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Monday, August 03, 2015
Brewer Says New TIF Districts Needed To End Indy's Food Deserts In Low-Income Neighborhoods
Indianapolis Republican mayoral candidate Chuck Brewer's response to the recent announcement the Double 8 was closing all of its grocery stores in inner city neighborhoods is that the City needs to create more TIF districts for low-income neighborhoods. If it worked for downtown, why wouldn't it work for those neighborhoods Brewer asked.
Republican Councilor Christine Scales has been fighting for years to bring a TIF district to a low-income neighborhood in her district, Avondale Meadows. Her efforts were stymied by Republican and Democratic council members and the Ballard administration. Now that they finally agreed to establish a TIF district in that low-income neighborhood at long last, the Ballard administration further stalled it by saying more time was needed to study the boundaries for creating it.
Instead of creating TIF districts in low-income neighborhoods, the mayor and the council chose to expand the City's permanent, downtown TIF area and create a behemoth of a TIF district in the so-called midtown area on the City's north side where development was already taking place without TIF incentives. Why? Because that's where their campaign contributors want them to invest your tax dollars.
Large inner city stores cannot control shoplifting and pilferage; CUB foods tried it in The Meadiws area
ReplyDeleteI don't see why tax dollars will help lure businesses to crime infested neighborhoods that are too violent for their business model. The reason grocery stores leave poor areas are threefold: First, there are holdups. Even convenience stores and liquor stores are closing, and they can hide their cashiers behind glass. Its expensive to insure these businesses. Second, the shoplifting is rampant. They steal everything they can. They eat while in the store. Even the little children are taught to steal. There just isn't must profit margin left when 3-5% of the merchandise walks out the door without being paid for. And third, poor people in poor neighborhoods don't buy the high markup items that the store's rely on for profit. They are value shoppers who are purchasing items with very little markup. So these stores just can't make a profit. Add to that the problem of retaining reliable, trustworthy employees in these neighborhoods, and some executives just determine the whole thing isn't in their desired business model. I don't know how you fix that with tax dollars. The black community in Ferguson burned down their CVS store and trashed a dozen other local business. This is the kind of challenge that business leaders hate. I think we should have a referendum on the ballot asking whether we taxpayers would like to dissolve all Marion County tif districts. I support their dissolution, finding them inherently discriminatory, and patently used to benefit large contributors to political campaigns. We don't need new tif districts. We need fewer. And the black community needs to solve its neighborhood problems, or they will soon have zero businesses locally.
ReplyDeleteThere's an ALDI at 52nd and Keystone.
ReplyDeleteSo many of these so-called "food deserts" have a Mexican grocery nearby. Sure, it's not your American-style grocery store, and there may be Spanish spoken, but they have aisles and aisles of perfectly tasty and reasonably priced food.
Where are we going to get our pickled pigs feet now?
ReplyDeleteIt's probably true that it's nearly impossible to have a TIF District that only covers a blighted neighborhood. It's blighted because no one wants to build there, and incentives won't change that by themselves. At the same time, it may well be possible to create a TIF District that includes blighted areas because you can take tax dollars from new construction in the non-blighted areas and apply them to the blighted areas. If you remember what downtown looked like well before the TIF, you can see where that in fact happened. Development is generally an incremental process - if an area that's already showing some improvement, shows even more improvement, areas on the ring of that area should start to improve too. In Chicago, you can see that happen a lot easier, because of the City's scale. Indy is always going to move slower, because it's a smaller place, but if you look at the longer term picture, it does work, and has been working.
ReplyDeleteWhy isn't someone doing articles on why these FOUR stores suddenly, without warning, shuttered their stores?
ReplyDeleteIt would be very interesting to know why this happened. It also might help in developing a plan for the future.
I thought the concept of food deserts was already beginning to be a little discredited. I know I read a 2011 article in the Economist that said the usda counting process was flawed, only counting full service groceries stores when often there were alternative sources of fruits and vegetables in the area made available by mom and pop groceries and food stands etc. And that even when access was improved, as it was on the East side of Indianapolis when they opened Pogue’s Run cooperative, it didn’t mean people would buy that wholesome food or cook it. Most people have access to cars for occasional food shopping. In Indy you are never too far from a grocery. And people in rural areas and in small towns are often much farther from grocery stores than inner city residents. Don’t get me wrong. I believe in nutrition. But weird taxing plans upset me. And already we see huge parts of the county suffering because our property tax dollars all go downtown instead of fixing local roads. We don’t need Mayor Ballard announcing he will fix all the food deserts with our money. If people want to live next to a full service grocery store, let them move there. The idea of financially coercing corporate groceries into dangerous neighborhoods sounds ridiculous and an abuse of my property tax money.
ReplyDelete1104 - that is just ugly to say something like that.
ReplyDeleteGary, WHY did Double 8 close? I'm with c. roger csee - there is something that isn't being told and something not being reported here..
Elana Kuperstein, Double 8 Foods Executive Vice President, says it was a difficult and agonizing decision, and they have been struggling with the decision for about a year.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Kuperstein, the ultimate reason is declining sales.
“At some point, the numbers just didn’t come in. Our sales dropped, our revenues dropped and we just couldn’t keep up with it,” he said.
I noticed to pastors who have organized the drives in their vans say no one is coming for the rides.
Chuck "The Greg Ballard Train Wreck Caboose" Brewer proves again he lacks any real serious gravitas to be dog catcher, let alone mayor. How much you wanna be that MCRCC rocket scientist Kyle Walker coached him on this?
ReplyDeleteWell, Chuck Brewer vowed publicly he would be a "Greg Ballard Third Term". Like the guy before him, Brewer is an municipal economics idiot. I will not vote for the liberal Democrat candidate looking for yet another government paycheck and I certainly will not be voting for Brewer... "Lt. Col." or no.
ReplyDeleteI'm voting to stay home.
Over the last handful of years there have been more and more cases of mass shoplifting/trashing of retail stores by out-of-control young people. From the popular Michigan Ave. retail district up in Chicago within the last couple of years, to a Walmart in Macon, GA just recently. Then you factor in the shoplifting that another comment pointed out. This is what retail has to deal with now, especially if they locate in lower income areas and/or on popular mass transit stops.
ReplyDeleteThe lack of individuals using the shuttles points out exactly what a red herring this issue is. Resources scramble to assist and solve the problem...but no one takes advantage of it? And the number of police runs one can hear coming out to the Double 8...no wonder they are bleeding money. Someone should drill down into the number of police runs on thefts and robberies of these stores.
ReplyDeleteOne should always help themselves...I just didn't think in that manner...
Chuck Brewer has no chance at all, it's really pathetic and it's Ballard's fault, He has destroyed the republican party in Indpls.
ReplyDeleteNo. If anyone demolished the GOP in Indy its David Brooks and Tom John. Ballard was the figurehead to their double dealings
ReplyDelete