And no, Ron Tober is not a Vulcan. That’s cash on the ground, not alien blood.
Mary Newsom is reporting on her blog that Crosland — surprise! — has offered the city of Charlotte and CATS $6.4 million for the 17 acres the city and CATS spent $9.2 million to buy. City council has until June 1st to chew over the offer.
But that sales price would not be an almost $3 million loss for the city and CATS — oh, no. It is worse than that.
Crosland wants $2 million in city Housing Trust Fund money in order to build as much affordable housing on the site as $2 million will buy. So that’s $4.4 million net for the property that taxpayers bought for more than twice as much.
Plus figure in the cost of any temporary parking lot CATS sets up on the site — figure at least $350,000 there. That’s $4 million.
Plus the site prep Crosland wants as a condition of the deal — all at the city’s expense. Hard to put an exact dollar figure on that work — could be a few days of dozer work, maybe much more. I don’t know if there are any underground tanks on that site, for example. Just figure $200,000, possibly much more, and leave it at that.
So let’s add all this up. The city and CATS builds a $500 million train — at least that number, what with road and utility improvements figured in, work mandated by the light rail work. Then spends $9.2 million and countless city worker hours pulling together what is supposed to be a signature transit station for the $500 million train. But then has to turn around and sell the property at a $5 million loss in order to get anything built there.
This is more wacky than loaning $5 million to Bank of America to build something there.
Can we please, please get out of the real estate speculation business?
Update: This account does not tell readers that the public spent $9.2 million to buy the land. Without that info, how is anyone supposed to make sense of the latest, greatest proposals for the site?
