To: Hennepin County
From: Mitch Berg, Irascible Peasant
Re: You’re Screwed Blue

Dear HennCo

I can’t believe I missed this; your new co-chief public defender (FKA “County Prosecutor”) was sworn in this past week.. As befits an unserious person in an unserious city at an unserious time, she was sworn in on a comic book:

The new attorney of Hennepin County, Mary Moriarty, took her oath of office Tuesday with her hand placed on a copy of a graphic novel about the late congressman John Lewis.

Photos from the swearing-in ceremony show Moriarty with her hand on a copy of “March,” which she described as a “graphic novel trilogy about Congress Member John Lewis and his courageous fight for voting rights.”

A comic book.

I may start rooting for the criminals at this rate.

Oh, yeah – no surprises here:

“Research and data show that non-restorative models of punishment do not prevent recidivism, do not repair families, and cause harm to a community. Incarceration, sometimes a year or more after a crime is committed, disconnects the punishment from the impact of a crime on a victim,” she says on her campaign website.

“Incarceration disconnects the person who committed violence from their community and makes reintegration extremely difficult,” the website adds. “Mary’s office will seek to provide an alternative to traditional prosecution through restorative justice as an option for victims.”

She also opposes the cash bail system, which is “not helping to make our community safer.”

So strap in, HennCo. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

Black owned detailing shops, immigrant owned restaurants and Vietnamese run nail salons come and go constantly throughout Minnesota. They come and go without much comments from the gatekeepers of popular culture.

but high concept, restaurants, especially the ones that clean closely to the progressive narrative? They get saturation media coverage, coming and going.

“Common Roots”, a high concept restaurant in south Minneapolis, got breathless media coverage when it opened a few years back. And with a mission statement like this, it’s no wonder:

‘According to their website, the eatery was operated around the values of supporting local farmers, being environmentally sustainable and providing living wages and benefits for employees.’

With a set up like that, you know how the story ends, don’t you?

“While we dramatically reduced our monthly losses during the course of the year, the business still will end 2022 with a large financial loss. We are still only operating at roughly half the sales we did prior to the pandemic. Our margins were thin in good times, but there’s absolutely no possibility of the budget working at anywhere near the volume we are at now,” Schwartzman wrote.

And I’m sure there’s no link, no way, no, how, between the fact that principal collided with reality:

He added that last week he was informed that staff wanted to unionize, which forced him to “take a fresh look at the overall state of the business.”

“I fully support the labor movement and would have loved being able to run a union business,” Schwartzman wrote, but said he “couldn’t commit to moving forward if I didn’t have confidence I would be able to keep the business open under all the very many different strains the business is under.”

Huh.

So, your principles have unsustainable prices?

Weird.

II had to double-check to see I hadn’t clicked onto the Babylon Bee by accident.

Alas, no.

Minneapolis, reacting to the latest round of retail closures, is starting a – I swear, I’m not making this up – “Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup” to try to make downtown, for lack of a better term, suck less:

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey convened a “Vibrant Downtown Storefronts Workgroup” this week following a string of recent high-profile closures.

“Cities that see the most success post-pandemic won’t cling to the old ways that are now changed forever,” Frey said in a press release. “Here in Minneapolis, we will step boldly into the future, guided by the top experts in our region, prepared to innovate and adapt. Minneapolis has always been a hub of commerce and innovation, and I am confident that this workgroup will help ensure we continue carrying that legacy forward.”

The workgroup will be co-chaired by Steve Cramer, president and CEO of the mpls downtown council, and Gabrielle Grier, managing director of Juxtaposition Arts.

So – downtown is starting a vibrant storefronts working group but downtown is back and it never really left and if you say otherwise you probably drive a minivan and live in Maple Grove.

The hits keep coming for Minneapolis, as more restaurants  are calling it quits:

In Minneapolis alone, a number of long-standing institutions have called it quits. Rock Bottom Brewery, Seven Steakhouse and Sushi, Williams Pub and Peanut Bar, Amore Uptown and Stella’s Fish Cafe to name a few.

Some of them date back to long before I moved to the Cities – in this case, Asia Chow Mein in Columbia Heights:

“It was very hard to decide that,” Ng said. “At first, I was going to have my son take over, but now with so many obstacles and so many unknowns in this industry, I just hate for him to take over and he will be struggling like we have the last three years.”

Winnie said what served as a mold for success the prior generation, is one that no longer fits.

“The American dream maybe is for our parents,” Winnie said. “Because they think, immigrate here, they will make a better living, a better education for the kids. But I really don’t know what the outcome would be if we were to stay. I still have cousins and people back home and they’re doing really good too, you know?”

Ng said she is grateful for the sacrifice that her and Tim’s parents made. She recognizes the difficulty of moving to America, without speaking English, with the hopes of providing a better future for their children. She admired that they took the time to learn English, to navigate American cities, to learn how to walk in the snow, to learn to love eating American food.

In completely unrelated news, Downtown merchants and other leaders are trying to figure out what to do to revive downtown…

…which is back,and also never went away and has no crime or vacancy problem, and if you think it does you’re a rube from Waconia or Maple Grove.

Anyone remember Mika McFeely? He’s sort of the Filene’s Basement version of Ed Schultz, another guy who got his start talking about grown men chasing balls around fields, and decided to go into being a political, talking head. He’s the Heitkamp family’s token liberal on KFGO in Fargo, and proof that the talent bench for progressive talk hosts in Fargo is even shallower than in the Twin Cities.

I wrote about him (checks notes), a little over 12 years ago, when he wrote easily the stupidest hatchet piece I’ve ever seen, about Mary Franson, during the 2012 elections.

Anyway – he came to Minneapolis over the weekend. Ironically, it was to see Les Mis, a play featuring an out of touch patrician class that attacks a plebaian class whose travails they neither share nor understand.

Oh, yeah – he had a great time!

In other words, he went to a show, with hundreds of other people, and then went to a tony restaurant on the south end of the gentrified North Loop. Back to the hotel – or on the road back to Fargo? – by 11!

And look – no crime!

Guess all those people talking about crime in Minneapolis are wrong!

Speaking of crime – tourist McFeely has an interesting perspective on recent Twin Cities history:

Not sure it’s “Anti”-Fa that’s shooting up crowds after bar closing on First Avenue.

But he’s getting a little warmer: “Anti”-Fa are the children of the Twin Cities bon vivant class. But they didn’t burn the Ordway, or Kenwood or Linden Hills. They burned East Lake and University – the places where immigrants and lots of entrepreneurs and workers try to earn a living.

But he didn’t go to a show on Lake, or Uni, or up at Plymouth and Sheridan, now, did he?

Well, I guess that settles it!

Close on the news that two of downtown Minneapolis is nicer office towers are going up for auction, to avoid foreclosure?

The Hilton, one of downtown‘s premier hotels, and site of the NARN‘s first big surprise triumph (the 2004 debate party between George Bush and John Kerry, where we expected and planned for 100 attendees, and got more like 700)

Yeah, things are looking up downtown, aren’t they?

A bar and restaurant explicitly aimed at revitalizing Downtown, and at “bringing Minneapolis together”,as a “place of healing for people” as one of its owners said, and overturning the image of downtown Minneapolis as a crime-ridden area enmeshed in a death spiral, has…

…oh, do I even need to finish the sentence?

I mean, let a thousand lights shine and all. It takes more gumption to try to open a restaurant downtown than I, for one, have.

But some of this stuff just seems to be the cosmic equivalent of taping a “kick me” sign on your back. The “Baghdad Bob” vibe alone was just tempting Murphy’s Law…

In March, a bartender at Ties Lounge & Rooftop told Alpha News that downtown Minneapolis is “very, very safe,” even though the city had released data at the time showing increased thefts, gunshot victims, and assaults in the area compared to the previous year.

…even if crime, and downtown’s eroding status as a destination, didn’t do it first.

If proclamations made with muted, Minnesotan gusto were correlated with economic results, Jacob Frey’s exhortations would have downtown Minneapolis humming along like Dallas.

Alas, they do not. Some of downtown’s signature office towers are ailing financially:

 The 30-story LaSalle Plaza in downtown Minneapolis is scheduled to go to auction next week after the previous owner, the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois, avoided foreclosure by transferring the building to its lender, Northwest Mutual.

Nearby Fifth Street Towers is facing the same fate and may also go back to its lender this month, according to Axios’ sources who were not authorized to discuss the matter.

And it’s not just your garden-variety class-AAAAA office space. It’s the big daddy of all the downtown office buildings (emphasis added):

Real estate analytics firm Trepp is keeping tabs on IDS Center — the city’s most iconic office tower — due to a 77% occupancy rate and the loss of Nordstrom Rack from Crystal Court, said senior managing director Manus Clancy

Rumors of downtown’s non-demise appear to be premature.

I’ve had a couple of DFLs claim I, among other GOPs, “want Minneapolis to fail“. They cite a couple of online polls taken by my friend (and one of about six actual journalists in the Twin Cities) Bill Glahn showing lots of conservatives don’t think the city can be saved.

Speaking for myself? It’s not true.

37 years ago this past Saturday, just out of college, I moved to Minneapolis (and, a few years later, Saint Paul – because it was a place with huge opportunity, that a recent college grad with almost no money and without a tech degree and a really nice entry level salary (I didn’t get one of those for another 8 years) could afford to live in.

A friend of mine got an apartment, back then. Nice, brand new one-bedroom place – $400 a month. After inflation, probably $1,000 today. So tell me what a 1 bedroom in a brand new building in a neighborhood where a single 22 year old woman can live without a full time escort costs today?

In 1986, when I was working as a producer on the Don Vogel show, I booked a writer from the Fodor travel guide on the show. He’d just written an article calling Minneapolis and St. Paul “the Athens of the modern era“ – and he was not alone. Other publications shared the consesus – the Twin Cities were “the next big thing”, economically and culturally.

It was an amazing time to be here. And that was the place I wanted my kids to have, when the time came.

Something sure screwed up along the way, didn’t it?

The place is economically plateaued, *at best*. People respond “But look at all the Fortune 1000 companies!”, to which I respond “Sure – it can still be a good place to live and work, if you frequent the Guthrie and the club level at Target Center”.

But if you’re that kid getting out of school today? Usually economic stagnation comes with deflation. But thanks to the Met Council’s meddling, Minneapolis and Saint Paul housing stock is harder to find, AND hideously expensive, AND increasingly cheap (to build, not to rent) ticky-tack stick and frame apartments with the build quality of an IKEA dresser.

As to crime? Crime was bad in the ’80s, and got worse in the ’90s. But there was a general sense that those responsible thought it was a *bad* thing, and gave the appearance (outside the month before a “red wave” election) they wanted to do something about it. If the President of the Minneapolis City Council had called public safety a “privilege” in 1985, Walt Dziedzic would have led a mob of union pipefitters down from Northeast – back when Northeast was a blue collar neighborhood, not an “urban life” theme park for hipsters – and tarred and feathered her. If Attorney General Humphrey would have written an op-ed supporting defunding the MPD, someone would have checked him in for a 72 hour hold.

The Twin Cities are *not* better; they have not “moved forward“, they haven’t become “more vibrant,“ it’s just more dangerous, more expensive – and more segregated, especially by class.

I would love to see a rebirth of what the Twin Cities were – a hotbed of economic and scientific and artistic creativity and opportunity, and a place where young people of all backgrounds can afford to get established. A place where “vibrancy“ isn’t a punchline.

Can anybody possibly be delusional enough to think the current regime can bring that about?

As to the “polls” – should Minneapolis be saved? Sure.

Can it be, without a 180° political turn around? I’m afraid not.

Is it worth it? That’s its own people to decide.

30 ideas ago, New Yorkers decided New York City was worth saving. And they did it – they elected Rudy Giuliani (and other cities in the NYC metro area followed suit; Jersey City elected Brett Schundler, one of my personal political heroes). And a few years of hard work paid off; NYC went from being a high-crime toilet with a First Class section, to being one of the safest cities in America; a second Golden Age of New York followed closely.

NYC is in the middle of squandering that legacy – and there’s no way they’re electing another Giuliani, since the “Great Sort” has driven the Giuliani voters upstate or waaaay out onto Long Island.

As to Minneapolis? As long as the white, upper-middle-class, ultra-“progressive” laptop-class members continue to control everything about Minneapolis, there really is no hope.

And that’s a shame. The city used to have so much to offer, not just to them, but to *everyone*.

Rebecca Brannon – one of about seven or eight actual journalists in the Twin Cities – went to downtown Minneapolis Friday night/Saturday morning.

Or so she would have us believe:

Of course, it can’t be; I’m reliably informed that “downtown is back“, and that anyone who disagrees is a suburban tourist who gets his entire world view from Tucker Carlson.

But boy, if it weren’t fake news, it would be pretty grim, wouldn’t it?

That’s a direct quote from Mayor Frey, from a presser yesterday.

I could shred that statement myself, using facts and stuff

Or I could let Keith Ellison do it, far more delightfully, starting around :12 seconds into this video:

When Keith Ellison‘s BS detector explodes, spewing shrapnel about the room, you know you’ve got a problem.

When the cities of Minneapolis or St. Paul, or the Met Council, ask for public input, you can be certain of three things:

• They have long since decided what they want to do
• It is going to reflect the revealed egos of the decision makers involved, and how they want to manifest “moving their city/area forward“ in physical form
• See the first bullet. And the post title, for that matter.Nobody cares about your input.

With that in mind – the city of Minneapolis is “seeking input“ on what to do with the old Kmart property at Lake and Nicollet:

The City of Minneapolis wants the public’s ideas on how it will redevelop the former site of Kmart at Nicollet Avenue and Lake Street…In order to gather public feedback for the project, the city has opened a surveythrough Nov. 30.

The survey asks residents about how they currently get to the area, for what reasons, and what their future goals for the area.

The city is “seeking input“ so they can check “seeking input“ off the statutory list of things to do, before doing exactly what whoever controls most of the city council wants done.

It’s how the Green Line got built down the middle of University even though the “public hearings” excoriated the idea.

It’s why the SW light rail got built through a hill and under a condo even though publc hearings said “put it where people are”.

It’s why they built a soccer stadium at the most congested intersection in the state, and tore down the retail that was the anchor of the Midway neighborhood.

Fearless prediction: the Kmart site will be turned into four blocks of “mixed use“ multi story apartments, with first floor office and business space that will mostly be filled by “community“ nonprofits.

“Public input” on public projects in MN are always a sham.

…is going just great in MInneapolis.

Fences are useless, until they are mandatory.

Officer at the MOA with a “weapon of war”:

How about removing the “gun free zone” signs from the Mall, and let the miscreants draw their own conclusions?

…is “doing the same thing, over and over and over, and expecting a different result”.

Apropos nothing:

Tax money will be shifted from taxpayers to non-profits that are, themselves, run and staffed by junior members of the city’s DFL political class. They’ll do studies, write reports, have events, and mostly cash checks, and crime will rise and (maybe) fall on its own rhythm (or, like Detroit and Newark and Baltimore and Saint Louis, not fall at all, ever) – but the DFL will be able to claim with a straight-ish face that they are “Dooooooing Something” about crime.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Couple finds their stolen business work van at a homeless “encampment” – naturally, after doing their own investigating.

They called the Minneapolis Police.

It didn’t go well:

If you are looking for a good periapocalpytic business opportunity, opening a “group of thugs for hire” to do things like retrieving expensive property the cops won’t – y’know, their job in a place that observes the rule of law – could be a booming business.

Since, among people who can’t afford to move elsewhere and aren’t willing to or can’t afford to just live with it, it’s going to wind up happening soon anyway.

“ The rule of law has collapsed so badly in a city we used to proudly brag about “owning“ that crime flourishes openly and without fear in the streets“

“And if you don’t accept an invitation to come see this collapse face-to-face, it is you who is the problem!”

Rights come with responsibilities.

Exercising rights without responsibilities is libertinism.

By the opposite token, having responsibilities without rights is tyranny.

With that thought in mind: Attorney General Ellison, trying to look “tough on crime” after 3.85 years of actively coddling it, is going after public enemy number 1: the businesses where the crime takes place:

It’s more than a little tempting to respond “turning a blind eye to violence – you’re going to be perp-walking Mike Freeman, John Choi and the entire 2020-2022 MInneapolis City Council?”

But no. That’d actually get at the ever-popular “root cause”.

What precisely are the stores options?

Call the police? And have the response come far too late to do anything? Or, even if the perps are arrested, watch them back on the street before the paperwork is filled out?

Hire private security? Whose only value is potential deterrence, maybe. If not? They call the cops. See above.

Hire off duty cops? Forget the expense – $60-80/hour – for the moment. Can the business even find any, whatever the price?

What precisely would the DFL ruling class like the knaves to do?

Gosh, why is it that Governor Klink and Co-Governor Flanagan can’t stop talking about abortion?

White, upper middle class progressive women – the people who are the new DFL base – never come to North Minneapolis, so it’s all OK.

MINNEAPOLIS IS BACK, BAYBEEEEEEE!!!!

And if you say otherwise, you’re probably from Fridley and live in your mom’s basement!

Oh, yeah. Minneapolis is back.

Pay no attention to the mass of criminals behind the curtain:

I bet Andy Lugar lives in his mom’s basement in Fridley!

A friend of the blog emails:

Some hipster soccer fan from Brooklyn stayed at a hotel in Minneapolis and was not impressed

The beginning of the thread is pretty funny. He complains that the Hilton Gardens isn’t really downtown because it is between a highway and a vacant building. (Surprise-that is what our downtown is like these days). In the next tweet, he complains that the hotel seems to be full of people “waiting until things with the police cooled down or their wives took them back.” (Another surprise, I guess, because this seems to also be something many people are saying about downtown Minneapolis these days. It’s just not that #vibrant).

Sorry the guy got some big bed bug welt. I’m also sorry that the bed bug made the news but the deterioration of our Twin Cities, with all it’s vacant buildings, vacant lots, and ongoing crime do not really make the news in any significant way. 

Stay with me, here.

Minneapolis has always had an inferiority complex re New York. It even adopted “The Mini-Apple” as its marketing slogan in the ’80s (during the later years of NYC’s nadir in the Dinkins years, for crying out loud).

If New York media figures start dunking on Minneapolis? That might get the administration’s attention.

Crime in Minneapolis is apparently intensely racist:

According to MPD data, 83% of the city’s shooting victims this year have been black. And in 2021, one black shooting victim was identified for every 150 black residents, while one white shooting victim was identified for every 3,768 white residents.

It’s worth noting at this point that the population of MInneapolis is 18.9% black. The imbalance among victims works out to about at 25:1 ratio, per capita.

But wait – the imbalances aren’t done yet:

A significant majority of homicides in Minneapolis, moreover, are committed by black suspects. In 2022, 89% of shooting suspects have been described as black (in cases where police obtain a suspect description from a witness).

As for age, two-thirds of Minneapolis’ shooting victims are 30 years old or younger.

So – young black men are extremelly disproportionally the perps and the victims in Minneapolis.

The lesson is clear, Minneapolis. Vote DFL harder

…one might be well-placed to shuffle past the Minneapolis Public Schools’ latest collective bargaining agreement:

To be, uh, fair, it doesn’t mean all white teachers get laid off before all minority ones. The union would never go for that.

No, just that honkeys are first people at any given level of seniority to get whacked.

One of the proposals dealt with “educators of color protections.” The agreement states that if a non-white teacher is subject to excess, MPS must excess a white teacher with the “next least” seniority.

“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement reads.

That’ll fix that achievement gap…

In previous years, when the DFL won elections in Minneapolis and Saint Paul by Iranian-election-level margins, their activists would gather at “victory” parties and chant “We own this town! We own this town!

I wonder if they’ll be doing that this year?

Well, some people were out to celebrate: last night, as criminal sympathizers moved to the ballot for Henco Attorney and Sheriff in November, it’s hard to miss the constituents celebrating:

You’re right, DFL. You own this town