The administration of Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey has, as the Post-Gazette reports it, “launched a campaign … aimed at cracking down on predatory real estate practices and promoting home ownership for more residents across the city.”
Of course, one person’s “predatory” is another’s arms-length transaction.
The administration says too many houses are being taken up by private equity investors and others who want to turn them for profits.
Egads! Imagine that!
These would be the same financial geniuses that floated a $30 million “affordable housing” bond that, over its 20-year term, will cost taxpayers $60 million.
These are the same economics savants building $450,000 homes, then selling them at a $250,000 loss, for $200,000. And then some buyers will be further subsidized.
“Affordable housing”? For whom? Certainly not taxpayers.
Per the P-G, Gainey says the city will be rolling out new policies designed to “protect renters and support first-time homebuyers,” but offered no details on what tactics the city will employ.
Heavy-handed ones, we can only presume.
Perhaps rent control? Even more subsidies? No doubt, there will be more rules and regulations on top of onerous rules and regulations in an attempt to command the housing market and other markets that will only further serve to pervert them.
But perhaps, just perhaps, Gainey & Co. should take a long and disdainful look into the Pogo mirror that reflects the reality of having met the “enemy and he is us”:
The largest owner of condemned houses in Pittsburgh is the city itself, the P-G reminds of its extensive documentation, “with few programs to address the empty structures in nearly every corner of the city.”
But, again, with plenty of rules and regulations and chop blocks, making just about any attempts at revitalization an impossible fool’s errand.
Yet, Gainey has the temerity to implore for the “use every tool at our disposal to address the sweeping crisis that we’re in, a crisis which is crushing working families all across the city, and we have to tackle it from every angle, not one angle, every angle.”
Except the angle that Pittsburgh city government is the major impediment in addressing the challenge in a market-based fashion. The best way to address the erstwhile Steel City’s housing challenges is for the city to simply get out of the way.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
