At West Chester U., one of the few schools in the state system to experience growth in recent years, the student population has reached 17,600.
Trendy restaurants and boutique shops followed.Īll that activity and the town’s walkability attracted young adults, many from surrounding Chester County, where the average median household income is a state-high $100,000. Events like food festivals, a nighttime bicycle race, and an Old-Fashioned Christmas Parade lured people downtown. Expensive new townhomes and condos were popping up throughout West Chester’s 1.84 square miles. The situation is especially fraught for restaurateurs their trade is the dominant employer in town after government.īefore COVID, building-permit applications and home values had been rising steadily. “I left a cushy job with Sodexo to open this place and I haven’t gotten a paycheck since.”Īdding to all the winter-related angst for those shops whose business has been bolstered by the big weekend dining crowds is the realization that the make-or-break Christmas season is right around the corner. “I didn’t qualify for any funding because I wasn’t open prior to all this,” said Josh Taggert, whose Mae’s West Chester debuted in May. And many businesses, particularly those who didn’t benefit from the first round of COVID relief, say they’ll soon need financial assistance. Ongoing governmental restraints continue to frustrate merchants. That was one out of every three jobs in that area.Īnd with many office workers still at home and West Chester University almost entirely virtual, weekday foot traffic long ago dried up.
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According to government figures, 2,000 businesses in the zip codes that include West Chester received about $170 million in aid earlier this year from the antivirus Paycheck Protection Program, enough to save at least 17,000 jobs. Moreover, the town clearly benefited from an infusion of federal aid - money that is no longer flowing.
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