Downtown Pittsburg developers face challenges

by A.J. Kohler

Pittsburg is a growing city, and because of this growth a few people have taken it upon themselves to develop apartments downtown. Those who have say there are big opportunities for those willing to jump in and renovate the city’s aging downtown buildings.

One of those developers is Jock’s Nitch owner Phil Menton, who owns four buildings downtown.

“Downtown living has really boomed,” Menton said. “It costs a lot more nowadays than it did five or six years ago to do those projects, [but] if there’s enough parking downtown you can get more rent from your apartments upstairs than your [business] tenants downstairs.”

But there are major challenges facing downtown developers—including the buildings themselves.

John Kutz, owner of TJ Leland’s developer of Leland Lofts, has been renovating in downtown Pittsburg since the 1990s.

“You have to realize that when these buildings were built that we didn’t know how to fly,” Kutz said. “The main mode of transportation was horse and buggy. They weren’t sure this whole electricity thing was going to work out.”

In addition to outdated electrical wiring, downtown buildings also often include plumbing made out of lead or cast-iron pipes, leaky roofs, and interiors that require stripping down to bare studs in order to make the spaces livable.

In renovation, Kutz found that a room had seven ceilings. 

“They just came in and put it on top, and put it on top, and put it on top,” Kutz said. “I just went in and gutted the walls, the brick walls. I gain an entire foot from just gutting the walls back.”

It’s not just the structures themselves that challenge developers. It can be difficult to attract tenants to downtown rentals because despite the area featuring many businesses, it lacks things like grocery stores.

“We’ve been trying to get a grocery store downtown,” Kutz said. “I’ve been on these downtown committees for 30 years. We’ve been trying to get a grocery store downtown for 30 years.” He said that Fernandez Market, located just east of Broadway on Fourth Street, is the closest thing they’ve gotten.

Another issue is noise as traffic, and loud cars go down Broadway everyday.

“I’m from the era where we used to drag the gut,” Kutz said. “But the motorcycles and the vehicles, there’s a lot of revving and other stuff going on.”

And then there’s crime, which some people, including developers such as Menton and Kutz, say is a real problem downtown.

“The city will tell you there’s not much crime downtown … they don’t report it,” Kutz said. “Me personally, there’ve been six different incidents where the officers didn’t give them a ticket.” 

Kutz said he even had someone climb up on his roof and step on his skylight now making it leaky.

Menton has had problems, too, including having one of his buildings broken into and stripped of copper and its radiators.  

One thing that seems to be less of a problem than in the past, though, is working with the city. Regulations and incentives can help or hinder developers. According to Kutz, it’s not necessarily the officials up top—it’s the people in charge of the day to day who he often has issues dealing with. 

“The upper-management, they get the big picture,” Kutz said. “They want us to look like Wichita or Lawrence. The further you get down the chain, the more it gets clouded.” 

But he said that whatever problems exist today, city officials are trying a lot more now than they used to, a sentiment echoed by Menton as well.

Mertson said current officials have incentivized growth through programs such as one that offers grants to cover 10% of the cost of developing projects downtown. Those grants come from the city’s Economic Development Advisory Committee.

One thing is clear, though—no matter how many apartments go in above downtown businesses, it’s still a busy downtown, and it’s still Pittsburg, Kansas.

While downtown has fluctuated in the past, Menton thinks it’s one of the strongest eras for downtown he has seen.