Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Where Was The Greensboro Partnership On This One?

Today we read that "A1 Wholesale Tires announced plans Tuesday to open a distribution and wholesale operation in the area, taking over the former Spray Cotton Mills warehouse at 413 Church St." in Eden. That's right, Eden, not Greensboro.

You see, in Greensboro, developers came in and bought up all the available properties, jacked the prices up sky high and then enlisted the City of Greensboro and the various "non profits" to help them fill them. How's that working? Not too good!

In Greensboro, "non profits" like the Nussbaum Center take up space first in one old mill then abandon that mill to take up space in another old mill. Both at the expense of the Greensboro taxpayers. Then the Nussbaum Center comes back to the taxpayer well because they can't make the payments on their bigger mill even after they rented part of it to an established foreign furniture maker who will take the corporate welfare profits out of Greensboro and the United States. And folks like the Greensboro Partnership have the audacity to call what they do, "economic development."

Greensboro has far more empty commercial buildings than any other city in the Piedmont Triad. It's time our "leaders" concentrated on filling these old buildings rather than building new empty buildings in empty industrial parks and megasites far from where Greensboro's residents live.