Minneapolis is increasingly politically insignificant- with a dropping population we'll be lucky to have over 300,000 souls here for the 2010 census. We and St.Paul barely managed to stay in separate U.S. house districts, and for the next redistricting you'll need about 700,000 population to constitute a district. Given current trends Minneapolis and St. Paul would be merged into one safe DFL house district, or Minneapolis could be combined with much of Hennepin County into one swing district that could go to either party. Not very good prospects for a sitting Minneapolis Mayor who may want to run for that seat when Congressman Sabo retires. Worse yet, if R.T. cares to unseat Misters Pawlenty or Coleman in 2006, 150,000 Minneapolis votes isn't much of a base in a statewide voter turnout of nearly 3,000,000.
So if we are to avert our slow slide down the slippery slope to political insignificance we need more Minneapolitans. To accomplish that we need to attract people here, and overpriced housing and uncontrolled crime isn't going to do that. We need to offer the best bargains in the housing market.
Housing MARKET? Surely the thought that home buyers and renters might be shopping around is an unfamiliar concept in the rarified atmosphere of our City Hall. Much like the Donaldson's Department Store manager that expects customers to forever ignore the better deals at Target and Zayre, never mind WalMart, our city planners blindly expect buyers to flock to their $200,000 and up condos and townhouses.
There are few new living wage jobs on the horizon and WalMart is setting the pay scale. In the metro area that means $8 times about 30 hours a week. That's about a thousand dollars a month. Then consider that thanks to the Bush administrations incredible ability to permanently lose jobs we are nearing the point where less than half of core city adults are working. Most of these structurally unemployed folks are bringing in at best about that same $1000 a month from social security, but many are trying to survive on about $500-600 a month from SSI.
So we need to provide decent housing for folks making only about $1000 a month, and to do that we need to drive the cost of a new or rehabbed small home down to less than $100,000. To do that we need to drive the inefficencies out of housing construction and rehab much like Walmart has done with retail distribution. Housing is built today very much like it was built a century and more ago- by putting together a structure of blocks, joists, and boards then hand fitting same with utilities. Essentially houses today are built like cars were a over a century ago- by hand with little standardization or economies of scale. Handbuilt cars are still available and tend to cost well over $100,000- is it no surprise that Minneapolis housing is similarily overpriced?
We need to turn loose the available technology- why can't houses be wired with a mass produced wiring harnesses instead of hand wired? If modular housing works above the Arctic Circle, why can't we use it here? We already have garages in our back yards, why can't we replace them with carriage houses and put more folks into decent housing? We have about 200,000 housing units, mostly single family homes, and less than 400,000 residents. Why can't grandma fix up her basement or upstairs and rent it out? And why can't my mother park her RV in my driveway when she comes north for the summer?
The choice is ours- we can continue to become a dying core city significant only for it's crime and bancrupcy or the city our founders intended- a proud home to over a million citizens and an economic and political powerhouse.
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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