Downtown building owners organizing against spread of vape shops

PITTSBURGH — Harris Jones came to testify with both a running count of just how many vape shops have cropped up downtown and how quickly as well as how he’s witnessed the potential for damage they can bring.

Speaking before the Pittsburgh Planning Commission for a hearing on whether to recommend on to Pittsburgh City Council legislation to place limits on retailers largely operating as vape shops, Jones spoke as a developer and resident of the building at 824 Liberty Avenue, an historic building originally commissioned by the founder of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company and built in 1884, on what he sees from his front door.

“Within 150 feet of my residential front door, I have five of these shops. And with that comes all of the streetscape surrounding them, public drinking, drug use, street crime, loitering, fighting, public urination, drug dealing, homelessness, et cetera,” said Jones. “But the most important thing and the most powerful image that I’d like to leave you with is in the morning when I get up and drink coffee and look out my window, every time a bus unloads, I see children going to the public schools around the corner, and they flow into these stores like they’re candy shops. At 7:30 to 7:50 every morning. It makes you cry as a parent, and as a downtown resident.”