another pointless political rant

[artie]

If I can't donate to them, who can I donate to?

This whole idea of giving your hard earned money to some group that promises to act in the interest of someone else is just another con, like so many others.
I'm not saying that people don't benefit from these charitable organisations, just that they only benefit a minute percentage of what they could.
Stop giving money to big corporate charities and do something nice for somebody every day, if you can.
Not everything should have a price tag.

 

[D_W]

Certainly for our area the local council aren't helping either. Buses to the city centre are very expensive and parking charges are horrendous. Doesn't encourage people to go out and shop for a few hours.

Local councils often cater to a few loud residents if there's anything residential. Here in urban and rural areas, once there are any complaints about noise or traffic, the whole thing gets tilted to putting tons of conditions on having or opening a business (requiring current properties only to be used as a subsequent business if the business is an identical type, etc).

When the taxes go up, so does avoidance, and you end up with "businesses" in the storefronts that don't pay tax (which must pass through to the property owner). I live in pittsburgh. You would think business rents downtown wouldn't be that high. The monthly rent for a small convenience store type location with about 15 feet of store front is $4k. What happens is that all of the cobblers and service businesses that used to occupy those fronts in the business district (because they served the people working in offices) get replaced with little service offices for a local college, or they become a charity storefront that often isn't even open. The remainder of the private businesses is private equity funded junk like tax prep (Sketchy in the downtown area here - they specialize in enticing people with no incomes to falsely claim dependents that aren't theirs so that they can get a refundable credit) or urban only cell providers.

There is one cobbler left. I have no idea how he can pay rent like that unless his property owner is just waiting for someone else to want the spot.

 

[D_W]

Certainly for our area the local council aren't helping either. Buses to the city centre are very expensive and parking charges are horrendous. Doesn't encourage people to go out and shop for a few hours.

separate, there are about three scheduled days per year here when the city has free parking to do shopping in the business area. There used to be department stores (the kind in one of your old shows, are you being served). They struggled for years and all are gone now. The answer to local councils when there's a problem is to designate a couple of days at it, and completely ignore that the remainder of their policies drive shoppers away. It costs $20-25 to park in any given day in our downtown, and the garages are usually filled early with commuters. The prices in the stores are higher to make up for the rent, and the rent prices are high to be able to deal with paying the property taxes on city buildings due to the fact that a huge volume of the remaining buildings are university, health system or charity rented (no tax).

The whole situation makes no sense. No grocery shopping or anything of that sort for any of the residents that live in city center, and the response of the city council is to criticize the market chains here for being too greedy to open a store downtown (it's been tried - high location cost and high theft). Rather than starting to make some of the large "not for profit businesses" pay some share of property tax, the council and the NFPs come up with an arrangement to create programs that are a fraction of the tax amount as a buy-off scheme (as in, create another pet charity, and make the health systems fund it for a tenth or a 20th of what property taxes would be and then both try to find as many TV cameras as possible to highlight everyone being helped).