I’ve lived in Saint Paul for most of the past twenty years. I have no intention of changing that.<\/p>\n
I love this city; its neighborhoods, its attitude, its architecture, its down-to-earth feel.<\/p>\n
I love its contradictions.\u00a0 Mark Twain once said, “Saint Paul is the last city of the east, and Minneapolis is the first city of the West”), and as you go through the neighborhoods, you can see why.\u00a0 The great playwright August Wilson lived on Cathedral Hill because more than anyplace he’d seen,\u00a0it reminded him of the Brooklyn he’d grown up in.\u00a0 Highland Park feels like parts of Chicago; the West End reminds me of Cleveland, Toledo, even parts of Boston; the East Side, parts of Chicago or Baltimore or Camden, New Jersey, depending on the area.\u00a0 My Midway?\u00a0 Well, it could be anywhere.\u00a0 And yet the old saying “Saint Paul is fifteen small towns with one mayor” still resonates; each neighborhood is, in many ways, its own stand-alone city.\u00a0 And with all that, it’s still a ten minute drive from the hustle and bustle and thrum of Minneapolis (and yet you can duck back across the river and escape the crime rate pretty much at will).\u00a0<\/p>\n
But things feel different lately.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Back during the Latimer and Scheibel administrations, Saint Paul felt tired and spent.\u00a0 While the neighborhoods throve, downtown was deteriorating as you watched; the Saint Paul Port Authority committed the city to a series of ruinous boondoggles, Town Square and Galtier Plaza and the World Trade Center, all of which stand mostly unoccupied, or occupied by government and non-profit offices; renting to government is the closest thing developers have to a “get out of jail free card” in Saint Paul, but even the state’s appetite can’t consume all the spare office space in downtown.\u00a0 Saint Paul, especially the downtown, turned into a ghetto of official space and a few stalwart local companies.<\/p>\n
During the Coleman and Kelly administrations, things felt like they picked up.\u00a0 I’ll allow in advance\u00a0that part of it is my projection of good thoughts onto more-conservative administrations.\u00a0 But the fact that Coleman and Kelly held the line on property taxes and spending was huge; people started buying houses in the city again; the plague of absentee landlords abated as people started choosing to invest in living in Saint Paul.\u00a0 The crime rate, always much lower than Minneapolis, subsided as Selby-Dale, Frogtown and the Lower East Side’s crime waves abated.\u00a0 It wasn’t all roses; profligate Tax Increment Financing lured a few companies – most notably USBank – out of downtown and into the huge, and for the next several years TIF-subsidized – West Side Flats complex, leaving several downtown office buildings vacant and strewn with tumbleweeds.\u00a0 But for the most part, Saint Paul during those 12 years had a “let’s do it” attitude.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But since Chris Coleman was elected mayor, and the ultra-left wing of the DFL took prohibitive control of the City Council with five far-left council members, the city just feels<\/em> different.\u00a0<\/p>\n Again, I’ll allow that part of it is projection.\u00a0 And the foreclosure crisis, especially on the East Side, North End and Frogtown, doesn’t help.\u00a0<\/p>\n But a huge part of this intangible, subjective change is the attitude behind the flip in course in the Mayor’s office.\u00a0 The bulk of Chris Coleman’s campaign, and the reason a fair chunk of his supporters voted for him, was retribution for Randy Kelly’s endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004.\u00a0\u00a0They rode into office with a promise to raise taxes, not <\/em>endorse Republicans…<\/p>\n …and not a whole lot else.\u00a0 It was pure negativity.\u00a0 And negativity is a response, not a direction.<\/p>\n