Monday, June 22, 2009
40 Jealous Whores / Around Town / Kotz / Politics / The Economy Chain Your Wallet: Ye Olde Fake Job Scam Comes to Nashville
Posted by Pete Kotz on Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 5:24 AM
But just to soothe the naysayers -- those who either didn't like sports, or didn't like giving their money to guys way richer than themselves -- the town fathers hired an esteemed consultant. For a great deal of money, said consultant dug deep into his anal cavity to render a verdict: This new project would create 27,000 new jobs, he decreed. The people were sold.
Scroll forward 15 years, and these 27,000 jobs have yet to show. Maybe they're stuck in traffic. Best as anyone can tell, that billion-dollar investment gave birth to perhaps a dozen or so bars and restaurants. The job estimate, of course, was lie. Unless Alice Cooper's joint happens to employ 26,572 bus boys.
So forgive my amusement that Nashville is now running the same scam. Backers of the new convention center estimate that it will create 36,000 new jobs. Over at May Town Center HQ, they're expecting 35,000 jobs. All they need is a very large pile of welfare to get started.
They can't tell you where these jobs will come from. Or who will provide them. Or what kind they'll be. All they can say is they've been culled from some highly respected anal cavity and splattered across an impressive report.
It would be cool if it was true, but it never is. In my old hometown, they ran Ye Olde Fictitious Job Scam so often that everyone joked about having five jobs. They're easy to come by. All that's required is massive transfer of wealth from you to someone way richer than you. But there is a downside: Fictitious jobs don't pay so well.
Comments (2)
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Pete, where the jobs will come from is inevitable growth. May Town is designed to house a certain portion of Class A office space that comes with a certain amount of white-collar jobs that come as a proportion of all jobs that comes with the total population growth. It is not creating jobs, only giving a location for employers in Davidson who don't prefer a Downtown location. If you've seen the studies, that's been the majority of them recently.
The census bereau projects 900,000 more people in the Nashville MSA in 25 years. Surely, Nashville proper can land 35,000 measly jobs out of that growth. Yes, I know you don't trust those numbers, but please find different ones, or there's no controversy.
The problem is that metro doesn't seem to be planning for such growth. Certainly, they're not planning for a reversal of the trend of regional growth being predominantly in surrounding counties that we've faced for 40 years (3 out of 4 added people have gone to surrounding counties). Yet, even the MTC opponents, in questioning "sprawl," have pointed out that high fuel costs could reverse that trend and more and more growth occurs in Davidson. They just won't concede that Bells Bend has a shorter drive-time to the CBD than Spring Hill.
That's way different than saying if you build an arena then jobs will come. Especially when the underlying population, including the more affluent season-ticet holders, continue moving to surrounding counties or out altogehr because the underlying economy is ill.
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