Unintended Refugees

My lefty pallys on Facebook have alerted me to the imminent loss of a treasured restaurant in St. Paul:

Business is down for Mai Village Restaurant, and it is facing foreclosure. It's scheduled for a sheriff foreclosure sale at the end of October 2012.

Mai Nguyen and Ngoan Dang, owners of Mai Village, have put everything they have into the restaurant. Every single minute of their lives revolves around it.…

Mai and Ngoan were refugees from Vietnam. 22 years ago, they used all their savings to open Mai Village, one of the first restaurants to open on Saint Paul's east University Avenue…

But now, because of the economic recession and light rail construction, many customers are not coming to Mai Village like they used too.…

Political and planning visionaries insisted that Minneapolis and St. Paul must be connected by a new light rail line. Instead of using freeway frontage two blocks away, the line is being constructed in the middle of St. Paul’s primary commercial corridor. Pleas from the businessowners along Univeristy Avenue were discounted or ignored.

Businesses have already closed. There was some outcry when we lost Porky’s, an iconic drive-in hamburger joint. Most have passed with little note. But now we have the lefty goal of green transport at odds with the lefty goal of cultural diversity. They may be communists but they’re communists who care.

So they’re having a fundraiser to save the restaurant their policies are killing.

The irony of it all makes me cry.