Morning Reads for Tuesday, February 21

The interesting thing about the blight bill as related to Savannah and different areas of Chatham Co is how many elected official or their relatives hold or at one time held property adjacent to claimed property waiting to be sold by the city so the properties could be clustered together for development (the Van Johnson family retirement plan and an investment deal that Ron Stephens was involved in), sold to the Historic Foundation (for a profit) after sitting empty and boarded up for a decade (the Bells who sit on the city and school board) or folks who inherited a property from daddy, couldn’t sell it, let it sit and rot for about 4 years before the city condemns the structure, removes it and then they sell the empty lot out right to the city to cover the removal costs but still makes a profit off the sale since the property is worth more then the clean up (Lester Jackson).

These people already legally play the waiting game, as do other local investors. They get most of the property from the court house steps in foreclosure. All they have to do is maintain the safety and yard of an empty building for about 5 years or so, pay the extremely low taxes and mortgages (of which the majority are tax write offs) next to other empty structures. as soon as the new SCAD grads or the up and coming professional class start renovating local properties, they can sell their empty structures at a profit.

Good read on what is happening in the job growth or lack there of in the US compared to over seas employees.

As an example, Mercury Marine closed it’s Reagan era Asian parts plants in 2008, but it also closed it’s very large 50 year old Stillmore OK plant in 2009 instead of paying to have it updated. More people worked in Stillmore then the overseas plants. The Wisconsin plant (the corp. headquarters) grew 30% in size between 2009 and 2016, but become more automated, so the number of employees remained about the same due to retirements vs. new employees. The Canadian plant was already automated and maintained it basic numbers in the last 10 years. On paper, it looks like Mercury lost US jobs while the international percent got larger. Both went down, but the modernization of the company did not result in additional jobs in the remaining Wisconsin plant which now has the parts division that was in Asia 10 years ago – although production skyrocketed.

https://www.axios.com/outsourcing-draft-2265752386.html