Bob Johnson wrote:
Do Minneapolis residents see the Sears project as a present day repeat of the Target project with respect to the upcoming City Council and Mayoral
elections? If so, for what reasons?
Someone(s) may try to make it into a Target project through spin, but Sears was empty for 10 years (and running at less than half steam for another five years + before that) and took up 11.6 acres of city land in a city which cannot grow outward. A Sears Project would have been up and running four or five years ago if the residents of the Southside had not risen up and said they wanted to save the building for it's historicity and its familiarity. However, each of those who wanted to redevelop Sears (and there were a bunch of them) wanted the city and the state to heavily support any possible redevelopments. Ray Harris got the project first, promising 5,000 jobs and a whole slough of other stuff. It was he who insisted that he could not do that project without a modification to 35W (which became the Access Project). However, Harris and the city had a falling out and the city withdrew the contract. (You'd have to be a Philadelphia lawyer to figure the ins and outs of that deal.)
I don't know, monetarily speaking, whether that makes Sears like Target or not. I do know that the Southside's revival is heavily tied to the Sears Project and that all the neighborhoods between 35W and Hiawatha along Lake St. participated in the process.
WizardMarks, Central ________________________________
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