Why? Wellhere is a story of a mall called Zona Rosa in North Kansas City. Years ago when the place was being built they used county paid for bonds to pay for it and now that that mall is failing, the owners cant pay the mortgage and now its up to the taxpayers to pay it.
Have you all ever seen something like this in your community? I hopeyours doesnt get suckered into using public money to pay for a private business.
How do you feel about the NFL?
Dont get me started on taxpayer paid for sports stadiums.
At least the big ones. Some of the smaller ones seem to actually make a profit if they are designed for smaller, minor league teams plus able to do events and concerts.
We have suburban towns falling all over themselves to give tax breaks to strip malls or big box retailers or even supermarkets to get them to move two miles down the road for the sake of maybe getting some sales tax revenue for a few years.
And every time a mall fails, there’s some developer out there who’s ready to redevelop it into something else, as soon as the city comes up with the right tax breaks.
But you have to figure the odds on these things.
If a city gives breaks to 10 projects and only 1 out of 10 fails, they are probably still well ahead on the whole thing.
Too many things in politics rely on a bad example rather than on overall data. I hope we can move on from this someday in the future.
Is there any actual “overall data” to be had? Google returns nothing relevant. If there are meaningful statistical studies of success or failure rate of municipally-subsidized commercial development, they’re pretty well hidden or very few in number.
ETA: Since municipal bonds are a well-known investing instrument, I expect investor research would be where to find this, but I don’t avail myself of any of that for my trivial investing needs, so no help to me. YMMV.
Part of the problem is that communities get trapped in a race-to-the-bottom where whoever does ***not ***pander to the project proponents is left out and suffers short-term pain in slowed growth of job and tax bases. So it has gotten to the point that no “Big” investor will even look your way unless given breaks and guarantees and subsidies, while the hometown guy still has to risk losing his shirt and house PLUS get socked with the full tax bill to support the Big Investor.
Nobody wants to be the first to say “Fine, so build it somewhere else” when the voters are asking for jobs and the Chamber of Commerce is asking for something that will bring traffic into town. Plus voters are notoriously not very good at judging if their elected officials were wise about debt risk.
You mean like the Dome in Toronto, that was built in a rush, 24-hour days, for 570 million dollars in the late eighties, and was later sold to Rogers for 25 million?