New Construction Dawson Road

Great house, learn more go to WorcLand.com or check out the slide show. By the way, great builder--me. Can't afford to build in Main South anymore--can' t compete with the CDC's , need to move to the West side.

Seriously this is no exaggeration. A private developer, with his own money, can not compete in a low-income area, that desperately needs investments, against the CDC's. Why?? They are so highly subsidized by our tax dollars.

Consider this. $5,8000,000 of work was down in the Gardner Kilby Hammond project for the Main South CDC and Clark University. Are they making the payments on the loan? No, the City of Worcester, you and me, are paying it back through lost CDBG monies.

Let me make an analogy to try help explain this:

• A bank takes out a 5,800,000 loan to do all the development costs on a parcel of land for you.
• You do not have to make any of the payments on the 5,800,000 loan
• The bank will make them, although they will try to get the local Congressman to get funds to pay the payments for the bank.
• In the meantime bank deeds you parcels for pennies and you are able to develop them and sell them without having to pay back any of the $5,800,000 loan.

I know this sounds crazy, but this is the reality in the the CDC development world. The City of Worcester took out a 5,800,000, guaranteed it, gave out the underlying collateral (parcels) for pennies on the dollar and has stuck the tax-payers of Worcester with the repayments.

How can any private developer compete against an entity that gets the benefits of 5,800,000 of investments without having to pay back one penny? Lets not even get into the other grants, the waived permitting fees and free infrastructure work. The answer is, sadly, they can not. As a result, they need to move on and we wonder why we can not get any private investments in the City's inner core.

Does this make any sense?

Better yet why isn't the vocal Pools Coalition complaining about the $365,000 that will be deducted from our annual HUD CDBG allocation to pay back this $5,800,000 Garnder Kilby Hammond HUD Loan. These monies could have been spent on the pools that they so desperately want?