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Leave it to a professional stand-up comedian to put the best face on a dream that didn’t quite pan out.
Steve Hofstetter announced this month he’ll be selling the property that’s been home for four years to his Steel City Arts Foundation — or, as it’s amusingly known, Steel City AF. Hofstetter came to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles in 2021 to launch a nonprofit comedy performance and production center, complete with residencies for emerging comics. He created the foundation to honor his late father.
Hofstetter achieved some of his goals in the former Methodist church he purchased in Stanton Heights. Key successes included residencies for a dozen comics, most notably Learnmore Jonasi, who rose to national fame this year as a finalist on “America’s Got Talent.” Another comic who came to town for a residency and stayed is Ronnie Fleming, a nationally touring comedian who now hosts Pittsburgh’s “secret” pop-up Don’t Tell comedy nights.
But to completely realize his vision, Hofstetter said, he needed zoning changes it proved too difficult to obtain.
In a nutshell, he said, the property when he bought it was listed as commercially zoned. But that was a mistake: In reality, it was zoned as a church, and if Hofstetter had been up for starting one of those, he’d have been fine. But what he really wanted was to host live performances there, and for that the zoning had to be changed to a “cultural or community” use in a neighborhood that’s now zoned almost entirely residential.
Between legal fees and expenses like a parking study, he said, he spent about $50,000 on the effort.
“We realized it’s just becoming untenable,” he said, speaking for himself and his team.
Even had rezoning been possible, he said, retrofitting to meet the standards of the new classification would have been cost-prohibitive.
“We would be spending more on the building than we would on helping artists. And I never want to run one of those charities that spends 90% of its budget on itself instead of its mission,” he said. (By the way, he said, none of the problems involved neighborhood opposition: “The vast majority of the community has been incredibly supportive,” he said.)
Hofstetter is a successful enough touring comedian that Steel City AF has been largely funded out of his own pocket — some $500,000 over the past four years, he estimated, speaking by phone Nov. 15 from a tour stop in Portland, Maine.
Some entrepreneurs might be bitter about being thwarted by zoning law, but Hofstetter sounded simply disappointed. He wasn’t even too upset about the original error listing the property commercial.
“If not for that mistake, I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place, and we have been able to do some really great things while we were there, so I’m OK with that,” he said.
Other developments soften the blow as well. This past summer, Hofstetter opened Sunken Bus Studios, a space in another former church on Babcock Boulevard that hosts nationally touring comedians and wrestling shows multiple nights each month.
And Steel City AF isn’t going away, just changing course. While it won’t be hosting residencies any more, it’s turning to helping local comics with micro-grants — one-time gifts Hofstetter anticipates will mostly fall between $500 and $1,000 for things like medical bills, plane fare to a comedy festival, or paying a comic’s rent during seasonal lulls.
Meanwhile, Hofstetter is preparing the property for sale. The lot on Stanton Avenue has been subdivided into two parcels, one including the main church building of about 15,000 square feet, and the other a three-bedroom house. He expects to list the house first.
I asked Hofstetter who’ll want a whole church as much as he did.
“It’ll likely be purchased to be the most inexpensive mansion in Pittsburgh,” he quipped.
