Corporate subsidies that feed sprawl

Are government subsidies to job-promising corporations the waste of taxpayers’ money that critics have long claimed


That’s the charge the Washington-based watchdog group Good Jobs First is now making. It has strong evidence, based on careful surveys rooted in government data and conducted in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan.

Of 86 subsidized corporate relocations in Minnesota between 1999 and 2003, involving 8,200 jobs and more than $90 million in government payouts, four-fifths were outbound from the Minneapolis-St. Paul urban core. People of color and transit-dependent workers lost out; more-affluent, less-racially diverse areas gained, registering increases in jobs that were five times that of the central cities.

The map of subsidized job shifts in the Twin Cities area, says Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First’s founder-leader, resembles an “evacuation plan.”

Seattle Times