Minneapolis ranks 59th out of 63 cities, in terms of loss of foot traffic since 2019:
Researchers essentially treated smartphones and other mobile devices as a proxy for their owners. If a device pings a nearby cell tower, it’s a good bet that’s where the device’s owner is.
The Downtown Council says it’s all a matter of remote work, and perceptions:
Downtown Council CEO Steve Cramer told Axios. The largest downtown employer pre-pandemic, Target, has no in-person requirements. The perception of public safety is another factor, Cramer said.”Our downtown … is lot more safe than many of the downtowns that get measured on these indexes, but then you have to factor in perception, and we’ve been battling that.
He’s not wrong. Downtown isn’t especially dangerous. Near North and the middle South Side are where most of the actual danger is.
But your odds of having a problem if you’re a schmuck trying to go to a concert or a game or meet friends for happy hour are about double what they were in 2016. And while that is also a matter of perception, it’s not wrong, either.
There are whispers that the people who actually run Minneapolis are looking at converting empty office space to apartments and condos.
It could work, though doing this is always more complicated and expensive than it first appears. You’d have to fix the lawlessness problem.
And of course the people promoting the idea are the people who allowed Minneapolis to get hollowed out in the first place.
And, of course, it is always well worth contemplating how different and better the world would be if our elites had reacted to covid as they did to the Hong Kong flu instead of going bat shit crazy.
” . . . converting empty office space to apartments and condos.”
Including, of course, a set-aside number for ‘affordable housing’ which will draw the sort of tenants who always make The Projects such lovely places and whose antics will further exacerbate the “perception” problem.
Dense residential zoning, public transport, all these wonderful ideas came from the top down & were completely smashed by covid interventions which came from the top down. The population of Minneapolis peaked at over half a million in the 1950s, it will never be that high again.
I’m going to go out on a limb & say that financing, taxation & services will shift to county level in the metro, so Minneapolis & Saint Paul can effectively grab the suburbs in Hennepin & Ramsey counties.
“Malevolent stupidity” is the operational mode of our elites.
You White MAGA men, demanding your downtowns be pristine places for you to enjoy are making cities unlivable for homeless and people of color.
Shame on you
When a middle class neighborhood has a large influx of poor people, the poor bring with them the same pathologies that make them poor. This causes the middle class people to move somewhere where there are fewer poor people.
The elites think that this demonstrates the moral failure of the middle class people, and this moral failure must be “corrected.”
Cramer, who’s job it is to advocate for downtown and the businesses there, is pulling the plug and retiring later this year. He’s been a lone voice sticking up for a semblance of law and order downtown, but I’m guessing he’ll spend his golden years far from this mess.
As for cleaning up the streets, you have to look to the Feds. U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger – who took point on stopping car-jackings in the downtowns earlier, had a press conference last week announcing arrests and RICO charges against 45 gang members. Minneapolis Police Chief O’Hara – who has had several tongue-biting, teeth-gritting exchanges with Mary Moriarity – was on-hand and endorsed the action – about the only person from Minneapolis government who did.
It may be contagious, though. A day later, the new head of MTC Security also had a press conference saying that they were going to start “holding people accountable” for misbehavior and free-riding on the light rail. There’s not enough money or manpower (to assume gender) to actually do much about it the way the LRT is designed, but it’s nice to see someone sticking his neck out, even if it just makes it easier to get his throat and budget cut.
Rico could be used against antifa. But it isn’t, for some reason. Maybe because a lot of dem pols have kids in antifa?
Looking for the first video of an MTC cop enforcing the law & then getting doxxed.
The elites think that this demonstrates the moral failure of the middle class people, and this moral failure must be “corrected.”
One way to correct this is to make sure everyone is poor. Hmmm… I wonder if this had been tried before?
I turned down Free Twins tickets last week, and public safety was one of the reasons. There are too many examples of crime at the stadium, much less on the street, in the parking garages, or on Mass Transit for me to blithely go someplace that prohibits self defense.
@SmithStCrx – I have a similar feeling. Since the pandemic and “unrest”, I’ve vowed not to spend a dollar within the borders of Minneapolis and St. Paul while the current regimes are in place. I won’t drive on their crappy roads, ride their rolling cesspool transit, or walk on their thug-infested sidewalks. It’s hard to avoid, but I’ve only needed to make a couple of exceptions, and then only in broad daylight.
Sure, it hurts the businesses, but that’s part of the point – cut the useless heads off at the knees, the tax base. My philosophy now is “follow the money”. That is, if the businesses want my money they can “follow” me to the burbs or provide delivery. And when the public menaces “follow”, I’m at an age and in a situation where I can go even farther out.
I suspect the finances of Minneapolis are pretty dire, but it is hard to tell from the financial data available online. The data lags by a year or more and receipts are not clearly given by source. Minneapolis used to be proud of the fact that < half its revenue came from property taxes. The rest came from event fees, liquor taxes and other hospitality-type fees. I can't find that information broken out anymore, and we know the feds and state were pumping federal covid bucks into Minneapolis through this year.
The last time I spent a few dollars was last December, when I went to the MIA to view the traveling Italian Renaissance exhibit. well worth the money. But all we did was did was drive in, use free on-street parking, and pay the admission fee. No night out, no driving around to see the sights. Drove past the old, old Uncle Hugo's bookstore location @ 4th & Franklin. It was boarded up.