The good, nay, great, news is that the Pittsburgh Penguins have ceded sweetheart development rights that they never should have been granted 18 years ago to the expansive former Civic Arena site in the Lower Hill District.
The bad news is that the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh (URA) and the Pittsburgh-Allegheny County Sports & Exhibition Authority (SEA), which continue to own the 28-acre parcel, will regain control over who now will develop the largely still-undeveloped tract.
Sadly, the result might be no better and could be worse, given the proclivities of “stakeholders” who too often have little or no skin in the game that you can bet will be upping their efforts to pressure the new developer or developers to essentially give them something for nothing.
Consider it a form of extortion, a rigging du jour, if you will, that almost always results in rigor mortis setting in for what should be a very promising, market-driven development on prime Pittsburgh real estate.
Clearly, the failure of the Penguins to develop the site was a failure of the kind of government-sanctioned and -directed command economics that almost always collapses under its own hubris.
Thus, it behooves the URA and the SEA to restore sanity to this development. And that means these 28 acres must be divided into parcels of varying sizes for varying uses — small, medium and larger — and then sold to the highest individual bidders and not a single developer.
Employing the former will result in a natural, market-based (dare we say “organic”) development instead of some cookie-cutter single development that lacks character, architectural variety and staying power and a real sense of neighborhood.
How better to pay homage to a Hill District that was leveled to make way for the Civic Arena all those years ago?
It’s certainly not naïve to think that this land expanse of Pittsburgh history could, and should, be redeveloped into a neighborhood of the proverbial butcher, baker and candlestick maker.
And, no, not in the “rakish,” fools-all nursery rhyme origins of that phrase but, as one historical observer reminds, a reference “to a diverse and essential group of tradespeople who form the backbone of a self-sufficient community.”
It’s long past time to do the Lower Hill right by getting its redevelopment right. Finally. And that means by employing the free market instead of government’s command market that all too often keeps its shillelagh raised high and always poised to strike – and always to the extreme detriment of the public weal.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
