The best government is the least government – government that gets out of the way, we repeatedly have said.
That doesn’t mean there should not be rules, regulations and oversight. But those should be the least intrusive possible. That is, government should facilitate, not command.
Two members of Pittsburgh City Council would be wise to heed that maxim.
The story has been well and oft told that the city’s land bank is badly broken. As the Post-Gazette reminds:
“Despite launching the land bank nearly a decade ago as a powerful tool to combat urban blight, local officials failed to codify a legal mechanism to move dilapidated city-owned properties to the agency, effectively paralyzing its ability to function.
“(P)roposed legislation — which would establish that process and tackle the backlog of properties in the city’s inventory — was brought back for a briefing in April, shortly after a Post-Gazette investigation revealed perpetual delays in the city’s ability to turn ramshackle homes over to housing advocates and other developers.”
How bad is the situation?
The P-G says “nearly 5,000 city-owned properties across Pittsburgh are deteriorating with no comprehensive plan to put them back on the tax rolls.”
Yet the pair of councilors want to micro-manage the process, a certain recipe for further delays.
As the P-G reports, proposed new legislation would allow the land bank to take in properties from the city’s inventory, which would speed up the resale process.
“Without the changes, developers looking to revive city properties must continue to wait as long as five years — if the process succeeds at all, records and interviews show.”
How onerous is that attempt to command the process?
One of the council members told the P-G that she would probably vote yes on the proposal if the council were offered two votes in the property transfer process — one vote to send city-owned properties to the land bank, and another to approve the end-buyer.
The P-G says that would be “a level of involvement unprecedented in successful land banks elsewhere.”
Which is certain to keep the moribund land bank not merely dysfunctional but nonfunctional. In a phrase, bureaucratically bankrupt.
For as Albert Einstein once put it:
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
