St. Cloud, Minnesota orphanage, blog post by John Hoff
The photo above contains a clue to answer this question: What is the number of Praxis Marketplace Grocery Stores you can expect to see in North Minneapolis in the near future or, for that matter, EVER?
That's right: NONE.
Get it? None? NUN?
OK, I'm sure you get it...
Back in 2012 JNS blog was loudly calling b.s. on the Praxis Marketplace project in North Minneapolis and saying "Where are the grocery stores promised back in 2009?" Click here for that old blog post. Actually, the first time I ever read about Praxis I thought, "Something about this feels like a scam." For one thing, the article I read was too perfect, too pat, too uncritical. "These airy promises," I told myself, "Will not come to pass."
I kept the article on my fridge for THREE FREAKING YEARS and in 2012 after the article had aged like fine wine I wrote my "What the heck, Praxis?" blog post linked above.
Now it's 2014 and, in a Star Tribune article which appeared today, we learn city leaders are pulling the plug on Praxis finally, finally, FINALLY.
Members of the (so-called) Northside Residents Redevelopment Council are crying foul, of course. But I can't remember the last time NRRC did anything to impress this blogger. Crying foul and claiming the Northside is being cheated out of yet another do-gooder project funded with public tax dollars seems to be their job description.
Certainly there is a place for the kind of grocery store project proposed by Glenn Ford. But it should be built by, oh, how to put this...
Non-scammy people.
And funded by, oh, how to phrase it...
Something besides public pork.
JNS blog thinks there should be an actual City of Minneapolis investigation to determine whether the Praxis Marketplace project was ever anything more than an elaborate scam to sustain professional dreamers and windbags on grant money without ever completing an actual bricks-and-mortar grocery store project.
5 comments:
A reader sent me the following comment by email:
I wish we'd get a Trader Joe's or some other established grocery store instead of "Pie in the sky" pocket lining ventures.
Nun/None: good one, Johnny!
"Large corporate grocery chains stay away from poor neighborhoods because they think there is no money there."
This is complete nonsense, as the presence of Cub and Walmart show. Both stores exist to suck vast amounts of money from EBT cards. Corporate chains know there's plenty of money. The question for them is, "can we make money in the face of much higher security and theft costs?"
Gordon makes a valid point...corporations don't give a fuck and are the biggest receivers of the welfare handouts...as they continue to play middle-class and poverty level individuals against each other and foment a class mentality to where we just keep beatin' each others asses.
Just when I had written its obituary...
It rises, Lazarus-like, from the dead.
Or is it more like a ZOMBIE?
http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/288844401.html
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