One Year after Riots, Twin Cities Marked by Lawlessness, Racial Division

Minneapolis — Speaking in La Crosse, Wis., before the Fourth of July holiday in 2015, Barack Obama directed the crowd’s attention a few miles west, across the Mississippi River.

Minnesota, the then-president noted, was proof of what blue state politics could achieve. The state’s Democratic leaders had increased taxes on the wealthy, raised the minimum wage, and pumped taxpayer money into all-day kindergarten and financial aid for college. And the state’s unemployment rate was still lower than Republican-led Wisconsin’s, and its median income was higher. Minnesota seemingly had cracked the code.

Just six years earlier, Forbes named Minneapolis the nation’s safest city. In fact, Minnesotans were used to their state topping lists of best places to raise a family or to retire, and they were happy to snub their frozen noses at the rest of the nation who viewed the state as icy flyover country with perpetually floundering professional sports teams.

Then came the summer of 2020. After George Floyd was killed under a Minneapolis police officer’s knee, the Twin Cities became the ignition point for fiery riots and unrest that spread across the country. Rioters damaged or destroyed more than 400 businesses in Minneapolis and St. Paul alone, with an estimated price tag of at least $550 million.

Over the past year, amid the national news coverage of continued unrest, Minnesota’s image as a friendly and safe progressive paradise has taken a hit. Burned and boarded-up buildings, visible scars from last year’s riots, still dot Lake Street, the ethnically diverse business corridor connecting several South Minneapolis neighborhoods. The burned-out husk of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct building, abandoned to rioters, remains surrounded by concrete barriers, metal fencing, and barbed wire. Some of the most badly damaged buildings have been razed, leaving only overgrown fields and construction sites.

It will take years, maybe a decade or more, to repair all of the damage. But fallout from the last year of unrest in the Twin Cities is greater than just the physical scars.

Troubling Trends

While there hasn’t been massive flight from the Twin Cities as there was in Detroit after the 1967 riots in that city, the riots and unrest in Minnesota have instead exposed and exacerbated troubling trends that have been brewing here, in some cases for decades. In a sense, last year’s riots didn’t so much push the Twin Cities over a cliff as show that in many ways the cities and the state were already falling.

For instance, the state’s economy is not exactly the juggernaut that Obama bragged about just six years ago. A recent analysis by the state’s chamber of commerce revealed that Minnesota’s economy has been growing slower than the national average for 20 years or more. Income and job growth have lagged. Young people and middle-class residents have been fleeing to lower-tax states since at least the early 2000s, a brain drain that threatens future prosperity. Rumors continue to swirl that some of the state’s largest employers are looking to set up shop elsewhere. And the state’s liberals apparently were shocked to learn of the so-called “Minnesota paradox,” the finding that years of high taxes and increasingly progressive policies haven’t prevented the state from having some of the largest racial inequities in the country in terms of income, unemployment rates, arrest and incarceration rates, and education.

“All these disparities have either arisen while we have some of the highest taxes, highest government spending in the nation, or they have proved completely resilient to remedy by some of the highest taxes and some of the highest government spending in the United States,” said John Phelan, an economist at the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative Minnesota think tank. “That really does suggest to me that we need to be looking at something else.”

A Depressing Situation

Then there is crime, which has skyrocketed in Minneapolis and St. Paul, as it has in many big cities across the country. Crime already was a growing problem in the years before the riots. It got bad enough in 2019 that representatives of the Minnesota Vikings, Twins, and Timberwolves wrote a joint op-ed in the Star Tribune urging city leaders to increase policing levels and to do more to make downtown safe. Over the past year, things have gotten increasingly worse as police officers left Minneapolis in droves amid threats by progressive city leaders to defund their department. Streets in the Uptown neighborhood, a prime entertainment district, often are taken over by drag racers and protesters who set dumpsters on fire. Some frustrated business owners are locking their stores during business hours.

There were more than 5,400 violent crimes reported in Minneapolis last year, including 553 shootings and 84 homicides, the largest numbers in decades. Things are actually looking worse so far in 2021. According to city data, there were 41 homicides in Minneapolis through June 28, a 46 percent increase from the same period in 2020, when there were 28 homicides.

In May, a college student was killed when he got caught in downtown crossfire, just hours before his graduation. In April and May, three young children were shot in Minneapolis, two of whom died, including a 9-year-old girl shot in the head while jumping on a trampoline.

Recent polling by the Center of the American Experiment found that 81 percent of Minnesotans are concerned about crime in the state, including 85 percent of suburban residents. The poll found that 58 percent of Minnesotans said they are visiting Minneapolis less often than normal, 73 percent said it will take at least a year before Minneapolis will feel safe again, and 19 percent said the state’s biggest city likely will never be safe again. The state’s tourism agency is in the process of surveying people across the country to get a better sense of how they view the state in the wake of the riots and continued unrest.

“It’s a very depressing situation. And to the extent that the city and the metro area have gotten a black eye, it’s thoroughly deserved,” said John Hinderaker, president of the Center of the American Experiment. “Civilization is kind of a thin veneer. It only works because of voluntary cooperation and voluntary respect for, not just the laws, but for basic civilizational norms. And when those start to go out the window, it opens the door to a lot of really bad stuff.”

Minnesota historically has had a deserved reputation for being safe, clean, and family-friendly, a reputation that has helped the state to compete for residents despite its frigid winters, high taxes, and sometimes unglamorous image, Hinderaker told National Review.

“Well, if we lose that, if we have the climate and the high taxes and the not very glamorous reputation, and you add to that a high crime rate and boarded-up store fronts in the central cities, and all of the things that we’re seeing, I think long-term it poses a serious threat to the future of the state,” he said.

So far there hasn’t been a mass exodus from the Twin Cities. Home sales have been up in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, in part driven by low mortgage rates and a general housing shortage. And despite the rising crime and the coronavirus pandemic, the downtown Minneapolis population actually increased slightly in 2020, according to the MPLS downtown council.

Phelan, the economist, noted that the riots that gutted Detroit and other cities in the 1960s simply sped up the urban flight that was already occurring. In recent years, the trend has been to repopulate cities. Demographic changes, including lower rates of family formation, may help explain why more people are continuing to live in cities with rising crime, he said. Young singles, especially young whites who typically are less often the targets of violent criminals, may just be more willing to accept the lawlessness around them as a tradeoff for the cultural and social advantages that come from living in a big city.

Still, Phelan said, a hollowing out of the Twin Cities is possible. Phelan moved out of his downtown St. Paul apartment recently because of the shuttered restaurants, rising crime, and open-air drug use by homeless residents who gathered in the park near his home.

“At some point people get fed up with being mugged,” he said. “I don’t care how liberal you are, at some point you think, ‘No, I’m gone.’”

‘We Need People to Come’

Tim Mahoney, who owns restaurants in the downtowns of both Twin Cities, does not buy the rosy picture painted by the downtown Minneapolis advocates. He knows people who have left the city because of the rising crime, and he said there are many high-end apartments vacant downtown.

The Minnesota Twins have brought the baseball crowd back to downtown, Mahoney said. He’s hoping more workers will return in the coming weeks and months, because his lunch business has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, and he has little happy hour or late-night business.

Mahoney said Minneapolis is at a tipping point. Citing the pandemic, Minnesota-based Target announced this spring that it is downsizing its footprint at its downtown headquarters and relocating 3,500 employees.

“Once the big boys and girls start to crumble and leave, it’s dominoes. And I think you’re beginning to see that,” Mahoney said.

Julie Ingebretsen, co-owner of Ingebretsen’s, a 100-year-old Scandinavian meat market, deli, and gift shop along the Lake Street corridor, had to close her shop for three months last year to repair damage and rebuild after the riots. For the most part, business has returned to normal, but they’re doing more online orders, and she gets a sense that some of their customers from the suburbs are worried about driving into Minneapolis, she told National Review.

“Probably the biggest thing in our little part of the world here is the effect of all of the unrest last year on the police department,” Ingebretsen said. “They don’t have enough manpower to keep doing what they used to do, as far as keeping the crime levels down.”

Ingebretsen said it will take a while before the Lake Street corridor is fully restored. “We had so much intense damage,” she said. The non-profit Lake Street Council has raised $11 million to help local businesses repair. It’s an “astounding” amount, Ingebretsen said, but ultimately, it’s “just a drop in the bucket as far as what’s needed.”

According to the council, insurance is only covering up to 40 percent of the damages for most businesses. Some aren’t receiving any help from insurance. Many of the Lake Street businesses damaged or destroyed in the riots were minority-owned.

“Some of those folks did not have insurance, or not enough for sure,” Ingebretsen said.

“When all of this happened right after George Floyd was killed, it was pretty understandable the level of outrage. But the way of dealing with that was less understandable,” she added. “Most people, at least around here, are totally on board with the need for change and the degree of change that needs to happen, and the speed we would like to happen in is all true, but the method that people on the extreme end of things are employing is not how to get there.”

Ingebretsen said that Lake Street business owners worked hard in the 1980s and 90s to repair the corridor’s reputation, back when the city often was referred to as “Murderapolis.” They’re going to have to redouble those efforts in the wake of last year’s riots. She wants people to know that coming down to Lake Street isn’t “unsafe for the most part.”

“We wouldn’t be here if it was dangerous. A whole lot of us come to work every day, and we’re still alive, and we’re fine,” said Ingebretsen, who remains optimistic about Lake Street’s future.

“We really need people to come,” she said. “The more good people that are hanging around on the sidewalks the better.”