Crime, homeless encampments, riots, crime, loopy left-wing government, crime, litter, violent protests, imperious left-wing activists seeing off mainstream liberal Democrats, boarded-up shops downtown, a vicious social-media-driven politics of personal destruction, crime, crime, and crime, to say nothing of the crime — today’s Minneapolis is where Minnesota Nice turns into Minnesota Nasty.
Let’s talk about the crime first. Everybody does.
“We’re moving,” says one longtime resident of downtown Minneapolis. “Prior to COVID, I walked to work every day and walked home. You couldn’t pay me enough to do that now — and it’s only a mile. It’s a changed city.”
That certainly is the experience of the 553 people who were shot in Minneapolis last year, the highest casualty figure in a generation. Robberies, assaults, thefts, carjackings, and the like are up across the city. The city council voted to partly defund the police department — and then promptly hired a private security firm to protect its members. And then, in mid February, it voted to allocate millions of dollars to . . . hiring new police officers, although they’re going to start asking them whether they have sociology degrees.
. . .
The transformation of Minneapolis already was well under way before two great radicalizing traumas arrived in the forms of Derek Chauvin and the novel coronavirus. These have interacted in unpredictable ways: There would have been protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in any year — as there should have been — but the consensus in Minneapolis is that it was the epidemic and the lockdown that really made them into the rolling parade of violence and lawlessness that marched through the city. With Chauvin going on trial in March, downtown Minneapolis remains boarded up in anticipation of more rioting and looting.
When Minneapolis was thriving, the entertainment district in the city’s core attracted both residents and visitors, and the tax dollars their merrymaking threw off became an important source of city revenue. That has died off. The immediately pressing economic question for the city is whether that business was gutted by the epidemic, in which case it may recover, or whether it was terrorized away by the riots and the crime wave, in which case it may not recover.
“If you took Hubert Humphrey and plopped him down in Minneapolis today, he wouldn’t recognize the place,” says Annette Meeks, a former Republican Party leader and head of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, a conservative think tank. “It’s not the social upheaval — it’s just the rank craziness.” At the top of the hit parade of crazy are efforts, well under way, to completely abolish the city’s police department. The city’s charter commission kept a police-abolition measure off the ballot the last time around, ruling that the city charter has to be amended before such an action is taken, but a petition drive has been launched to make that happen. “They need 12,000 signatures to get it on the ballot,” Meeks says, “but they’re going for 20,000, overachievers that they are.”
Meeks paints a bleak picture of Minneapolis’s political environment: The Republicans moved out and fell into obscurity decades ago; the caucus system and ranked-choice voting create complexities that favor committed full-time political activists over civic-minded volunteer leaders; boutique radicalism has replaced such old-fashioned livability issues as park maintenance and crime; and the new breed of leaders can win by grandstanding on cultural issues rather than concentrating on the difficult work of seeing to it that the city is run well. On top of all this, Meeks says, is a shocking new viciousness as the manners and style of social media move into the real-world political space.
“It’s survival of the fittest,” she says, “and the radicals won.”
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Downtown Minneapolis is home to the corporate headquarters of Target (8,500 employees) and US Bank (5,000 employees), as well as a large Wells Fargo office (7,000 employees). One major corporate defection could have devastating consequences.
And Minneapolis today is a hard sell as a long-term investment. People with a taste for urban life will put up with all sorts of shenanigans in New York City and Los Angeles and other megapolises; at the other end of the spectrum, residents can exercise a relatively high level of control when things go badly awry in small towns. But midsized cities are neither fish nor municipal fowl: Sometimes, they hit a sweet spot like Austin’s or Kansas City’s — and, sometimes, they end up with the worst of both worlds. That’s a real danger for Minneapolis, which has long prospered in no small part on the strength of its lively cultural scene and livability. Even when the plague is conquered, rampant crime and the aftermath of the recent lawlessness will hinder the city’s cultural recovery. And people will have to ask: Do you really want to live in a city with San Francisco’s homelessness and Fargo’s weather? Do you really want New York City’s crime with Milwaukee’s theater, Los Angeles’s governmental dysfunction with Columbus’s restaurants? How many variations on the theme of Cleveland are Millennials able to sustain?
It’s a familiar story. Everybody knows where the road to Portland ends: Portland.
Portland was once a thriving and quirky second-tier city and is now a dreary, backward, ugly, dangerous, tedious little burg of no interest except as a sobering cautionary example. Philadelphia was once celebrated as “an American Paris.” Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Minneapolis’s new radicals came to conquer and may be king for a day. But they won’t be the first of their kind to ruin a city by trying to rule it.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
