megan goodmundson wrote:
<>the made-up person "Michelle Hill" is trying to spin Don's answer by saying he thinks low-income people should move-out so middle class people can move-in. He didn't say or imply that. ... Jordan has a documented 30% vacancy rate! Empty houses, for rent houses, for sale houses, boarded properties. 30%!!! No one needs to move out!! People need to move in!!!!
Ah ha! Then we look to CPED, the people who are in charge of vacant/boarded houses. Both Don Samuels and Natalie Johnson-Lee sit on the board of commissioners of CPED. If the problem is v/bs, then the answer lies at CPED. According to sources at CPED the city no longer takes down vacant/boardeds as a result of the new policies instituted by the current mayor and the CPED commissioners. With the economic situation of Minneapolis created by the governor's policies, the federal policies, the war, and the rage of Mother Nature, no one is moving in. Once the number of v/bs is large enough--and in Jordan, from your figures, it's more than large enough, we have created a perfect soup for developers, whether they be for profit or non-profit, to practice predation on Jordan. The same can be said for other core neighborhoods of the city.
What the city is doing, through CPED governance, is the same thing Ferris Alexander and others of his ilk did. They sat on numerous properties all over Minneapolis and St. Paul, let them go to ruin, planning, obviously, to rack up wads of money when the city was forced to instigate massive redevelopment because of the mess. The v/bs become unsalvageable and new housing is called for. Here come the developers.
Answer this: At today's prices and with the rise in cost of fossil fuels, who exactly, can afford to take down a v/b and then build on a city lot? Will it be the people already living there moving up a step or two on the economic ladder? Highly doubtful.
With issues of crime control, a critical mass has been reached in Jordan. There is nothing more welcoming to predators than vacant/boarded housing. Since both your candidates have fashioned their campaigns around crime issues, maybe it's time to ask them why, as the CPED commissioners, they are working counter to their call for more and better policing by allowing vacant/boardeds to dominate the landscape in the Fifth.
This is not spin, Ms. Goodmundson. This is THE issue for core city neighborhoods like Jordan. You can have vigils on the corners for murdered citizens and talk till you're blue in the face about moving people in, and moving people out, but it's still a deliberate action on the part of the city council acting as the board of commissioners at CPED who keep the mess in play.
I'm asking questions around this issue of both the contenders in my ward, you can be darn sure. I've put 15, no, 18 years of work into my neighborhood and those contiguous to my neighborhood to reverse the malicious red-lining neglect we experienced from the early sixties until the mid nineties. I am not happy that the new and "improved" CPED is really worse than the old, pre-NRP MCDA.
This mess in the core city is the result of the city acting as the rotten landlord who allows his/her buildings to fall to ruin, driving out tenants and giving space to murder and mayhem. It is the principle reason why I don't necessarily want any currently seated council person or mayor to be reelected in Minneapolis this election cycle.
It's the bigger hammer theory of governance wherein developers "discover" neighborhoods the city neglects, push out the people living in them, and remake them ala Hollywood. Besides the cost in human infrastructure, this is the most expensive way to govern a city. Whatever myths we might want to believe about the changes RT and the commissioners have instigated with the creation of CPED, the proof is in the pudding.
Why should we tolerate this approach when it is counterproductive?
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