City Grill

Photo courtesy ECS Mid-Atlantic

J. Matthew Carroll 
Office Manager, Principal 
ECS Mid-Atlantic

A crop of “determined folks in the region” are redeveloping or looking to redevelop older industrial properties for “all sorts of interesting projects to generate value and business on sites that have long been neglected,” says Carroll, noting that while these projects have great locations, permitting can be challenging.

“Financing versus construction costs has also been a challenge over the past couple of years, so it has been hard to make the numbers work in some cases.”
But South Central Pennsylvania has historically been “somewhat insulated from the extreme economic shocks some other areas of the country have endured,” Carroll says.

Located within a two-hour drive of larger metro areas, the state capital’s diversity of industry and good transportation corridors makes the area “one of the central hubs of growth and stability within Pennsylvania,” he says.

Carroll is bullish on the region’s outlook for 2025. “Most consultants we have spoken to in recent months have a deep log of proposals that are still on the street just waiting for a green light, which we anticipate will start to happen in Q4 2024 into Q1 2025,” he says.