[lbo-talk] Olympic displacement

[W. Kiernan]

The housing in downtown St. Petersburg which got torn down that I was 
talking about was all private.  There is no new low-income housing, 
public or private, being constructed in Pinellas County, absolutely 
zero.  During the last decade, the St. Petersburg Housing Authority sold 
more than half of its properties to private developers.  Meanwhile, 
county-wide, the remaining privately-owned cheap rentals and trailer 
parks for retirees are being bulldozed at a steady clip that I think 
outpaces the death rate of the retirees by quite a ways.

As for

 > roads, schools, libraries, housing, the police, that are

 > used predominantly by the low to moderate income citizens

as I said, there's less than zero new tax-subsidized housing for 
low-income citizens being built here, and the police are not used _by_ 
these people, they're used _against_ them.

 > That benefit outweighs the inconvenience of those few

 > who have to move to make room for new developments.

All the benefit falls on one side of the income dividing line, all the 
inconvenience falls on the other, and they developers and the city 
government think that's OK.  The Chamber of Commerce types here do not 
think of gentrification as a trade-off, where on the up side you get all 
this new municipal tax revenue and all these jobs get created, but on 
the down side you've got to do something for the people getting evicted. 

  They look at it as a win-win thing; if condos eventually get built on 
the bulldozed lots they'll get the increased tax revenue and the jobs, 
but even if the lots remain vacant at least all those ill-dressed bums 
got shoved out of downtown to God knows where.

We did a taxpayer-subsidized stadium in St. Pete too!  Guess what kind 
of people had rented the houses and apartments in all the blocks that 
got condemned under eminent domain and turned into parking lots?

Yours WDK - WKiernan at gmail.com