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Originally Posted by Found5dollar
The current compromise seems to be agreeable to all parties and that in and of itself is an accomplishment.
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I think there is some wisdom in this, but I also think it was an unnecessary, unforced error to have the Penguins be one of the necessary parties to the deal. If all this was going on between the City, Lower Hill community representatives, and normal, for-profit developers competitively bidding to do Lower Hill projects (see, for example, the recent Produce Terminal bidding process), I'd have a lot more confidence in the end result being close to the best deal possible.
And speaking of which . . .
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If the markets called for more tall buildings in Pittsburgh we would be getting them. We can compling about the Lowe Hill and North Shore not being built tall, but honestly the big issue is not Nimbys in these areas, it is that no one is proposing tall buildings. Lets fill in the holes in the urban fabric of Pittsburgh and get a good street level before we complain about no one building tall or iconic.
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In the case of the North Shore, I'm not blaming NIMBYs, I am blaming the Steelers and Continental, who got handed all those development rights on a no-bid basis. Of course it is hard to know for sure what would have happened if those rights had been bid out instead, but I think it is a very good bet it would have been built out faster and better. In other words, the concept of "the market" means investment opportunities end up going to the entities which value them the most, which they prove by bidding the most for them, which tends to lead to the most aggressive use of those opportunities. When you instead hand out investment opportunities on a no-bid basis, odds are you are not finding the entities that value the opportunities the most, and therefore you will not get the most aggressive use of those opportunities. And that is particularly likely to be true when the entity which gets the rights on a no-bid basis has ulterior motives (like the Steelers wanting to keep parking available for their patrons on game day, including for tailgating purposes).
In fact, although there were some dicey things about this offer, back when the Steelers/Continental were subject to forfeiting their rights due to failure to comply with their required development schedule, Stabile offered to pay $10 million for the site of North Shore I and II and build a 10-story office building instead. But once again, the City (then under Ravenstahl) agreed to give the Steelers/Continental an extension to build their crappy 3-story building. That's what you should expect with this sort of no-bid situation, and even if Stabile was not the right choice, the right choice would very likely have been some other entity that was never allowed to bid.
To sum up--it is bad enough when normal developers have to deal with NIMBYs, particularly NIMBYs with strong allies in local government. But when the City is also handing out development rights on a no-bid basis to entities with ulterior motives for wanting those development rights, it makes the situation much worse than it has to be.