The new year begins much as the old year ended – with a wishful (though typically uneducated) push for converting empty downtown Pittsburgh office space to residential units.
First out of the gate was a Tuesday editorial in a local newspaper that flat-out declared “Office to residential conversions are smart, but complicated.”
“Complicated,” yes. But “smart”? Well, that remains a dubious characterization.
As the mantra of the urban central planners goes, the royal “we” can save America’s hollowed-out office occupancy rates by undertaking such conversions.
And, don’t you know, the results can be a societal twofer – reversing Downtown office vacancy rates and offering “affordable” housing at the same time.
But, and as per usual, hold on to your wallets. Because developer after developer of such proposed conversions say they only make sense if they can receive some sort of taxpayer help.
This is what the local editorial refers to as “the economics of these conversions” being “complex.”
But the turn of the year does nothing to change the simple fact that it was because the marketplace that spoke – and had been speaking for years before the blamed pandemic – tanked the office market. Think stagnant population and job numbers but continued high government costs and onerous regulations piled ever higher.
While some office tower owners responded with upgrades (and even that, no guarantee to secure higher occupancy rates), other owners did not.
But that’s no excuse to raid the taxpayer kitty to either make such building owners “whole” or to advance an agenda (in this case, in part, providing “affordable housing” that makes housing in the same developments for all others more expensive.
And we’ve not even touched on growing concerns that such a configuration of “affordable housing” in old Downtown office buildings eschewed by businesses will devolve into “projects” that warehouse the poorer. As we’ve noted before, can the ACLU be far behind?
It’s a recipe not for rejuvenation but further degradation.
The bottom line remains that office-to-residential conversions should be pursued only if they have the potential for economic success and if those proposing such projects do so by risking their own money in pursuit of the manifest rewards the marketplace can deliver in profits.
Robbing taxpayers in the guise of making such projects “economically feasible” is an oxymoron, a non sequitur that is nothing more than Orwellian doublespeak.
We must do better in this new year.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
