Starlings are birds that rest their tired wings in pre-existing nests, taking advantage of readily available real estate to make their temporary homes. Perhaps the same strategy can help some landlords along the Central Corridor fill their empty storefronts, at least until a more permanent tenant comes along.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Cute name. \u00a0But I think the only birds that are going to benefit from this disaster will be seagulls – scavengers that pick off the waste others leave behind.<\/p>\n
Or Caribou. \u00a0Which isn’t a bird – it’s a big hoofed mammal – but it’s also a coffee shop that will enjoy lots of cheap rent in abandoned storefronts, in which to serve coffee to the condo-dwellers – the few that don’t drive everywhere, and also exist.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, two graduate students launched a new volunteer-driven effort to connect University Avenue property owners with artists, entrepreneurs and community groups looking for short-term offices, galleries or event space at bargain rents.<\/p>\n
The Starling Project focuses on “meanwhile spaces,” according to co-founder Ben Shardlow, with the intention of filling empty storefronts with evidence of creative enterprises.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
OK – it’s not a dumb <\/em>idea, per se. \u00a0Eventually the market will fill the vacant space – it’s a big metro, still. \u00a0And those people and businesses in turn will…<\/p>\n…well, either languish in the arid parking-free no-mans-lands between the big stops, or get priced out of the market by the Caribous and Patagonias and McDonalds and Dunn Brothers that can <\/em>afford the newly-gentrified rents at the \u00a0intersections that the Met Council has selected to be the “winners”.<\/p>\nWhich, in turn, will be someone else’s grad school thesis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How many businesses along University Avenue have been driven out of existence by the Central Corridor light rail contraction? Hard to say – nobody involved in this boondoggle seems to be publicizing the counts. But enough that someone’s trying to help people scavenge the space: Starlings are birds that rest their tired wings in pre-existing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trains-and-automobiles","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24831,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24830\/revisions\/24831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}