We are forced to wonder if taxpayers are being set up again for another wallet raid:
The Post-Gazette reports that PNC is evaluating its “strategy” to repurpose 500 Smithfield Street.
If that address doesn’t ring a bell and conjure up an iconic image, allow us to help — It’s the former and once-grand Mellon Bank in downtown Pittsburgh that has been vacant for nearly eight years.
It’s the same building for which Pittsburgh taxpayers had their pockets turned out 24 years ago to largely gut and turn it into a Lord & Taylor department store.
Then-Mayor Tom Murphy’s recidivist exercise in command economics crashed and burned four years later. It was a predictable and utter failure weighing in at a hefty $11.8 million.
Lest we forget the previous, far more expensive multimillion-dollar Murphy-inspired failure of the taxpayer-financed Downtown Lazarus department store.
PNC, no stranger to taxpayer-financed “progress” – taxpayers “contributed” nearly $50 million to one of its Downtown skyscrapers — bought the old Mellon building for $3.85 million in 2012, restored much of its original, gutted splendor, and turned the four-story building into a call center.
Per the P-G:
“At one time, up to 800 employees worked there. But in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic emptied out the building. Four years later, it is still vacant amid hybrid work policies and rising office vacancies in the Golden Triangle.
“According to real estate sources, PNC is now trying to find a taker for the building and is perhaps even willing to virtually donate it if it finds the right user. It does not list the building for sale or for lease on its website,” the P-G says.
With a long-term property tax abatement program already in place for some qualified rehabilitation/repurposing project or projects, it’s quite possible that there will be taxpayer money involved in any deal.
But how much more, and in what configuration, would be appropriate? None, we would say.
For the umpteenth time, taxpayers have no business being involuntarily turned into venture capitalists for private businesses.
The fact that 500 Smithfield Street has such a checkered history in the last quarter-century is the marketplace speaking loud and clear that there’s little free market economic efficiency to utilizing the space.
And as we’ve repeatedly noted, confiscating precious taxpayer dollars in the name of making such sales, repurposings and/or rehabilitations “more affordable” is oxymoronic.
Indeed, it’s “more affordable” for the private entity morphed into a sucker fish for public dollars. But it’s certainly not so for taxpayers who yet again are despoiled of another wad of their hard-earned income.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
