By allowing rich developers to replace affordable houses with giant unaffordable apartments in the hopes that someday they will become slums?

Lefty activists aren’t against development in most cases in Pittsburgh. Most of the anti development campaigns are just neighborhood nimbys and sometime worse, landlords astroturfing to reduce competition.

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From the article:

"Walnut to get a zoning review from the city has jumped from $15,000 to $255,00, an increase of nearly 600 percent. And that's just one of more than a half-dozen other city reviews it will need."

Wut? lol.

Who wrote this garbage? Who edited it?

The new rate is 0.3% of development cost.

How much they raised it by is irrelevant.
Throwing around random dollar amounts is annoying at best and being deceptive at worst. These buildings will stand for 50-100 years and should be reviewed thoroughly by the city.

Nimbys and astroturfing shills should be the focus of our outrage at reasonable developments being stymied

No. I believe that you can’t address the housing crisis by making it more time consuming and expensive to build and constraining the supply of housing.

You think trickle-down economics improved the world too, huh?

Most of the time, these activists have nothing resembling a workable plan, let alone funding. Their approach to "oversight" is to jam up the process so nothing new ever gets built unless they approve. Which they never do, because they're typical NIMBYs or tankies. People respond much better to complaints when the complainers present a workable solution to the problem they identify.

It blows my mind how resistant some people here are to development, even when Pgh has been badly lagging in this area since the 1980s. We have a declining population and some of the oldest housing stock in the country. Opposing development instead of compromising for smarter, more equitable development is a fool's errand.

Yeah, I had concerns about Gainey from the beginning since he didn't seem to have much in the way of legislative accomplishments or a detailed policy platform compared to Peduto. I tried to keep an open mind in the first year, but it seems clear now that he just doesn't have an interest in policy or the day-to-day management of city services.

The existing calculator won't show us what the fees used to be, and a $15K to $255K jump is an insane claim.

Economics exists as a "science" to backfill an explanation for what the capital-holding classes want to do anyway. You know that and I know that.
 
My favorite economics story is from the book Princes of the Yen, wherein Japan sent their youngest and brightest minds to Chicago to learn economics, and they took what they learned there and trashed the Japanese economy for over three decades and counting. Good stuff.

I mean I just didn’t want Moreno or whatever his name was

Behavioral economics makes very different assumptions than the rational choice theory you're describing. Also, many if not most seemingly irrational decisions can be explained by incomplete access to information or people valuing money differently.

Yours is a common and, to some extent, valid criticism of classical and neoclassical economics. That said, don't throw the baby out with the bath water here.

The city has the zoning fee calculator online if you’d care to look.

We half-ass tax land at a severely undervalued rate, but then also tax improvements as well as land transfers.

There were many suspected mounds, some confirmed. There are numerous newspaper clippings about them being found in Wester PA and along the OH river valley. Typically if there was one there would be more nearby.

The city requires a temporary lane closure permit, which isn’t free.

Same reason I’m hopeful that the Bucs can compete each year in spring training.

It hasn't been confirmed and should remain on the DL. There's another suspected mound nearby but this one is clearly marked no trespassing.

The problem is that it isn’t rational in Pittsburgh. And what exactly do you support? Less and more expensive housing? Because that’s what’s the city is serving up.

I will never understand why this sub was so in love with Gainey two years ago when there was never any evidence he would be better than average at best.

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As Tommy Bolt might say, "Bullshit, it's a plain 255,000."

I support the lefty activists and development oversight. Cities should be built in a rational manner.