Developer John Mathern talks economy from Bonnie Obremski on Vimeo. John Mathern, CEO of Mendota Homes, met with me for about an hour two weeks ago shortly after First National…
Category: <span>RepJ Stories</span>
Update log: 10/27 9:30 a.m., 10/31 2:30 p.m.
Jesse Streitz received informal encouragement from the Northfield Economic Development Authority (EDA) on Thursday morning to move forward with plans to build a Goddard School for Early Education off Professional Drive.
Streitz, former mayor of Dundas, said he would plan on returning to the EDA in the future to ask what the board can do to help finance the endeavor, possibly through a Master Development Fund loan.*
Buying the land and building the school would cost about $1.9 million, he said. The school would eventually employ 20 people and enroll about 134 students. He told the EDA he hoped to break ground between January and March and operate the school at “half-capacity” at first.
Northfield resident Richard Garcia is working in a “recession-proof” industry on Division Street. He’s a video game designer for a company he founded 13 years ago called Monster Games.
“People will still pay for entertainment,” Garcia said, adding that profits throughout the video game industry are mostly on the rise, despite the national economic slump.
Garcia credits the steady increase to the growing public acceptance of video game playing as a “valid” form of entertainment since many people like to play competitive games as Overwatch, so you can go online and get services that allow you to boost your Overwatch ranking . Nintendo’s recent widespread marketing of video games as “something for the whole family” with its latest “Wii” system has accelerated that acceptance, he said.
The success of the industry might be helping Garcia’s business thrive, but he said his location has also been a plus. The Twin Cities has a deep pool of talent, he said, and he can usually have his pick of designers since few other video game engineering firms exist nearby. Competition would be much stiffer on the West Coast, he said. Garcia has also hired a number of Carleton College graduates. Garcia, a Saint Paul native, is a 1988 graduate of Tufts University outside Boston.
Brenda Miller owns a successful 12-year-old horse tack manufacturing business off Division Street called Triple L, but the Equine Outfitters retail store she opened right on Division Street a little more than a year ago is closing.
“If I had known the economy was going to be this bad, I would have never decided to try and open the business this year,” Miller said, sitting in her store on Tuesday while a half-dozen shoppers wandered through the racks.
Miller began her “Going Out of Business” sale on Tuesday, but she said she decided to close about a month ago, when she examined her finances. She did not have any full-time employees working at the store. Miller had been surprised to see the market for horse products dive so deeply in the past few months because, she said, it typcally remains fairly stable.
“Usually, I figure the people who have money are still going to have money,” she said. “And, when people love their horses, they’ll feed the horse before they feed themselves.”
“If I had known the economy was going to be this bad, I would have never decided to try and open the business this year,” Miller said, sitting in her store on Tuesday while a half-dozen shoppers wandered through the racks.
Miller began her “Going Out of Business” sale on Tuesday, but she said she decided to close about a month ago, when she examined her finances. She did not have any full-time employees working at the store. Miller had been surprised to see the market for horse products dive so deeply in the past few months because, she said, it typcally remains fairly stable.
“Usually, I figure the people who have money are still going to have money,” she said. “And, when people love their horses, they’ll feed the horse before they feed themselves.”
Note: I’m trying to get a picture of the nature of the housing market in Northfield. I talked to Mary Schmidt this morning but will be speaking with other people throughout the day on the matter. There will be updates attached to the bottom of the original post throughout the day. (Update log: 10/20 2:30 p.m., 2:45 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:40 p.m.; 10/21 6:15 a.m., 7 a.m.; 10/22 1:15 p.m., 4:00 p.m.)
Steven Schmidt Construction Inc., which owns Schmidt Homes on Armstrong Road, has built one house this year, Mary Schmidt, director of marketing, said on Monday.
Five years ago, the business sold upwards of 30 homes in a year, Schmidt said.
The 27-year old company is surviving, however, by providing another service that’s in higher demand now than in boom times: Remodeling.
“This year, we’ve probably done work in about 20 homes,” Schmidt said. “That work ranged from building a deck to completely re-doing a kitchen to building an addition.”