Sharon Sayles Belton stood up before the Downtown Council Annual Meeting
last month proclaiming the city was in great shape because everywhere she
looked she could see construction cranes.
It sounded like the person who kept ordering new couches without noticing
the living room was overcrowded and the credit cards were overdrawn.
The news about the Gaviidae loans is the latest example that Minneapolis
City Hall seems to be lurching from one development crisis to another. The
city is hemorraging hundreds of millions of dollars, with no end in sight,
on projects with no public support that do little to create a city of the
future.
Step back and see what's happening: Gaviidae and City Center are both in
trouble because they have vacant space. What does the city do? Spend
millions more to create more retail space in two new projects, which puts
Gaviidae and City Center in even deeper trouble, making us spend more to
bail them out. Instead of forcing Brookfield to upgrade City Center as a
condition of Block E, Brookfield is actually asking the city for MORE!
Meanwhile the development spending binge has left the city in an
increasingly perilous financial shape, unable to address the growing needs
in the neighborhoods.
What could the city have done differently?
Option one: Get out of the development business and let the overstimulated
market recorrect itself.
Option two: Save many millions by rejecting the Block E development, which,
in turn, would save even more millions because the Shubert Theater would not
have been moved. Take a small part of the savings to fund movie theaters in
City Center. The retail stores in City Center could then be moved to
Gaviidae, filling that space and giving the MCDA a better chance of getting
its loans repaid.
What about Block E? Build a truly innovative central library, which the
voters just agreed to fund, and incorporate the Shubert and a new
Planetarium, which may be able to get state funding.
Then sell the existing library block and use the money to create a
multi-million dollar affordable housing fund. Use part of that money to
match private investment so every one dollar of public money creates three
dollars for affordable housing.
This option could have saved the taxpayers money, delivered a far more
exciting downtown and made a major impact on the affordable housing crisis.
Instead we are left with mounting bills for increasingly unpopular projects
and scant resources to attack affordable housing.
The lack of vision doesn't just exist downtown. On Lake Street three
separate development projects are in active discussion---at Nicollet Av.,
Chicago Av. and Hiawatha Av.---with seemingly no coordinated vision.
It's time to put away the public checkbook, develop a clear vision for what
we want, and get some leadership that knows how to get the PRIVATE sector to
invest PRIVATE dollars to help implement a PUBLIC vision.
R.T. Rybak
www.rtformayor.com
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