The New Jobs Of Allentown

J.B. Reilly said this week that the downtown development is bringing 3,000 jobs to Allentown's $600 million NIZ. Between the National Penn Bank, and his other prospective tenants, that figure seems high. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, and considering everything else he's gotten, we can easily throw that in, each job will cost the state taxpayers $200,000.00. Now, this is nay-sayer math, but then again, this is a blog. Talking of nay-saying, last night over 200 unemployed  packed into a center city church, hoping for some benefit from the NIZ. I think a church was an appropriate venue, because that will take a lot of prayer. As I had written in a previous blog post, the new jobs, except for the peanut vendors at the arena, will be white collar, college degree required. This brings us to the photograph shown above. As they demolish the former Gallery Building in the 900 block of Hamilton Street, we see that the steel beams were fabricated at the former Lehigh Structural Steel. At one time, the buildings on Hamilton Street were built by entrepreneurs, to accommodate our prosperity.  Now they are funded by taxpayers, hoping to steal another town's employees.