A few weeks before Gov. Josh Shapiro arrived in Harrisburg to make a splashy announcement of $64 million toward a revitalization plan for the capital city, local officials faced a far less photogenic task: finding $2.3 million to return to the state. The city had failed to finish a playground project at Reservoir Park before its grant deadline expired, despite multiple extensions. Indeed, in Pennsylvania’s capital, even free money apparently requires more administrative competence than we can reliably supply.
That’s why the mood in Harrisburg is flickering somewhere between cautiously optimistic and carefully pessimistic after Shapiro’s September 28 announcement of $64 million in public and private investment — including $22.7 million of state money —under the banner“Harrisburg Works for All of Us.” Given the city’s current moribund state, that slogan almost feels ironic — it barely works. It’s too bad the plan’s long-term success relies heavily on the two parties least equipped to deliver it: a corrupt, incompetent mayor in Wanda Williams and a do-nothing City Hall often at war with her.
First, the good news. On paper, there is plenty to like: a new downtown hotel, improvements to the criminally underutilized Susquehanna Riverfront, and funding to develop a master plan to revitalize City Island. There’s also vague talk of improving public safety technology and parking woes. But for nearly every nice bullet point in Shapiro’s Harrisburg agenda, there’s a caveat or an incomplete grade.
What no one will say is that this plan is a compensation package for the partial withdrawal of the state government. This is a company town, and that company is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It’s by far the biggest landlord here, and it pays no property taxes. Harrisburg became a ghost town during Covid, and six years later, it still hasn’t fully returned to its pre-2020 self. Why? Despite a return-to-office mandate, many Commonwealth employees have stayed fully remote or work hybrid, and the old five-day lunch crowd is a thing of the past. Shapiro’s Space Optimization & Utilization Project (SOUP), released in 2025, reflects this new reality; it shrank the government’s office footprint in Harrisburg and beyond to cut costs. In the end, there was no reason to keep up the facade of big office spaces with fewer people.
The savings make sense on the state’s balance sheet. But what’s good for Pennsylvania taxpayers is bad for Harrisburg on the ground, and the scarcity of state workers has helped fuel the doom-loop effect. Walk downtown on a Monday or Tuesday morning, and you’ll find nearly as many homeless people shuffling through the streets near the green-domed Capitol building as state workers. Over the last three years, restaurants, pharmacies, and other needed retail have closed, and a stretch of Second Street resembles a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with trash in the streets and people sleeping in doorways of abandoned buildings. When pasta joint Pastorante closed in mid-2025, the owner cited declining business, neighborhood bar fights, the odor of marijuana everywhere, and a shop window shattered by gunfire. They moved to nearby Steelton, which isn’t exactly fleeing to a crime-free paradise.
