Alatus Development - 411-417 Lexington Pkwy (MNDOT Snowpile site)

[nate]

Fun to start a new topic:
Alatus is apparently working on a 250+ market rate unit development for the vacant lot currently used as a State Fair lot for a week in the summer, and a snow removal site in the winter that floods the sidewalk with disgusting snowmelt every April/May.

There will be a public meeting next Monday, April 15 at 6:30pm at Wilder Center.

[mplser]

http://monitorsaintpaul.com/alatus-plan ... cil-funds/

[EOst]

Frogtown Neighborhood Association and Summit-U are teaming up to fight it:

https://www.facebook.com/events/590684478164795/

The Alatus Development project located on Lexington Avenue; the old dirty snow pile lot that Wilder is selling to Alatus. The Amherst H. Wilder Foundation https://www.facebook.com/wilderfoundation/, is aware that the project TRIPLES THE MARKET RENTS and will ulitmately result in mass displacement of the economically and culturally vulnerable Rondo Community but appears ready to sell it anyway.

Representatives from Alatus and the City of St. Paul will be in attendance to explain the scope of the project, and why they need 2.50 million dollars of our tax dollars (city of saint paul and Metropolitan Council )to fund a luxury development that few people within the surrounding area can afford.

We want to leave the decision to support this project with city funding in your hands because the community has the right to decide what's built in and around your neighborhood, and how our tax dollars are spent.

FNA and involved community members demand a PROPERTY TAX FREEZE ZONE if public money is used.

[alexschief]

This is frustrating—a good example of how the consumption theory of gentrification can be extremely harmful. This project would bring a significant number of housing units (including affordable units) and a grocery store to a transit-accessible site that has been vacant for over a decade. The idea that this project represents displacement entirely rests upon the idea that bourgeois signalling causes neighborhood change and not underlying market forces.

If projects like this can't go forward, it's hard to imagine what new project would get approval here. The end result would be that the site would lie vacant for another ten years and the neighborhood would continue to lack affordable places to live and grocery competition.

...the community has the right to decide what's built in and around your neighborhood...

We'd correctly recognize this line as advancing segregation if it was said by someone in Highland or Linden Hills. It can both be true that poorer neighborhoods have frequently been run over by powerful interests, and also not a good thing to flip that over and give them the same implicit veto that has been enjoyed by wealthy neighborhoods. The best opportunity is to strip privileged places of their influence, not to extend that corrosive power to everyone.