Starbucks and other corporations came to Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot. But not to the neighborhood where he died.
Four years after Michael Brown was shot by police, the neighborhood where he was killed still feels left behind
When Starbucks opened here in 2016, politicians celebrated, predicting that the coffee chain would revitalize a city marred by violent protests over Michael Brown’s killing two years earlier.
Other corporations jumped in with multimillion-dollar commitments to help rebuild the majority-black town that became a global symbol of racial and economic inequality.
But four years after the unrest, nearly all of the new development is concentrated in the more prosperous — and whiter — parts of town, bypassing the predominantly black southeast neighborhood where Brown was fatally shot by a police officer while walking to his grandmother’s home.
The investments, rather than easing the economic gap, have deepened that divide.
“This is the forgotten Ferguson,” said Francesca Griffin, a St. Louis native who moved to the inner-ring suburb 13 years ago for the more-affordable home prices. “Time and time again, West Florissant Avenue just gets left out. And people are losing hope.”
The growing disparity is the result of decisions, large and small, that capture the difficulties of overcoming a legacy of racial segregation, economic exclusion and political disenfranchisement.
In Ferguson’s case, obstacles have included a corporate mind-set willing to take on only so much risk, a seeming lack of political will and a disadvantaged community’s inability to promote its own interests.
Of the more than $36 million in bricks-and-mortar development that poured into the city after 2014, only $2.4 million — for a job training center — has directly benefited this isolated pocket of Ferguson, according to an analysis of building-permit data provided by the city...
Read the rest if you will, but I'll focus on "obstacles have included a corporate mind-set willing to take on only so much risk." No kidding, that is the factor when you put out money in an investment. How much risk the investor is willing to accept is in direct correlation to what much benefit they will realize. And quite frankly, there is not much potential for great benefit in a community that destroyed itself based upon a lie ("Hands Up! Don't Shoot!) and not expects others to rebuild it.
The lack of the basic understanding of economics by liberal politicians is nothing short of astonishing to me. Especially seeing they understand it for themselves, right Obama, with your 60 million dollar advance for a book you will never write and likely won't read. But on a more serious note, I hear inner city politicians complain about "food deserts," areas where there are no major grocery stores. As to be expected, these race baiters complain of "racism." No, it's not racism, it's the fact they won't want their employees robbed or shot. Again, the correlation of risk and benefit.
Ferguson, you made your bed, now it's up to the good people in that city (the men and women who've invested in it before Brown was shot, and lost it after the poverty pimps destroyed the city) to rebuild it.
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