The Post-Gazette reports that the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership (PDP) has unveiled a three-year plan for “revitalizing” the Golden Triangle, “aimed at preventing businesses from bolting, keeping the streets safe and clean and filling empty storefronts with ‘transformative’ retail.”
Yada-yada-yada. And rah-rah-sis-boom-bah and all that. But we’re more concerned about how much of the cost might be offloaded onto taxpayers.
“Jeremy Waldrup, the partnership’s president and CEO, said Tuesday the initiative is designed to turn ‘strategy into action’ in the efforts to bring new vitality to a downtown that, like many others, has struggled to right itself in the aftermath of the pandemic,” the P-G reported.
Waldrup says key to the effort will be a “commercial tenant engagement strategy” to encourage businesses that are nearing the end of their leases in Downtown to renew rather than move elsewhere.
“The idea is to keep those tenants from jumping to the Strip District, the North Shore, or points beyond, as some have done in the past,” the P-G says.
And that could include some type of undefined incentives, Waldrup says. What, some kind of “Favored Business Status”? Apparently, above and beyond grant money and revenue collected through a recently extended Business Improvement District assessment, we can only surmise?
Dare we suggest that cleaning up Downtown – from eradicating the open-air drug trade, to better policing of vagrancy and cracking down on the streets being used as public bathrooms, to physically keeping the downtown’s public spaces safe and clean – should be all the incentive businesses there should be afforded?
It’s up to government, or its designees, to see to the garden-variety public services that, once upon a time, one had come to expect.
But not only do the vast majority of taxpayers have no business being forced to subsidize those dubious and still-evolving office-to-residential transformations Downtown – something the PDP wants to ramp up even more — they equally have no business having their pockets picked for the kind of “transformative retail” that smells of government command economics and would be doomed to failure.
Didn’t we have enough of the Allegheny Conference and Tom Murphy all those years ago?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
