“We have met the enemy and he is us,” Walt Kelly cartoon creation Pogo famously quipped in 1970. That sentiment, and other Pogo-isms, appear to be playing out in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
As the Tribune-Review reports it, community activists became “alarmed” when the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) began placing for-sale signs on hundreds of properties it owns in the neighborhood.
One activist told the Trib he was concerned that land speculators could see the signs and gobble up land. Developers could use it as an opportunity to gentrify the community and displace Hill District residents, the Trib reported his worries.
Never mind that the URA, long a troubled purveyor of bad public policy, did the right thing in this case. As the authority offered in a statement, the goal of the en masse for-sale sign posting was an exercise in “radical transparency” to help Hill District residents better identify URA holdings.
“We believed this was a step towards a more equitable process, as private developers and well-established organizations are well-versed in how to find our available properties,” the statement noted.
“This decision to expose our inventory to a wider audience and our hope to generate more diverse interest in property ownership and development opportunities left our sales process unchanged.”
Apparently, no good deed goes unpunished by the “social justice” crowd.
That said, it’s a process we are forced to remind is so handcuffed by free market-perverting, central-planning “stakeholders” that it makes expeditious, arms-length property sales nearly impossible.
Or as one wag with whom we regularly converse put it:
“The thought that capitalism might actually be allowed to work is so frightening to these people that they must eradicate the notion before it takes root,” he says.
“But they should fear not because the planning commission and the zoning hearing board will still be there to erect every roadblock imaginable to prevent the free market from creating prosperity anyway,” he added.
Or as Pogo also reminded:
“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”
And, “Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
