and the Pittsburgh Pirates winning division titles.
Even by government standards, an update was probably due.
The project is being funded through an even split between state grant money and borough funds. Meanwhile, local officials point to an additional $35 million in anticipated private investment that could help renovate vacant storefronts and commercial properties along the corridor.
Now comes the difficult question.
Will it work?
Not the sidewalks. The sidewalks will almost certainly work. People have been successfully walking on bricks for several thousand years.
The larger question is whether nicer sidewalks can revive a downtown.
Across America, municipalities have spent decades pursuing what might be called the Brick Theory of Economic Development. The theory holds that if enough decorative pavers, flower pots, and vintage-style lamp posts are installed, entrepreneurs will magically appear.
Sometimes they do.
More often, the benches arrive first and the customers never quite get around to following them.
Monaca’s leaders deserve credit for recognizing this reality. They are not merely rebuilding sidewalks. They are betting that public investment will encourage private investment. In ordinary English, that means hoping someone opens a business after the construction crews leave.
Yet there are reasons to believe Monaca’s odds may be better than average.
For one thing, some of the pieces are already beginning to appear on the board.
Consider Valley Vintage Motorworks, that wonderfully eccentric enterprise devoted to restoring vintage mopeds and motorcycles. Any town willing to devote storefront space to preserving obscure European two-stroke machinery is at least trying to cultivate a distinctive personality.
Then there is Steel House, which has helped bring customers and activity back to Pennsylvania Avenue. A downtown with restaurants has a fighting chance. A downtown without them generally becomes a place people drive through on their way somewhere else.
Soon the corridor will also include a new gallery and creative space being developed by artist Emmanuel Panagiotakis. Art galleries do not automatically create economic development, but they do create something almost as important: reasons for people to linger.
And then there is the factor nobody likes to discuss publicly because it sounds suspiciously like the way things have always worked in Western Pennsylvania.
Connections matter.
Monaca happens to enjoy the quiet support of Leroy Ball, chief executive officer of Koppers, incoming chairman of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Monaca native, and Beaver County resident.
In regional economic-development circles, that is rather like discovering your cousin has unexpectedly become chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Ball now occupies one of the most influential economic-development positions in Pennsylvania while maintaining deep roots in the community where he grew up.
Leroy Ball is what Donnie Brasco might have called “a connected guy.”
That does not guarantee success. It does mean Monaca’s phone calls are likely to be returned.
Which, as every veteran of economic development eventually discovers, is often half the battle.
The encouraging news is that Monaca sits in the middle of one of the most economically active corridors in Beaver County. It benefits from proximity to Shell, continued industrial activity along the Ohio River, and a regional economy that has proven more resilient than many expected.
In other words, there is at least some economic wind at the borough’s back.
But skepticism remains warranted.
Economic development veterans eventually learn a painful lesson: infrastructure is necessary, but it is rarely sufficient.
A beautifully restored downtown with no compelling businesses is simply a more attractive place to be disappointed.
The challenge facing Monaca is the same challenge facing nearly every traditional downtown in America. The competition is no longer just the neighboring borough. It is every strip center with free parking and every consumer who can order almost anything without leaving the couch.
Brick sidewalks cannot solve that problem.
Neither can bike racks.
What can solve it is creating a district people actually want to visit. That requires restaurants, specialty retailers, entertainment, housing, events, and enough activity to make people choose Pennsylvania Avenue over staying home in sweatpants.
That is considerably harder than laying bricks.
Still, there is something to be said for Monaca’s approach.
The borough has never been especially susceptible to grandiosity. Unlike some communities that spend years announcing plans, Monaca generally spends its time pouring concrete and replacing water lines.
There is a reason the tortoise remains a popular character in children’s literature.
The tortoise occasionally wins.
The next five years will tell us whether Monaca’s leaders have correctly read the moment. If the private investment materializes, storefronts fill up, and the corridor develops into a genuine destination, today’s construction headaches may eventually be remembered as the beginning of something important.
If not, Beaver County will possess one of the most attractive collections of sidewalks in Western Pennsylvania.
Which, admittedly, would still be an improvement over having unattractive sidewalks.
Monaca’s strategy is neither flashy nor revolutionary. It is essentially the municipal equivalent of eating vegetables, paying off debt, and getting to work on time.
As strategies go, worse ones have certainly been tried.
We should know within a few years whether it works.
Or at least by the time the bricks need replaced again.
