Leonard

If you live near this, keep a close eye on everything. Apparently Fisher built townhomes on a hill in First Ward with no drainage to the street. Completely approved by the City, now has people living in them and washing away the downhill neighbors.

It depends on the market. In this case, there were already available options. Walmart should not have gotten an incentive to build. Guys, it's been fun, but I'm taking Augusts advice and doing other things with my time.

AND they said they would have built the Walmart without the 380 money. It's a total waste. Then, the taxes could have been spent on the most important thing on the list of things. If that thing was potholes where Red drives, great. If that thing is giant bandaids on the Yale Street Bridge, great.

Manufacturing, engineering - that kind of work might deserve some kind of tax incentive. The incentive for retail should be market-driven.

cinco, that's a good point. But for the City to not make the same mistake twice, it has to realize it made a mistake. For example, if I don't realize that posting on HAIF is a total waste of time (which I could spend affecting government on all levels instead), then I'll never stop. Or, if these 380 are really good, they should figure that out too. I think Austin has to put all their 380 payment info on a website (I think because they got in trouble). Houston should do the same. It should be easy for us to look and see who our City is handing out tax dollars to and how much. And if these are dirty deals, it's irrelevant what portion of the budget is involved - I only stole 0.6% of the City's total budget isn't a good defense.

Because it doesn't increase the taxes the City gets. Get it? Someone at some point said Walmart would never fail. I was just responding to that. Good bye August.

Google it. I don't want to deny Walmart anything except tax rebates. I don't encourage anyone to boycott. I'm not a fan of mixed-use. I'm not driving anyone into bankruptcy, just mentioned a couple of big companies that have failed. I want my elected officials to live up to their promises, even those about trees and sidewalks. I'm not saying tax collections are stagnant. I'm saying people would spend about the same amount of money in the city limits of Houston without that particular walmart.

Walmart workers can't afford health care, and cost $900K a year per store for welfare for it's workers. I imagine many Walmart workers shop at Walmart now. It's not really helping them, and it's not really laughable.

And what was that accounting firm? Remember them? Arthur Anderson.

Yeah, there was millions of unspent dollars just sitting around inside the loop. If only I had somewhere to spend my money, people said. This new retail merely moves tax dollars from one location to another. From Target to Walmart. It's not new tax dollars, merely moved a mile.

Enron

I didn't say it would close, I said I'm interested in seeing the sales tax revenues from that time period. Yeah, plenty of access without Yale street.

hahahaha! yeah, Yale street traffic does nothing for this Walmart.

I'm looking forward to seeing the sales taxes for the 14 months the Yale Street Bridge is closed. I bet whoever at Walmart did that research doesn't have that job anymore.

What data do you have that the Yale street location is successful? Have you seen that the sales tax numbers meet or exceed the projections? Please share this data with us!