I'm honestly getting a bit sick of hearing about target employees. I was laid off by a different local company back in 2009 and no one gave a shit. If even 1/10th of the things I've heard about target's recruiting and hiring policies is true then many of these people probably didn't even deserve the jobs they lost. /unpopularopinion
People are obsessed with Target as it's the largest private employer in the region. And it's such a part of our identity.
But the press keeps running with it because people are reading it.
"About a third" of the laid off Target employees are Minneapolis residents:
http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/296774431.html
That should certainly quell any fear that the Target situation has any impact whatsoever on the apartment construction boom. We're talking about roughly 600 people, some of whom already own their homes, others who probably cannot afford top-end rental housing (too young, college debt, etc.). Perhaps just a couple hundred of them were even prospective members of the luxury rental market, or in other words, not quite enough to fill one Nic on 5th.
My point is that the journos/Twatterers who were all too eager to jump on that angle of the story were basically dead wrong.
It has always been an overblown point, though if demand was already weakening (of which I haven't been paying enough attention to know), it could be a death knell.
That said, corporate-style jobs like that largely start in the high-$40K range, from what I understand, with plenty of people starting in the $50Ks if they're in the right department. Pretty much everyone I know with these types of jobs have landed themselves in some swanky pads (North Loop, SE Mpls riverfront, St. Paul by the river, etc.), so I wouldn't be surprised if this makes a dent in the luxury market, even if it doesn't kill it.
One big concern is if renters who worked at Target decide to just uproot themselves. They're obviously not all like that, but MPR just had their Friday Roundtable with Kerri Miller where one of the guys was a former Targetron who already had a job locked down in Seattle. He's fresh out of college, highly-skilled, and now stolen out of our market.