It is a vast and, supposedly, grand plan that the latest crop of we-know-best central planners have foisted upon taxpayers in an attempt to “rejuvenate” a large swath of downtown Pittsburgh.
Not since then-Mayor Tom Murphy’s plan three decades ago to bulldoze a large expanse of the Golden Triangle for his Fifth & Forbes folly (thankfully nipped in the bud, thanks, in large part, to the Allegheny Institute’s research) that was followed by taxpayer-financed department stores (that, predictably, failed) have so many proverbial powers that be poured their hubris into the same pot.
This latest central planning effort — consuming $600 million over 10 years — involves millions of taxpayer dollars to be taken from state and local coffers, augmented by a smattering of millions more from local corporations, foundations and professional sports franchises.
The effort is centered upon the belief that converting vacated high-rise office and retail spaces into residential units and making major upgrades to the city’s Cultural District will revitalize a Golden Triangle that has grown long in the tooth.
The COVID pandemic is blamed for the decline. But, truth be told, rising office vacancy rates were a problem before that with landlords long failing to make building upgrades that would have better kept their tenants from voting with their feet.
This grand plan, we are promised, will make Downtown a Mecca once again for all things sunny and bright. Never mind that the demand for this new housing has not been demonstrated. (Had it, the expected market rewards, i.e. profits, would not have necessitated such taxpayer “pump-priming.”)
As one wag with whom we regularly confer, put it, with its cohort of “affordable housing” units and lack of demand for the balance, this effort has all the markings of a Downtown housing project, with all the usual negative connotations of warehoused poor.
And more than a few observers have wryly noted the ancillary Cultural District project items have all the markings of gussying up the same old pig with new lipstick to showcase a modern Potemkin Village in advance of the 2026 NFL Draft, an event for which government-types have yet to reveal how much taxpayers will be soaked.
Another wag with whom we regularly converse notes that it is “going to take a lot of time to parse out the most important specifics of all this funding, where it’s coming from and how it gets deployed, not to mention if and how well.”
And that’s perhaps the most salient point: With this latest central plan to end all central plans, confiscated taxpayer dollars will be employed not according to the marketplace but by the whims of central planners who can’t possibly know “how well” to deploy those dollars – but, and, again, with great hubris, believe they do.
It’s why so many government-concocted grand plans are recipes for disaster.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
