On Friday, we looked into the ragged, rough beginnings of Minnesota’s renaissance, back in the 2020’s.

Today – well, we’ll take a walk through the dingy side of Minnesota’s political transformation, see how the children are doing, and…well, we’ll indulge in some foreshadowing.

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January 3, 2033
Decaying Housing Stock Causes Big Worries In ‘Burbs
Tim Plott, Minnesota Utterly Dependent

Father PZ Myers III has inherited a real mess. And he thinks he knows why.

The new priest at Saint Ignatius Church in Chanhassen – one of a wave of churches built during the huge rush to the suburbs in the 1990s – inherited a lot of problems that would have baffled his predecessor.

“It’s sort of a perfect storm of problems. For starters, most of the McMansions built in the 1990s were, to put it in terms I think the good Lord himself would understand, pieces of crap. Shoddy, poorly built, just garbage.”

“And then”, Myers continues as he walks through the cots at the homeless shelter the parish has set up in its basement, “between that and the fuel costs in the ’00s, the collapse of the transit system, the growth of the telecommuting service economy and the revival of the city, pretty soon all the middle class families that used to keep places like Chanhassen and Chaska going fled for places like Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Or, since telecommuting is so ubiquitous, far far outstate.”

Myers pauses, exhausted at the parade of misery he sees around him. “It might have worked”, he said, “except that – well, some of the people that moved out to the ‘burbs didn’t help things one bit”.

“No”, he adds hastily, “I’m not talking about the poor. I’m talking, frankly – and I do hate to get political – but I’m talking about the DFLers that flocked out here when the Southwest LRT started running. That was…”

He looks about the rows of cots, full of men who’ve staggered off the dismal, blighted streets of Chanhassen. The train station that used to carry suburban government workers from homes in Chanhassen and Chaska to jobs in Edina and St. Louis Park is now sodden with grafitti. Crack dealers terrorize the area at night. Vacant blocks of houses, some collapsing on themselves, bear mute witness to an experiment that failed, and failed badly.

Father Myers shakes his head. “That was when our problems started”.

But others see opportunity.

“What you have here”, says Gretel Lackey-Grotnick-Willey of “Homes And Money”, a non-profit advocacy group based in inner-suburban Lakeville, “is a situation where rich Republicans took all the good, solid, inner-city housing stock after the foreclosure crisis in the ’00s, leaving the poor out in the shoddily-built “mcmansions” in places like Lakeville and Eden Prairie. They had the connections to know that with gas prices rising, homes near work would be vital. This disenfranchised the poor, who, lured to the ‘burbs by artificially low prices and massive, publicly-subsidized public transit, got into the transit trap”.

“The key”, asserts Lackey-Grotnick-Willey, “is to completely fund the Aid to Local Governments And Environs program”.

Andrea Loang, professor of Suburban Pathology at the University of Minnesota’s Strom School for Public Policy, agrees and disagrees. “Homes and Money is right about construction techniques – but that’s about it. ALGAE was an organized subsidy of failure and poverty – basically, paying failing suburbs to get it wrong, and keep getting it wrong. The renaissance of Minneapolis, Saint Paul and outstate Minnesota show us that the free market not only works, it kicks ass”.

Lackey-Grotnick-Willey remains undeterred. “We need to start getting affordable housing in the city. The government needs to give these people dreams, too”, she says.

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January 3, 2034
Morales Goes To Nationals
Local Girl Dominant Yet Again
Buffy Moltke, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakotas Public Radio

For the third straight year, Phuong Morales of Saint Paul has won the state High School Combat Marksmanship title.

A senior at Margaret Thatcher International Charter Academy in Minneapolis, Morales held off a late surge by junior Ahmad Szarkowski of Hibbing with a rolling double-tap bullseye in double-overtime.

Morales victory continues a six-year tradition of inner-city shooting sports dominance at Reagan, where Tad Haukeboe had a three-peat before Morales’ string.

Morales will be attending Texas Tech next year on a combat shooting scholarship, and plans to major in nuclear engineering.

But the Morales dynasty seems likely to continue; younger brother Chuck placed fifth in state, after winning the state Junior Varsity last year.

The rise of high school pistolcraft programs, which only started a decade ago, has been astounding. Critics say the competitions “send the wrong message”, and emphatically deny any link between armed teenagers and the recent descent of crime rates in the Twin Cities prosperous inner-city to less than measurable levels.

And this one – which seemed fairly innocuous in context: 

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July 9, 2039
Trial Begins In Eden Prairie Beating Case
Belton Farouk, Network Of The Moderate Left

The trial of two Eden Prairie police officers accused in the beatings of Eden Prairie teens Jarrod Mondale and Bentley Pogemiller begins today at the Department of Public Esteem in Eden Prairie.

The officers – Sgt. Thai O’Riordan and Jeff “Lumpy” Al-Khalid – are charged with holding the two teens against a car during a paint-huffing bust last summer.  The case has stirred up passions in this troubled city which, in recent years, has not shared in the prosperity of the city to its northeast and the rural area to its southwest.

“This bit of brutality shows the community that it’s us against them”, says Celine Murchisson-Koblecki, leader of “Eden Prairy’s for Justice”, a group formed to protest police brutality in the wake of the alleged beatings.

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We’ll follow up tomorrow.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm and is filed under History And Its Making, Minnesota Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.