The Tribune-Review reports that the Pittsburgh Zoning Board has denied an affordable housing variance for an Oakland apartment complex.
“Walnut Capital hoped to avoid earmarking 16 of 159 apartments as affordable housing” under the neighborhood’s “inclusionary zoning” rules that require 10 percent of the units be “affordable” for low-income tenants.
Walnut Capital’s attorney, Jonathan Kamin, previously had said the Oakland apartment project would lose over $4 million in equity if Walnut couldn’t charge market rates for every unit, the Trib recounts.
In our book, that’s an unfair taking – government imposing an excessive burden on an individual for the government’s-decreed “public good,” a direct violation of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
It’s government-sanctioned theft by any other name.
Speaking of “inclusionary zoning,” the Pittsburgh Planning Commission is considering what Public Source calls “an optional alternative.”
Part of the proposal would allow developers who don’t want to include “affordable housing” in their projects “to pay $25 per square foot of housing that they build into a fund that would support other affordable housing developments,” Public Source reports.
And, this, one Planning Commission member says, is “moving away from a stick policy to more of a carrot-based policy.”
Talk about a loaded carrot. For no matter how government attempts to shake down housing developers, it’s still a shakedown.
Something was missing from the Allegheny County Airport Authority’s gushing news release about this week’s debut of Aer Lingus’ nonstop service between Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) and Dublin.
Yep, not one word about the $5.25 million taxpayer subsidy over two years.
But there was plenty of verbiage about the claimed “economic impact” the flights will have on Pittsburgh. Never mind that such claims – in this case, it’s about $23 million annually — typically employ suspect methodologies.
It certainly is interesting that the public seldom sees proof of such claims with a truly independent accounting.
And then there’s this: If the economic impact is to be so grand – and if demand is supposedly so great for these flights — why were taxpayer dollars needed to “juice” the deal?
As the data (i.e., passenger numbers) from the subsidized British Airways flights prove, public subsidies for foreign flights export more economic benefits than they import.
It’s corporate wealthfare at its worst.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
