The Post-Gazette told the tale that pretty much was preordained: “Downtown’s $600 million revitalization plan is being tested as delays and costs pile up,” the Sunday headline read.
Why “preordained”? Because, at its roots, it’s the latest in a long line of “government works” projects that government decrees but that seldom work.
Per the P-G story:
“Across Downtown, cranes in Market Square and forklifts in the Cultural District demonstrate that significant pieces of the $600 million project, announced in October by Gov. Josh Shapiro, are moving along. But elsewhere in the corridor, key buildings slated for makeovers remain untouched. Work initially scheduled to start on the 118-year-old May Building in June has yet to begin. On Wood Street, the former YWCA building remains empty and in search of a new owner.
“And months after the governor’s announcement, six of the seven residential projects anchoring the plan to reshape Downtown have been delayed,” the P-G reports.
The dispatch reminds – and we would remind again with no shortage of irony — that “Downtown revitalization plans are not new to Pittsburgh, where public and private officials have come together twice before to save the city center during downturns.”
As this scrivener noted last week, those “saves,” those government-touted “renaissances,” were merely successive interventions to paper over the failures – the taxpayer-funded lies — of the past interventions. Pittsburgh’s stubborn, continuing declining fortunes are self-evident in its population, economic and public education malaise.
Even one of the major cheerleaders for the latest attempt at “renaissance” admitted on KDKA Radio early Tuesday morning that this new effort is “scattered,” has cracks and is in need of a better focus.
But how about new glasses. How about a more discerning and educated government that, instead of attempting to command the marketplace, facilitates private investment – not through turning taxpayers into involuntary venture capitalists but through encouraging more and larger private investment by cutting the red tape and overlording that stifles bona fide investment and real growth.
By the way, the P-G story notes that, in part, a “federal funding pause” has caused the delay in one of those vaunted office-to-residential conversions.
But as a decidedly in-the-know wag with whom we regularly converse told me over the holiday weekend:
“Here we go. Another housing project failed and they are trying to blame the federal government. Seriously, I can count on both hands how many of these economic development housing projects have failed and ended up in people getting more tax credits to live there.
“What a racket,” said the wag, speaking truth to the fiction that such projects are “economic development” at all.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
