The upcoming municipal elections in Minneapolis will be a referendum on the city’s future. At the moment, the future is not bright.
Yesterday, the city’s hometown newspaper, the Star Tribune, delivered some more bad news,
Minneapolis’ total property value falls for second consecutive year
The market has spoken. Property value declines were led, again, by commercial real estate, followed by apartments. Recent transactions have seen even prestige buildings change hands at pennies on the dollar.
Of course, in the bizarro world math of municipal finance, this means that property taxes for homeowner properties will be increased to make up the difference.
A famous quote from NBA All-Star Michael Ray Richardson has him assessing the prospects of his early 1980’s-era NY Knicks team, “The ship be sinking.” When asked how far it could fall, he replied, “The sky’s the limit.” And so it goes for the City of Lakes.
Incumbent mayor Jacob Frey is running for a third term in this November’s election. A number of other candidates have announced a challenge, including Ward 11 city council member Emily Koskie. An upcoming milestone in the race will be the April 8, Democratic party (DFL) caucus night.
Minneapolis is a one-party town, so a Democratic-party endorsement will be influential. But under the city’s use of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), there will be no party primaries: all registered candidates advance to the November general election.
As I’ve discussed many times before, contrary to popular belief, RCV does not encourage centrist politics, but rather (through mathematical operation) it pushes elections toward the extreme of whatever natural ideological leanings a locality has.
Which brings us to state Sen. Omar Fateh (DFL-Minneapolis).
Sen. Fateh is an announced candidate for mayor and recently picked up the endorsement of the city’s Democratic Socialist (TC DSA) organization. In addition, he is supported by the far-left political nonprofit TakeAction Minnesota.
Nature abhors a vacuum, so the politics of solid blue Minneapolis have cleaved along a line of merely Left (Mayor Frey) and Far Left (Sen. Fateh). The 2025 Minneapolis election is, so far, a contest between more the same and a lot more of the same.
Yet, we are all expecting a different result.