Post news and information from your neighborhood: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________ I don't want to argue with David Strand, but I thought the Home Depot at University and Lexington was stopped because community activists wanted affordable housing at that site, Home Depot wanted substantial city concessions and the defeat was due to those factors, and not due to Home Depot's sexual orientation policies.
Ordinarily, I am opposed to any city subsidies to large corporations. But this is how I see this. At the time Home Depot wanted to build at University and Lex, I owned three apartment buildings. I was spending between $250 and $1,000 a month on materials and supplies at Home Depots in either Bloomington or Maplewood. I had to drive further, was spending $ outside the city and couldn't help St. Paul. Here it is now 4 or 5 years later and there is still nothing on that site. Was that a victory? If a Home Depot were to be build there, that would be between 150 and 200 well paying jobs, close to the heart of one of St. Paul's poorest neighborhoods. I wouldn't be spending my hard earned dollars in Bloomington or Maplewood, burning up gas to drive there, but I would be spending my $ right in our own neighborhood. I thought at that time that a Home Depot could be built, with housing above it. I thought why not make it, a win-win. But today, the site sits as an decaying eyesore, it is so bad, the owners have had to block off entrances to the parking lot, and this space is adding nothing to the city tax base. I am not sure keeping Home Depot out was such a great "victory". Dan Dobson Saint Paul ==================================================== Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 13:03:15 -0800 (PST) From: David Strand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I know that a couple of years ago when Home Depot wanted to build on University Avenue in St. Paul using a city subsidy to fund part of the expense, myself and numerous other Lavender Greens contacted city hall and reminded them that they had a policy that did not allow such funding to go to companies that did not include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies. IT WORKED! It played a role in blocking the Home Depot development project and eventually Home Depot added sexual orientation to their nondiscrimination policy. Home Depot and Wal-Mart have since added sexual orientation to their policies. However, Wal-Mart does not offer domestic partnership benefits like Target and other retail companies do(it's just yet another human cost factor in the long list). If St. Paul had a policy saying that city subsidies would not go to companies that did not offer domestic partnership benefits and (name some other desireable things for the community) then they could not recieve a subsidy to build. David Strand __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools _____________________________________________ NEW ADDRESS FOR LIST: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, modify subscription, or get your password - visit: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/listinfo/stpaul Archive Address: http://www.mnforum.org/mailman/private/stpaul/ _____________________________________________ For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract
