GREAT NEWS?! New statistics cast more doubt on Columbia's need for corporate tax breaks

Home seller confidence soars; high doctor population gets notice in Kansas

 

COLUMBIA, 5/29/12 (Beat Byte) -- Woe is Columbia, REDI and its non-profit partners say. Joblessness is soaring. Poverty is out of control. We need blight and corporate welfare to set it all right.

 

But wait! What about all those national news stories about Columbia The Great? The Hardest Working City story? The best city for new business stories? The best city for Veterans and retirees and college grads?

 

New statistics continue adding good news. Home seller confidence is soaring, with Columbia showing the nation's 5th highest growth in home sale inventories after years of market tightening. At 9%, CoMo ranks alongside Iowa City, Boulder, Colorado, Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C.

 

The inventory increase -- recorded in April -- "is unusual in the middle of the spring sales season. The uptick may be the result of rising seller confidence and it should ease concerns that the super tight inventory levels of the last six months have dampened sales by limiting buyer options," the National Association of Realtors reports.

 

Concentration of family doctors -- another quite literal measure of community health -- is six and half times normal, reports the Wichita Business Journal. In fact, in this multi-state region, Columbia's family doctor numbers top the list of all communities.

 

Wichita, by comparison, has roughly one-half the normal number of family physicians -- a rate nearly 12 times lower than Columbia.

 

And yet, to hear City Hall tell it, Columbia is a blighted dead zone that only local officials and the power class have any hope of reviving. Sadly, their policies promise to become self-fulfilling prophecies.