What is it about Pittsburgh’s hubris-fueled government command economists that make them so fervently believe they can defy the marketplace?
Ignorance, we can only conclude. Pure ignorance. Or pandering.
Almost six years to the day that it was announced that the government-chosen and taxpayer-subsidized Shop ‘n Save grocery store would be closing in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, word sprang back up from the rat hole, into which so much public money has been poured, that the follow-up government-chosen and taxpayer-subsidized Salem’s Market on the same site would be “pausing” operations a mere year after bowing with much ballyhoo.
Consider “pausing” a euphemism for “it’s toast.”
Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), which spearheaded the Salem’s project in concert with the city and the usual array of “stakeholders,” issued a written statement Wednesday that was woefully bereft of details but noted what should have been obvious long before construction began on either of the now-failed grocery stores:
“(W)e’ve learned that it’s not the right time for a full-service grocery store to be supported.”
A Pittsburgh city councilor cited high food prices and low foot traffic. The store manager told the Tribune-Review that theft was a big issue.
“A lot of stealing has taken place,” she said.
Good grief! Get outta town! Talk about a cluster-cluck. No, make that a double cluster-cluck. And given that all bad things tend to come in groups of three… Well, you catch our drift.
Does the URA mean to tell us that in the large cast of we-know-besters that pushed and pushed and pushed for the Shop ‘n Save and Salem’s Market, that nobody performed the due diligence that would have precluded two dives into taxpayer pockets because such full-service grocery stores could not be sustained?
Now there’s lots of new happy talk that, hey, perhaps this pair of failed government-as-grocer interventions to end all government interventions can be salvaged with, betcha by-golly wow, another government-as-grocer intervention to end all government interventions.
The “experts” who brought us both the failed Shop ‘n Save and now, the failed Salem’s, are talking of a possibly downsized store – by Salem’s or some other government-chosen entity, we suppose — to better serve the Hill District’s clientele.
That, after the constant rat-a-tat-tat of the Government/Activist Complex beating the snare drum to death that the Hill District had become a food desert and that anything less than a full-service, more-healthy-options grocery store would be a disservice to a perpetually disserved community.
What a crock. And what an absolute waste of precious taxpayer dollars that could have been spent better, in the Hill or elsewhere.
Oh, by the way, as Reason magazine noted more than a decade ago:
“Research looking at specific low-income neighborhoods and the effect of new grocers opening found no association between shopping at the new store and dietary improvements and found slightly decreased consumption of fruit and vegetables.
“A 2014 study of two neighborhoods in Philadelphia found the opening of a new supermarket improved residents’ ‘perceptions of food accessibility in the neighborhood’ but did not lead to increased consumption of fruits and vegetables,” Reason said.
And a University of Chicago study found that “policies aimed at nutrition education may be more effective at closing the nutrition gap than subsidies and grants meant to encourage building more supermarkets and farmers markets” in so-called “food deserts.”
Pittsburgh officials now have failed the sniff test twice in six years when it comes to claims of food “deserts” and nutritional deficits, believing they could command the marketplace to correct a perceived but largely dubious societal failing.
Given such recidivist behavior, expect the usual suspects to go for the poor public policy hat-trick in the Hill District, thus reaffirming that time-dishonored definition of insanity – seizing on something that doesn’t work but doing it over and over again.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
