The Tribune-Review reports that “state, county and local officials gathered Tuesday in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood to commemorate the opening of a new affordable housing development for low-income residents.”
“Located at Fifth Avenue and Stevenson Street, Uptown Flats is a 36,000-square-foot, four story building with 34 units. The project has been in development since 2024,” the Trib says.
And county and state representatives who’ve been spearheading the effort to expand “affordable housing” in Allegheny County – this specific project funded through state and federal grants (i.e. taxpayer dollars) — were on hand to pat themselves on the back.
“When affordable housing disappears and it’s not a priority, people with the least are the first to get pushed out,” said county Chief Executive Sara Innamorato. “These are 34 permanent affordable homes for our neighbors who have experienced homelessness or are at risk of it.”
And as U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, put it, these apartments “will be the difference between surviving or finally having someplace to breathe.”
“Housing is a human right,” she said. “And projects like Uptown Flats show us what it can actually look like in practice.”
But what it looks like in practice is, in actuality, taking taxpayers for a ride.
As Chris Mooney of Whitehall told me in an email the day after the Trib’s take on Uptown Flats ran:
“Some quick math for dummies — $22 million divided by 34 units equals $647,000.00 per unit. You could buy a nice house in Fox Chapel for that kind of money,” he reminds.
“Affordable housing?” he wryly questioned.
And as Mooney expanded in an emailed letter to the editor of the Trib:
“At what point should the taxpayers who get up every morning to go to work so that their family can live in the average $250,000 house in Allegheny County say that they have had enough? Should they just quit their jobs so that they, too, can qualify to live in a $647,000 apartment?
“At what point does the word unaffordable become part of this discussion?” Mooney asks the $22 million question.
Some dim minds certainly have been working overtime to come up with such “affordable housing” buncombe.
And nothing like proving the adage that the more you subsidize something the less you get of it, as the folks at Reason magazine long have argued, and, as we have long argued, more expensive at that.
Or as a synopsis of Reason’s rationale (proffered by Christian Britschgi in January 2025) notes, “the real problem with ‘affordable housing’ is that it often signals a city is under‑building housing overall, not that it is becoming more affordable. Such policies can worsen affordability by restricting supply and inflating costs.”
Back to Summer Lee and her contention that “housing is a human right.”
It is not.
As Roger Valdez wrote in Fortune magazine back in 2019, it is a “stubborn abuse of language … deployed for a political … purpose.”
“The Fair Housing Act banned discrimination when providing housing or making housing policy,” Valdez recounted, “but it did not allocate a 500-square-foot unit or guarantee automatic qualification for a mortgage.
“Housing has remained, to the chagrin of many, a commodity. And if it somehow ends up being the case that housing does become enshrined as an explicit right or a right by extension, one thing won’t change — when housing is scarce its price will go up.
“Markets solve this problem with innovation that is blind to winners and losers, while socialists rely on rationing to pick winners and losers based on criteria set by bureaucrats,” Valdez reminds. “Either way, when demand exceeds supply real people suffer from higher prices [that] consume their incomes — or waiting lists that consume their hope.”
The Fortune magazine writer says that, at a minimum, a good housing policy would maximize the benefits of private risk for public benefit, getting out of the way of buyer and seller so that price signals would push lower-cost product while also creating attractive economic return for investors.
“Today, housing policy is gripped by socialist views and deep suspicion of the profit motive. This gives inefficient nonprofit producers an advantage: they are believed as the experts on all housing, even though they produce a very small portion of it at huge costs,” Valdez says.
Politicians also face anger from constituents who worry that their own private investment in their single-family home will be put at risk by a deregulated housing economy.
“Homeowners have a monopoly on land use and nonprofits on the imagination of policy makers,” he continues. “So, politicians say we need more affordable housing, when what we really need is more housing so that it’s affordable.”
Valdez says that “enshrining something as a right — even if only rhetorically — has become the bullhorn of left-leaning activists … .”
“But housing, like … many other things, is not a right,” he reiterates.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
