Should there be a task force to attract businesses?

Yesterday, I wrote a post about my visit to a restaurant on 79th Street (btw, the establishment in question was Pepe's on 79th & Indiana). Also yesterday JP piggy-backed on my post to talk about his favorite business which will close at the end of this week.

Which leads me to connect those two post with one that I had found over at the EveryBlock blog. I think that can be as useful here in the 6th Ward as we seek to rebuild our local commercial areas. It's about a community message regarding Bronzeville posted on EveryBlock. This was the initial message:

Residents of Bronzeville and surrounding areas, let's put our heads together and brainstorm the types of businesses that we'd like in our neighborhood! Step 1: Give 1-3 suggestions, along with where you think the businesses should be located. I'll leave this open for a few days and we'll move onto Step 2, which will be counting the suggestions and narrowing down to the top three suggestions. After that, we'll take it from there. Thanks in advance!

As we learn this thread formed the basis of an eventual task force created to investigate what businesses should be located in that community.

We know that various communities in the 6th Ward have been opposed to a dollar store or more recently a pawn shop located within our neighborhoods, but certainly now is the time to find ways to attract other businesses here. Is it time to consider creating a task force for the purposes of bringing desired businesses to our community?