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2 Smart MayorsA Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist penned this article yesterday nudging Pittsburgh Mayor Bob O'Connor to look to Mayor Curt Pringle and Anaheim's freedom revolution for ideas on how to revive Pittsburg.
2 Smart Mayors
By Bill Steigerwald
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Well, well.
Turns out redeveloping Downtown Pittsburgh is not nearly as difficult or as complicated as the Murphy Gang made it look for 12 years.
Bob O'Connor -- a delusion-free Pittsburgher who knows his main job is to make the city safe, clean and fiscally honest, not to remodel it to his liking -- has been in office about 100 days.
But already all kinds of good things are starting to happen in the Fifth and Forbes corridor, where plans for new retail outlets, movie theaters, upscale condos, housing for Point Park students and even a gourmet grocery store seem to be announced every week.
A free-market nirvana has not arrived in Downtown, and never will. City Hall still has way too much control over development. And the marquee renewal projects -- PNC Financial's big office building and the resurrection of the old Lazarus-Macy's building -- were, foolishly, artificially inseminated by huge taxpayer subsidies.
But the O'Connor regime has obviously injected new life, energy and hope into the commercial slum left by a decade of the Murphy Gang's arrogance, ineptitude and eminent-domain bullying.
How? It's shockingly simple: Unlike his know-it-all predecessor, Mayor O'Connor has the brains and good sense to get himself mostly out of the way and give the market a chance to contribute to Fifth and Forbes' overdue resuscitation.
What a concept! Mayor O'Connor actually understands that the more business people who are allowed to join the redevelopment process, especially local/regional ones, the better the results will likely be.
Mayor O'Connor thinks this way not because he's a closet free-market ideologue. It's because, as he showed last week when he visited the Trib, he is basically a practical, levelheaded guy who knows his own limitations and the limitations of his financially busted city.
He is still a big-city Democrat who's not likely to change his stripes. But since he's refreshingly willing to trust the intelligence and wisdom of others, Mayor Bob might want to pick the brain of another big-city mayor, Curt Pringle of Anaheim, Calif.
Yes, Anaheim -- the home of Disneyland -- is a big city like Pittsburgh. Its population of 328,000, though richer and more diverse, is nearly identical. It's a major-league sports town -- with two arenas. And its original downtown was pretty much destroyed in the '70s by urban renewal and eminent-domain abuse.
Mayor Pringle, a mid-40s Republican elected in 2002, is a certified madman when it comes to getting local government out of the way of progress.
By decentralizing bureaucracies, relaxing regulations and zoning codes, waiving home improvement fees, declaring business tax holidays and emphasizing market solutions to things like a citywide Wi-Fi system, Pringle has created what he calls a "freedom-friendly" approach to fostering economic growth and redevelopment.
Anaheim's massive urban redevelopment project is the 807-acre Platinum Triangle. Pringle's free-market enticements -- offering market incentives, cutting taxes, nurturing competition and protecting property rights -- have attracted billions in diverse investments, reports Orange County Register editorial writer Steven Greenhut.
Pringle, says Greenhut, has made Anaheim "a laboratory for free-market thought" and his success is creating imitators on the Left Coast. If Mayor O'Connor, a former local chain-restaurant exec, wants to see things really start jumping, he'll purchase the franchise rights to Pringle's "radical" ideas and use them to save Pittsburgh.
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