The Pittsburgh Downtown Community Development Corp. “is working with the city, developers, landlords and other stakeholders to create an ‘urban village’ filled with cafes, bookstores, boutiques and other shops – in addition to restaurants,” the Post-Gazette reports.
The idea, nonprofit corporation executive director John Valentine says, is “to build a shopping district that is not the same as a mall.”
One part of the group’s plan is novel if not noble. It involves private assessments on Downtown businesses that would serve as something of an insurance fund to cover any lease defaults. Say a small business goes under and can’t honor its lease, money from the fund would be used to pay the lease until a new tenant can be found.
It’s unclear whether any public subsidies would be sought as “seed money” to begin this fund, to be set at $100,000. But, that said, the public has no business underwriting what should be a purely private effort.
But even then, there’s an overriding problem with this proposal – the idea that such a “village” can be successfully planned to begin with. “Central planning,” be it proposed by a private group or by a government entity, seldom works.
While the word “organic” is horribly cliché, it’s appropriate for this discussion. To wit, the resounding and long-running success of the South Side (excluding the SouthSide Works), Strip District and Bloomfield, among others neighborhoods, came not from any central plan but private businesses developing on their own — each private business complementing other private businesses.
That is, the proverbial butchers, bakers and candlestick makers came into being on their own, based on demand – not because of some central planning “vision” that usually turns out to be myopic.
And that said, “churn,” the ebb and flow of some businesses coming and going, is part of the natural order of things. Central planning interventionism is a market perversion sure to harm the entire “village.”
It was in 2015 that the City of Pittsburgh passed an ordinance making it mandatory for landlords to participant in the federal Section 8 housing vouchers program.
But on March 13, the Tribune-Review reports, an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge ruled that the ordinance is invalid and unenforceable because the city’s home rule charter prevents such regulation of private business.
And never mind that Section 8 housing is supposed to be a voluntary program.
The ordinance was challenged two years ago by the Apartment Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh.
The same judge, by the way, Joseph James, employed a like rational in overturning two other Pittsburgh ordinances. One mandated training for security guards. The other mandated that private businesses provide paid sick leave.
Both of those latter rulings have been appealed. Past being prologue, expect the latest court ruling to be appealed as well. But it’s pretty clear what the rule of law is on all three matters.
The Associated Press wonders if a little-known provision in the new federal tax bill will have a financial effect on professional sports teams that bolster their income mightily from luxury suites.
Heretofore, businesses entertaining potential and existing clients could deduct 50 percent of that expense from their taxes. The new tax bill eliminated that deduction.
So, will that result in less corporate schmoozing? The jury’s still out on that one. But if it does, and it results in less income for say, the Pittsburgh Pirates, Steelers and Penguins, how might those already heavily publicly subsidized sports franchises attempt to make up the money?
Stay tuned. Or, given that the fallback position might well be an ugly caricature of market economics – such as attempting to raid public coffers to make up the difference — perhaps stay “tooned,” as in cartoonish, might be the better phrase.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
