The Riverview supper club should be neither park land nor housing, but instead it should be light manufacturing. Minneapolis has been giving up industrial land for decades now to other uses and then bemoans the lack of living wage jobs. City folk interested in fighting sprawl should understand that a significant portion of sprawl has occurred over the past 100 years has been generated by city folk forcing �Dirty� businesses away from residential areas. Residential area that initially were built to be near the jobs that were born along the Minneapolis riverfront. Jobs in the form of unwanted industries were forced out to and beyond the city�s fringes, only to be followed by workers interested in being close to jobs.
While the total number of jobs has grown in Minneapolis dramatically over the past decade or two, the types of jobs and the job setting have been almost exclusively been located in our robust downtown. (A downtown whose robustness has been stimulated and maintained by far sighted municipal investments by elected officials who were willing to do what was needed, despite it not necessarily always bring popular.) But downtown jobs while diverse and varied do not meet the needs of the entire city's working population, and the dwindling supply of available industrial property should be of significant concern to people from throughout the city. Just because the Riverview site is not in my back yard, (reverse Nimby�ism) I do feel it important to stand up and say that it would be more appropriate to expand on the adjacent industrial base and to retain and expand the riverfront industrial area. I believe the city should do an annual assessment of its economic base, identifying the types of business by industry type and its employment characteristics. It should monitor the changes in its economic profile both in terms of the types of firms and employment to get a better handle on how that base corresponds with the employment aspirations of its people. I�ve done similar studies in suburban communities on a one shot basis. If one were to be done retroactively of Minneapolis, I think my hypothesis that we have been bleeding good living wage jobs and stimulating suburban sprawl would hold up. The Riverview site just happens to be the most recent example of suitable property being sanitized to the detriment of the city's workers. Earl Netwal 5344 36th Ave S. Mpls., MN 55417 _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
