Media accounts have it that the Pittsburgh Penguins are about to be sold again, this time to the Hoffmann Family of Companies based in Chicago. Apparently, current owner Fenway Sports Group has had its fill with a once championship team that has turned decidedly ho-hum.
And we can only speculate that its inability to be able to fully develop the real estate around PPG Paints Arena, to which the franchise was handed sweetheart development rights even before Fenway, played a role.
The Pens and Fenway allowed those development rights to expire this year.
But here’s a huge point of order:
Given that Hoffmann generally is projected to end up paying nearly double the $900 million that Fenway paid for the ‘Guins a few short years ago, you can bet it will be looking for ways to recoup that kind of outlay.
And we are forced to wonder if, behind the scenes, any deal will include giving – handing? — Hoffmann those very development rights.
What’s that definition of insanity again?
It’s way past time to let the free and open marketplace work. As we’ve said repeatedly, the remaining undeveloped tracts of the old Civic Arena site should be divided into parcels of various (and negotiable) sizes, put up for bids and developed, organically, as the marketplace decides.
Another sweetheart central plan, Christmas-treed to satisfy this “stakeholder” and that “stakeholder,” will be doomed to fail. Again.
A Post-Gazette dispatch on Thursday states the obvious: “Modern offices score more tenants as Pittsburgh’s office market continues to split.”
That is, new and/or updated office towers in the Golden Triangle and other neighborhoods – think of the Strip District, for one – are attracting and/or retaining tenants while office towers whose owners have not invested in updates have been clearing out.
“It’s a model of a possible path forward for aging office towers struggling to compete with newer, modern buildings for tenants,” the P-G report says. “In Pittsburgh and nationwide, demand for top-tier space continues to rise across neighborhoods as companies attempt to lure employees back into the office after years of remote and hybrid work.”
But let us make two points of order:
Point the first: Because some high-rise office building owners have failed to keep their properties up to leaseable snuff, so to speak, is no excuse to throw millions of public dollars into them to convert them to residential units.
Point the second: Absolutely no public money should be thrown at developers building new office towers that clearly show their profitability potential by the surge of tenants leasing space in them.
And, concomitantly, neither should those who have purchased long-in-the-tooth high-rise office buildings be subsidized by the public to upgrade those towers to re-attract businesses to them.
Indeed, developers who risk their capital in pursuit of profit should be lauded for their gumption and risk-taking. But, and as we’ve repeated constantly, taxpayers are not venture capitalists onto which developers should be allowed, nay, encouraged, to socialize risks they should bear and bear alone.
Anything less is public policy insanity.
From the email inbox, in response to Wednesday’s “At Large” column calling for the privatization of Pittsburgh’s badly broken snow-removal operation, a wag with whom we regularly converse offers this:
“As [Allegheny Institute President-emeritus] Jake Haulk noted in a previous rebuttal to another matter, ‘The only cure for the thought processes that dictate policy in Pittsburgh is a voter transplant.’
“The idea that elected officials in the city would privatize anything is presently a delusional exercise. This is the same socialist cabal that voted to ensure that the long-mismanaged water and sewer authority stayed a public endeavor.
“I will submit to you that the voters in the city are either suffering from Battered-Wife Syndrome, the Stockholm Syndrome or a combination of the two.
“As I explained to someone who recently relocated from the city to my little ‘burb: ‘You will like it out here.’ The trash gets picked up (contracted out), the streets get paved (contracted out) and plowed. Emergency services actually arrive when you call them and even the Democrats around here aren’t dumb enough to defund the police,” Mr. Wag notes.
“I will submit to you that another shining example of the city residents’ affliction was last week’s school board vote to keep wasting vast sums of money on buildings that they don’t need, while ignoring the fact that people are fleeing the grossly incompetent school system.
“The only question is how bad do things have to get before the voters seek professional help, because, currently, their answer to bad socialist policies is more socialism.
“Until that happens, the beatings will continue until morale improves,” he concludes.
Or, put another way – and all together now, class: What’s that definition of insanity again?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
