Pittsburgh City Council has rejected an alternative, less-expansive version of an inclusionary zoning ordinance.
One down, one to go.
The bill, introduced as a flaccid counter to Mayor Ed Gainey’s citywide inclusionary zoning plan, would have allowed city neighborhoods to decide the issue on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
But that’s akin to making a very bad and misguided policy a little less pregnant.
In a nutshell, inclusionary zoning mandates that a certain percentage of housing in new developments be “affordable.” That’s the “progressive” theory.
But in the real world, in practice, it is a price control that results in fewer housing units being built. And where inclusionary zoning has survived – that is, forced down the throats of developers (some have even called it an unlawful taking) – it results in higher costs for the non-subsidized units to cover the cost of government’s forced, and faux, “affordability.”
It is, in essence, a tax on housing. And, of course, the more you tax something, the less you get of it.
Now, to the “one to go” part:
That the citywide version of this proposed legislation survives is a sad, and shocking, testament to the continuing economics ignorance of Pittsburgh’s “leaders” and their recidivist sophist behavior.
For as once was written:
“Our ignorance is the raw material of every extortion that is practiced upon us, and we may be certain beforehand that every sophism is the precursor of an act of plunder.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
