The Tribune-Review reports that the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority has announced $43.2 million in state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program (RACP) grants.
But the question surrounding a few of these awards is a big WHY? And it is a perennial question every time these RACP grants are made.
Thirty-one projects across the city are receiving the money. Some, indeed, appear to be worthy.
For instance, there’s money for several nonprofit community groups. And there’s money to help hospital projects, a riverfront park and to help build a new veterinary center at the National Aviary.
As the Trib notes, the grant program is administered by the Pennsylvania Office of the Budget and provides funding for “the acquisition and construction of regional economic, cultural, civic, recreational and historical improvement projects.”
But a few of these projects are totally private projects and have no business receiving taxpayer underwriting.
To wit:
• The Oakland Crossings development, a mixed-use project, is receiving $4 million to help pay for land acquisition, site work, infrastructure and utilities. But this is a private development. And it’s the developer who should be paying for everything, including the increased demand it will create on the public infrastructure and those utilities. Period.
The developer rationalizes that the project will create 4,000 jobs through its construction and contribute to the tax base once completed. But, again, the public has absolutely no business being forced into the role of a venture capitalist. Picking the public pocket (yet again) is the epitome of poor public policy.
Socializing any part of the risk that the developer alone should bear in pursuit of private profit usually is.
• Equally suspect is public money for the new City Club Apartments, described as a new 20-story high-rise tower to be built atop the former YWCA building Downtown. It’s receiving $2 million. The project includes a rooftop pool, a two-story restaurant and a health club.
Why should taxpayers help to pay for such a thing? Simply put, they should not be, even with 10 percent of the 300-apartment project including units of so-called “affordable housing.”
Money being fungible, taxpayers at large essentially are being asked to pay for someone else’s “affordability.”
• Another eyebrow-raiser is the $1 million RACP grant for the Pittsburgh Press Building Redevelopment project. Taxpayers will be helping to underwrite what’s described as “the full rehabilitation of the interior and exterior of the Downtown building to transform into a Class A office building.”
WHAT?! Downtown Class A office space has been suffering from historic-high vacancy rates since well before the pandemic hit in early 2020. And things have become so bad that even millions of dollars more of public money is being earmarked to help convert unused office space into apartments.
And now taxpayers are being forced to subsidize even more top-tier office space?
Talk about a circular public policy firing squad.
“It’s tremendous the resources that are coming into our area,” said City Councilman R. Daniel Lavelle, who serves on the URA board.
More’s the pity that scarce taxpayer dollars are being laundered to private developers that should have no claim on public money.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the
Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org)
