i mean....

i get that this guy was being a jerk. and, good riddance. fine.

but, detroit can be frustrating when it comes to this, too. i've never seen a city go so far out of it's way to try and stunt investment.

so, the concern is that people from out of town (many who are white) are coming into the area and spending money. most cities actually go out of their way to design economic stimulus plans because they want that, they don't argue that it's "pushing out the local residents" (many who are black). now, i grasp that the way this guy was doing this appears to actually have been literally pushing out local residents by underpaying or not paying them at all, and bringing in workers that lived elsewhere - and no city would want that either. what everybody ought to want is a scenario where you create economic projects that bring in people from out of town (sometimes called tourists), who then spend their money in the local economy, which is then distributed to the locals, who then have money to spend on what they want to spend it on. that's called stimulus, or investment and it's what you're supposed to want, if you're a vaguely leftist liberal keynesian type. what they seem to want is loans for small businesses, while acknowledging that there's no market for what they're selling, because the poverty rate is structural.

what i'm getting at is what everybody knows: if they set up a bar designed to appeal solely to the local residents, it's going to fail, because they don't have the disposable income. in order to get the disposable income, you need to do things that create jobs - and then you need to find ways to attract people to spend money to pay the workers doing those jobs. then, once they've made some money, they can buy a venue, and put on shows for a local population that has disposable income from the employment created by the outside investment. detroit refuses to get this - it wants the end product without building it. this is just another example.....

i wish they would have tried to unionize or something rather than walk out, because the best outcome for everybody in the short run would have been for el club to keep being el club, and have it's profits better distributed amongst the workers, who could then use them to build the economy they want.

if the bar fails in the end, the neighbourhood loses a substantial income source, and everybody is worse off.