Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is trying a unique strategy to get remote workers to return downtown: insulting them.
“I don’t know if you saw this study the other day,” Frey told an audience of 1,000 at Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting on Wednesday. “What this study clearly showed … is that when people who have the ability to come downtown to an office don’t — when they stay home sitting on their couch, with their nasty cat blanket, diddling on their laptop — if they do that for a few months, you become a loser!”
The comment was a “complete joke” and the study was made-up, the Minneapolis mayor’s office told Fortune, but there are serious facts to back up Frey’s worry about the impact of remote work on Minneapolis’ downtown economy.
Disclosure: I work from home and enjoy it immensely. I never want to work in an office again.
There is that, and some rich people need to be boiled in their own pudding. But this affects all downtown businesses, even mom and pop shops. People will just flee like urban flight did when people went to the suburbs. What’s left? I hear about “well, turn office buildings into residential space,” but the logistics of that with fire codes, building codes, and urban planning are not drop in replacements. They can be done, but at great cost.
We’re looking at an urban decay beyond what we’ve planned for. Minneapolis is terrified to become another Detroit or Gary Indiana.
It doesn’t have to all be bad. If the city could get the head out of their ass, they could sort out the codes and get it done. Let people who work downtown live downtown. Shrink the driving and parking infrastructure, turn it into a walkable, bikeable area.
Rents/leases could go way down for the mom and pop shops that can survive in the new design.
Other businesses can move further out where the people are, so the suburbs can become more walkable.
If we made the focus on reducing waste, and making things easy for everyone, rather than how to make rich people richer, theres lots of solutions.
It was obvious 30 years ago downtowns were in trouble because businesses ere moving to suburbs. They still haven’t made serious effort to change the root causes of that.
Good point, but as an aside… is your backspace key broken?
typing on my phone. I have never found a good keyboard for mobile. I turned autocorrect off long ago as it too often was changing what I wrote to something that was completely the opposite, at least without it you know I didn’t mean that can can figure it out (I hope). I’m using thumb-key which overall I like, but there are still issues with it.
I have dysgraphia which means writing is already more difficult for me than most, combine that will small text boxes and random hitting of something I didn’t mean…
I’m on a real computer now so I was able to run spellcheck and get at least the most obvious mistakes fixed.
In addition, increase housing density by removing single family only zoning and adding more missing middle and affordable housing. Make the city a place people want to live (and can afford to live) rather than just a place people commute in and out from in their noisy, polluting cars.
Demand has changed in the market? Bummer. Anyway,
Oh no, we might not need heavily built-up downtown centers any more. But we need to need them! For some reason.
Just like we need crypto.
Oh wait.
Most of the buildings were talking about are made to accommodate stricter codes already. The problem isn’t really at all the cost of retrofitting them, so much as it is the lower rent/sf price they can charge for it.
Everything else you mentioned is fair, but the only reason people would rather leave urban centers if they don’t need to be there is the cost of living there. No matter how you slice it, the biggest obstacle to dense residential city centers is the established expectation of higher ROI on the space and the over-leveraged building owners who can’t afford to charge less for risk of defaulting on their properties.
In the end, it’s about bailing out the rich. They should have diversified their bets away from commercial real estate.
Covid mashed fast forward, but remote knowledge work was a thing before it. It was a foreseeable risk, even just from guessing normal rich people motivations: once the San Francisco crowd figured out they could cast a bigger net for talent, AND pay lower-cost-of-living city salaries to them, it was going to spread.