
The Miracle of Minneapolis - r2b2
http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-miracle-of-minneapolis/384975/?single_page=true
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bovermyer
I live in Minneapolis, in one of the "less safe" neighborhoods. Compared to
the house I lived in in Philadelphia, which had bars on the first-story
windows, it's perfectly fine from a crime proximity standpoint.

The house is 2500 sq.ft., with four bedrooms and three stories (not counting
the basement), and we pay about $1200 a month for it. The neighbors are quiet
and there aren't too many break-ins in the area.

Cost of living is wonderfully low here. Being smack in the middle of the
country, and close to Canada, we have access to a ton of stuff that other
areas just don't get. As a major transport hub, we also get extremely fresh
seafood, which makes the local sushi scene vibrant.

Music, art, and entertainment are huge here. If it's a day ending in y,
there's something going on somewhere in the metro.

There are a number of tech meetups in the area. I go to a few, like GoMN, AWS
MN, and PHPMN. I'm thinking of swapping out GoMN for RubyMN - we'll see.
There's a handful of tech conferences here, too.

The Twin Cities definitely feels like a Millennial city. Like there's a ton of
potential, and it's not just on its way to greatness, it's starting to achieve
it.

That is not to say it's flawless - like any place inhabited by humans, it has
its problems. But the benefits vastly outweigh the drawbacks.

~~~
voodoomagicman
what neighborhood is that?

~~~
redidas
From their description I'm guessing Northeast Minneapolis. It is an old blue-
collar area currently being revived, and has quite a few older 3-story houses.

A lot of the old warehouse buildings have been gutted and renovated, turned
into office spaces, breweries, lofts, restaurants, and coffee shops. Its also
considered the arts district of Minneapolis.

I think the crime used to be worse than it currently is, but I'm not certain
of that. I started working in the area a few years ago, and I haven't
witnessed anything unpleasant. It feels quite safe here.

If you go across the river to North Minneapolis, you'll run into a rougher
neighborhood with bars on windows and stuff like that. But even then I've
heard things are improving over there too.

~~~
ryanx435
it's probably not northeast. source: I'm currently looking to move there, and
1250/month only gets you a nice 2 bedroom duplex.

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adventured
Minneapolis also has a serious crime problem the article completely ignores.

It has about a 10 murder rate (per 100k people). Which is over twice the
national average, higher than SF, twice that of Salt Lake City and 50%+ higher
than NYC (but lower than Pittsburgh).

It has over five times the rape rate of SF or NYC.

It has twice the robbery rate of NYC, Salt Lake (and higher than SF or
Pittsburgh).

An assault rate higher than those other cities, and twice that of SF.

And a burglary rate three or four times higher than NYC, and twice that of SF.

~~~
VLM
Its a midwest thing. I grew up in the MPLS/MKE ish region and its definitely a
midwest thing based on my Army travels around the country.

Half the people in the new york metro area live in the city. There is some
diversity.

A quarter of the people in the Milwaukee metro area live in the city. Almost
no middle class people live in the city, as a percentage. Its all dirt poor in
the slums and a couple rich folks along the lake shore areas, thats it.

In MPLS, I kid you not, less than a tenth of the people in the metro area live
in the city. Nobody lives downtown but the skyscrapers and some poor people,
and as you note, poor people always have amazing high crime stats, so you
guess the results. Detroit is pretty much the same way although I haven't
spent much time there.

Basically on the coasts, there are middle and upper class people living in
cities, which NEVER happens in the midwest. "the city" is a couple soulless
skyscrapers, maybe a public uni, and invariably a giant crime filled slum. In
the midwest all the cultural and entertainment stuff happens like a quarter
mile away from the city or more, in one of the burbs.

If you see a skyscraper, on the coasts its probably a fun place to be, and in
the midwest its always the opposite, if you can see a skyscraper, run...

There are two cultural / social effects that really confuse discussions
between midwesterners and coasties.

1) Our cities are cultural wastelands with nothing to do except bar hop with
fake ID carrying college students. All the cultural stuff happens in the
burbs, music, art, parks, most festivals (makerfaire, etc), almost all our
sports teams except basketball, all the bars that aren't entirely full of kids
with fake IDs or need bullet proof vests to enter, all the good restaurants,
all the good or upscale or specialty stores, none of that stuff is downtown in
the midwest. My impression of the coasts is ALL the burbs have on the coasts
is houses, if you want to buy a pop-tart or a bottle of pepsi you need to
drive into the coastal city to shop, etc. So "new urbanism" and all that
confuses the hell out of midwesterners. So the coasties say if I move downtown
I'll have vibrant cultural activities but there's nothing to do downtown and
any time I want to do something I'd have to jump in a car and drive out to the
burbs.

This also confuses coasties who get imported. So they think our downtown is
like Manhattan but a little smaller, and are mystified that its possibly the
most boring four square miles of office buildings on the planet, and tell
everyone there's nothing to do in Milwaukee but get drunk, get drugs, and get
shot at... but drive out to the burbs, like maybe Brookfield, and we have
concerts in the park every summer weekend, and symphony and other music in the
amphitheater maybe every other weekend, at multiple sites, and festivals and
fairs and street parties and parks and great shopping and great food stores
and ... But you gotta drive out to the burbs to have any fun, cities are dead.

The imports have a really rough time, property developers have made these
million dollar condos for california people to move into because "all the fun
is downtown" back home and condos are supposed to cost a million bucks. But it
doesn't work that way in the midwest, so the get all depressed / freaked out
that there's nothing to do outside their million dollar downtown condo but get
drunk, get drugs, get robbed, or get shot. Could buy a great house in a great
school district in a great lifestyle area for a quarter mil, but no, the
imports all get a million dollar downtown condo and complain there's nothing
to do but get drunk.

In the midwest the cities are empty and soul-less, whereas I'm told on the
coasts its the burbs that are empty and soul-less. This confuses the heck out
of everyone when coasties and midwesterners talk to each other.

2) On the coasts if someone says they're from NY its over 50% odds they are
literally living at a postal address in NYC. In contrast, in the midwest, most
people you meet are not from the closest downtown office building city but
they WILL say they are. 90% of the people who claim to live in Minneapolis do
NOT live in MPLS but in a burb in the greater metro area. I tell people I'm
from Milwaukee and people who know MKE feel sad for me and the coasties
humorously think I grew up in an office building or in the north side slums,
but I actually grew up three burbs to the west (about 15 miles?) in something
of a paradise.

Some girls I dated a long time ago were "from Minneapolis" or "from Detroit"
but what that really means in midwestern speak is they lived in a burb and the
closest skyscraper was maybe 2 miles away in Detroit, for example.

~~~
uxp100
Since a few others have said you're wrong about MPLS, I'll say you're wrong
about MKE. In my experience, you're wrong, I can't imagine going to the
suburbs for "culture," (except perhaps Wauwatosa) I don't know anyone who does
regularly, including people who live in the suburbs.

But Downtown is fairly empty, you're not incorrect. It's Offices, and lunch
for office workers. For "Culture," or rather events, I go to the
neighbourhoods. Bayview, Riverwest, lower East side.

~~~
VLM
I'm not sure you're disagreeing with me.

I did some google searches on "things to do in Bayview" and the like:

Bayview: Buffalo Wild Wings chain (oooh), also plenty of places to get drunk
at night. Thats about it. Is there anything to actually do in Bayview other
than live there and get drunk?

Riverwest: Most of the time nothing to do. Primarily a residential area and
student rentals. A couple of annual festivals (like every other small town or
neighborhood in the entire state) and a couple places to get drunk although
not as many as the east side. They do have a cool annual bike race, again,
like pretty much everywhere else.

East side: This place is more fun. Gentrification is pushing all the fun out.
Still, there are some coffee shops and there are tons of places to get drunk
(like every other small town in the state, LOL). The annual Brady street
festival is fun but, again, its not like its the only block party in the state
LOL. Madison has better block parties anyway.

Is there any city, burb, or small town in the state that doesn't offer the
exact same stuff as the examples above? I can't find anything listed that
Hurley, Sparta, or Beaver Dam doesn't do better. Wheres the "culture" in those
neighborhoods other than having fifty places to get drunk? (and note the burbs
do not exactly lack places to get drunk, LOL, so why are they a wasteland of
culture if all culture is, is getting drunk?)

Some of this might be coastie / new urbanism term redefinition. When they say
"culture" they seem to mean something totally different than non-coastie /
non-new urbanism people, and I think that leads to confusion much like the
geographic limits of city vs burb as I previously mentioned.

(edited to add, I might be brutal but I'm fair, for at least 90 mile radius,
the Milwaukee city public museum and the Milwaukee city art museum are the
best cultural attractions in their field and the burbs have nothing to compare
WRT museums. You have to drive down to Chicago to find better museums. Then
again I only go to the art museum maybe every other year, and I get the
feeling that makes me an extreme art museum patron compared to most people,
especially residents, who never go to either facility at all. Actually I take
the train to CHC and hang out at their museums more often than I visit the
locals, which is funny.)

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toddgardner
Considering talent, you also must consider the culture of the region.
Minnesotans are generally very understated and humble. I have met many people
here who at first blush consider themselves average, but are amazingly
talented.

There are truly amazing people here. They just aren't broadcasting it--and
their not looking for work.

~~~
michaelochurch
Agree. There are a lot of semi-offensive comments about "brain drain" and
talent level. It's more subtle than that.

There _is_ a lot of talent in the Midwest. What you don't get outside of the
Bay, at the highest levels of specialty, is a continuous rather than
discrete/illiquid market. (New York has a continuous market, but you're
competing with Wall Street for anyone good.) This is a pain point for job-
seekers and companies looking for talent. If you're looking for someone with 5
years of Clojure experience, production experience with three specific NoSQL
products, and an extensive knowledge of the Javascript world... you can find
that in SF at some price. In the Midwest, you might have to train up into the
role... or, if you're a job seeker, accept an 80% match on the tech stack.

It's a quantity rather than quality issue (pound for pound, the talent levels
in Minneapolis and San Francisco aren't very different) but this allows
employers and job seekers both to be very finicky ("purple unicorn" searches)
in the Bay. It also makes it possible in the Bay, if you're adept at this
game, to double your comp in a bidding war. It's much harder to start a
bidding war in a Midwestern city of 500,000.

This "bidding war" effect is also why you see some not-that-talented engineers
making a lot of money. In the Bay, you have Haskell engineers at $125k and
Java engineers making $300k. Why the inversion? The Java engineer can get 3
employers into a bidding war at the same time; that's nearly impossible to do
if you're a Haskell engineer.

~~~
sjg007
java 300k where? and yes please!

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johnjackamend
Lived in MN for 18 years now in Southern California. If and when you can
afford to leave MN, you do it. I pay the same amount that I would for an
entire house per month in MPLS for a single in Santa Barbara and that would
put people off. But to me, I get to scrap that whole 5-9 months worth of
Siberian weather and inevitable seasonal depression and have an inspiring
environment.

People who have never lived in MN and read these articles with even the
slightest interest in moving to the state are simply out of their minds. My
opinion of course.

80% of my peers are MPLS millennials working for Target Corp., Best Buy, and
slew of start-ups and marketing firms and there isn't one person I know that
would even blink at the price difference if they had the opportunity to move
to a coastal region. If you have the chance to leave MN you do.

Tax me out the ass, increase my rent, and inflate my prices, I do not care, as
long as I get to see blue skies for more than 2 months a year (If you're
lucky).

I am simply an MN ex-pat hater but I find that the coastal cities are bustling
and expensive because the $$ is worth your sanity.

~~~
bGriz
I lived in Mpls for about 28 years, recently moved to Seattle and don't regret
it. It doesn't mean I won't come back, my family is there and I love northern
Minnesota (cabin country!).

The cold didn't bother me much.

Things that bother me on the coast are the insane traffic, the seemingly lack
of aid and/or housing for large homeless populations, yes the high cost of
living. But it's mostly awesome.

I'm missing a lot of useful points here, just some ad-hoc thoughts.

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joshjkim
Very interesting article. I've actually been kicking around the idea that the
midwest will see a braindrain-reversal in the next 20 years, similar to China
+ India + etc. (where elite educated foreign professionals/entrepreneurs who
historically sought the US market are actually realizing equal/better
opportunity back home, and also a more comfortable/familiar lifestyle).

Cities like Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis and Pittsburgh still can't
necessarily compete with tier 1 finance/law/tech opportunities and gross
compensation in NY/SF/LA/etc., but more and more they are offering a solid job
market (particularly within the healthcare industry) and more affordable
living to the point where net compensation may be the same, if not greater
than in the "elite" coastal markets (corporate lawyers in Manhattan feel less
rich than corporate lawyers in Cleveland, I'm pretty sure - who knows).

I think the other key is that these cities not only offer good jobs and
affordable housing, but also offer a true "city culture", including a good
food/bar scene, farmers markets, art galleries, a strong local music scene +
music venues that are on the national act rotation, all with a more casual
vibe than NY or SF offers (subjective statement: last time I was in Cleveland
it felt more like Brooklyn than Brooklyn). Whether it's better or worse is a
matter of opinion, but I guess my point is that those factors exist in many
mid-western cities, and these are the things that professionals moving into
cities really want (and pay higher rent for) and really miss when they move to
the suburbs.

Unlike the folks returning back to China or India however (who often times
work even harder for an even greater potential upside back in their
motherland), the choice to return/remain in a more regional city may often be
driven by a lifestyle choice - a mid-level manager working in Pittsburgh will
likely work less, make the same/more and, in the immediate social environment,
hold higher status than the mid-level manager in Silicon Valley who is slaving
away 80 hours a week to make an IPO happen for a 35 year old soon-to-be
billionaire founder (the big/small fish/pond concept) - of course the big draw
in SF is that YOU could be that founder, and there's less of those
opportunities in Pittsburgh (at least in theory, and for now). I think this
also ties into the relative wealth equality and socioeconomic integration when
compared to NY/SF/etc., which was well-described in the article.

Anyhow, just a thought - to be honest, much of my conjecture is driven by my
own desire to move to Cleveland for a lot of the reasons above, but at the end
of the day I have not and probably won't (I tell myself it has at least a
large part to do with the fact that I was born/raised in the Bay Area and all
my family/friends live here, but I have to admit that part of me still wants
to be in the big pond at the end of the day, as chill as it looks in a smaller
one - of course that could change haha).

~~~
shas3
Aren't you using 'technical talent' too narrowly to only refer to CS? There
are some pretty solid non-CS science/tech companies in the mid-west that
employ a large number of elite talent in the respective areas: mechanical
engineering in Detroit, food/bio/chem in MN, health-care in Pittsburgh (UPMC),
etc. (Anecdotally) I know highly talented people in the top of their
respective fields who consider working in companies in these cities to be
highly desirable because of how good these companies are in their respective
fields.

~~~
joshjkim
Totally agreed - I think especially with healthcare, cities like Cleveland,
Pittsburgh and St. Louis have nationally elite medical centers (Cleveland
Clinic, University of Pittsburgh and WSL, respectively) along with all the
healthcare service industries that surround such centers, and therefore are
able to attract and retain top talent at all levels of the healthcare
industry.

Since this is HN, I guess the question is when will the developer / VC
ecosystem develop, but I personally think it's just a matter of time before
successful "tentpole" startups will pop up in each market, and after that when
your significant other gets into a 7 year residency at WSL you don't break up
because you want to do a start-up in NY/SF/SEA - you just move too and
hopefully are able to bootstrap more efficiently than you would be paying
$3,000 for a studio =)

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ianbicking
I come from Minneapolis and moved back here as an adult. A few observations:

1) Of course lots of stuff still sucks, this is a low bar for miracles ;)

2) The region of influence is huge – going west the next real city is Seattle.
This has always been an important part of the city, first for lumber, then
agriculture, and now medicine and education.

3) Sure there's a brain drain, but we also have that large region draining
into this city. Rural areas produce smart and interesting people as well.

4) Government is quite competent. I get a broad and consistent sense that
people who work in government, elected or not, see it as a form of service.

5) Government is generally fiscally conservative. Not bullshit fiscal
conservatism, but the kind that keeps expenditures low AND taxes high. As a
result the squeezes we have had (the same everyone has had lately) haven't
been too destructive.

6) Minneapolis is embedded in a quite large county, that includes a lot of
suburbs and even some rural areas (even if those are dwindling). Minneapolis
is not the majority of the county, population or area. I know many urbanists
get excited about unified governments like Indianapolis where county and city
take on the same boundaries. I think that's unsafe – you can get shit done,
but shit can also fall apart. St. Louis is a good counterexample.

7) We're even less unified than that, because Minneapolis and St. Paul make up
one metro area, the two being largely indistinguishable from each other. I
liked this opinion piece on the problems with city government:
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/19/urban_malgove...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/19/urban_malgovernment_lack_of_partisan_competition_is_a_disaster.html)
– specifically the problem with a lack of political competition in core
cities. Like most big cities Minneapolis is almost one-party (there's a Green
Party that manages to just barely hold on to relevancy), but the competition
between Minneapolis and St. Paul I think helps keep both of them honest. It's
a friendly competition, but it helps moderate things. For instance, a useful
critique lately has been that St. Paul Public Schools manages to spend
considerably less and has better outcomes, for a student body that looks
largely the same. I'm hoping we explore that further.

8) Cost of living isn't that low. Lower than San Francisco, sure, but
everything in the U.S. is cheaper than that. We don't have the bursts of
speculation that drive prices up in weird ways, and we have the naturally
suppressive power of our weather, but it's not cheap.

9) There are many criticisms of the disparities here – that Minnesota
generally and Minneapolis along with it have a greater difference in outcomes
for whites and minorities, across many measures. Some of these are problematic
(I'm very unhappy with our policing), but some of the criticism I think is
unwarranted. We have a large Somali population, for instance. They are
struggling. But they JUST MOVED FROM SOMALIA. Families torn apart, no
background in an educational or economic system like here, I'm certain many
people hold trauma from their experiences in Somalia. Of course they aren't
doing awesomely. But they are doing okay, and all considered that's kind of
incredible. And that population is in Minnesota ENTIRELY because of our social
services. And I'm glad this community can use its wealth to help these people,
but the talk of disparities is just off. I think this is largely true for many
of the minorities here who are fairly recent immigrants, we could do better
but we're also doing good by them. (The same assessment doesn't really apply
to Native Americans, that's a sad situation where this community is not living
up to its obligations.)

~~~
maxerickson
Which side are you counting St. Louis as an example for? It isn't clear to me
from your phrasing, but I think you probably mean that it is split up.

For those that haven't seen it, Saint Louis county has 90 municipalities with
81 court systems:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
watch/wp/2014/09/03/h...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/)

~~~
ianbicking
Huh, I had been under the impression St. Louis had a combined county and city
government. I stand corrected!

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robodale
LeadPages is based out of Minneapolis...and they kick as much or more ass than
any startup San Fran can produce.

