So Winston-Salem isn’t the only city hoping to finance a downtown stadium-retail-mixed-use development with public funds. Fort Wayne is taking that highway, too, and its paper of record is a little more skeptical than the Journal has been so far:
Even those who share city officials’ and stadium backers’ optimism about the future of downtown and their conviction that preserving a vital downtown is crucial to the vitality of the entire city will have questions. We are cautious about staking so much money and so much of our hopes for an improved downtown on this single project.
People who want the most mileage from public funds have to be wary of luring private investment with huge expenditures of public funds. No city, county or other unit of government could afford to pursue economic development routinely by subsidizing 40 percent of its cost. That degree of subsidy is rarely brought in to cement commitments for private investment, and for good reason. It has the effect of underwriting some businesses at much greater public expense than other businesses….
…How reliable is the market research that leads the city to gamble on a massive development downtown? If there’s real demand for more condominiums and retail downtown, why haven’t developers spotted those unmet needs and capitalized on them?
The people are also a bit skeptical. I’d also like to know what Frank Burns thinks.
