Businesses in George Floyd Square sue city
As we’ve documented on video, the situation at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis hasn’t improved in 3 1/2 years.
A group of businesses located in and near Cup Foods is suing the City of Minneapolis for $1.5 million for the city’s various failures around the site of George Floyd’s May 2020 death. The Star Tribune reports,
The owners of Cup Foods and several other businesses near George Floyd Square are suing the city of Minneapolis, saying that concrete barricades and the lawlessness that flourished within those barriers cut their income and crushed their property values.
As we documented on video back in May 2023 and previously in June 2022, the city has given over the neighborhood to a lawless “autonomous zone” and given up on providing essential services therein.
So the businesses have a point: they pay property taxes and remit sales taxes to the city, yet their emergency calls for police and other first responders go unanswered. In any other setting, a party that accepts payment but refuses to provide services would be guilty of fraud.
As my colleague John Phelan notes here, the city’s May 2020 failures extend well beyond the intersection of 38th and Chicago, as large swaths of the city burned during the George Floyd riots.