The same demographic shift happened in the Twin Cities. Today, the Minneapolis Public Schools have 67 percent students of color, including Hispanic and Native Americans, and in St. Paul, that number is now 78 percent, with the single largest group being Hmong. For the entire Twin Cities metro area, the lower the grade, the more students of color, so the trend line will make it even more diverse. Roughly one hundred different languages are now spoken in the Minneapolis school system. The Twin Cities Metropolitan Council forecasts that two of every five adults in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area will be a person of color by 2040. In other words, this diverse population will be the pool from which Minnesota’s Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, and small businesses will be drawing more and more of their workers.
At the same time, not every Somali has managed to make Minnesota “home” as much as my friend Qassim at Hertz. On November 19, 2015, CBS News reported that a new study by Congress found that “more than 250 Americans have attempted to join ISIS, and one in four of them is from Minnesota … The Cedar Riverside community in Minneapolis … has the largest Somali population in the country. Many came as refugees in the 1990s.” The unemployment rate in Cedar Riverside is 21 percent, three times the state average. “And an alarming number of young Somali men from this neighborhood have left to join extremist groups. Since 2007, two dozen have joined Al-Shabab in Somalia.”
If rising to the challenge of integration is more difficult than before, it is also, as noted, more important than ever before—because this is the same challenge now faced by communities all across America (and Europe, for that matter). We are becoming a majority-minority nation, the expanding World of Disorder will only increase that trend—and it’s all happening when the skills needed for all middle-class jobs are rising and lifelong learning will be required to keep them. In other words, Minnesota and St. Louis Park are not outliers anymore—they are microcosms of the central challenge for America today: Can we still keep making e pluribus unum—out of many, one—in the age of accelerations?
That’s what I came back home to find out. And right now I’d say the jury is still out. I am not making any predictions; this is hard stuff, a lot harder than integrating Scandinavians and Jews in the 1960s. But here is the best news that I found coming back home: a lot of people there of different colors and faiths clearly want to get caught trying to make this work for another generation, and to get caught trying to make Minnesota truly “nice” for a lot wider circle of citizens than in my day.
Amory Lovins likes to say whenever people ask him if he is an optimist or a pessimist, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, because they are each just different forms of fatalism that treat the future as fate and not choice—and absolve you from taking responsibility for creating the future that you want. I believe in applied hope.”
I found a lot of people in Minnesota and St. Louis Park, from diverse backgrounds, still eager to apply hope—eager to innovate at the community level to fortify their eye in the age of accelerations—without knowing how the story will end.
Let’s take a quick tour, starting at St. Louis Park City Hall.
What Are You Gonna Try Next?
It is August 2015, and I am sitting in a conference room with the then St. Louis Park mayor Jeff Jacobs; the city manager, Tom Harmening; and the city’s chief information officer, Clint Pires. Jacobs had been mayor since 1999 and on the city council since 1991. He is an unusual mix of Andy Griffith, Machiavelli, and Yogi Berra. That is, he has learned a ton about politics and human behavior through the window of a small-town city council, and he is capable of condensing his wisdom into memorable one-liners that Yogi and Machiavelli would have admired.
The local newspaper, the Sun Sailor, collected a few on December 9, 2015, to commemorate his retirement, including: On the city council, “Our job is to have seven people come together to disagree, then do it again the next week.” When the power went out in a harsh Minnesota thunderstorm, Jacobs said: “Told my kids they need to watch TV by candlelight.” And my own personal favorites: “I’ve always wanted to walk into a fire station and yell ‘movie.’” And “Littering has two parents—the guy who dropped it and the guy who walked past it. People here will pick up a Mountain Dew can.” Finally, “I am Republican by birth and a Democrat by choice—and now I have no time for either.”
Since we’ve been talking a lot about what St. Louis Park got right, I began by asking what was the biggest thing they got wrong. All three of them smiled knowingly and proceeded to tell me the story: In 2006, after scores of public hearings, endless hours of research and debates, the city council voted to make St. Louis Park the first town in Minnesota to offer free public Wi-Fi. It is exactly the kind of thing St. Louis Park would do. After a close vote, the city council chose Maryland-based Arinc Inc. to build what would be the country’s first citywide, solar-panel-powered, wireless Internet service. Soon afterward, these wireless radio towers went up all over St. Louis Park—with their signature solar panels at the top.
And then the first winter arrived.
Snow and ice piled up on the solar panels and didn’t melt off according to plan. The whole system failed. Overnight it turned into a giant white elephant that had to be scrapped after eight months. The city eventually filed suit against Arinc for the amount of the project—$1.7 million—not chump change for my little town.
The day after they took all the solar panels and poles down, Jacobs recalled, “I stood up at a Chamber of Commerce meeting—and one of the poles was in my backyard—and what I said was this: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, [installing that system] was decided on a four to two to one vote. And do you want to know who was the idiot who cast the deciding vote for that? That would be me.’ We had a council member at the time who was an engineer, Loren Paprocki, and he had said during our meetings [deciding on the system], ‘I just can’t support this. I don’t think it will work.’ And he said something that I will never forget as long as I live. He said: ‘We robustly debated it. I want you guys to know I am not going to support it. I just want you all to know that until this passes, I will be against it. But once it passes I will be 110 percent for it, because I don’t want it to fail. [Afterward], he was the last guy in the world to say ‘I told you so.’”
The job of the council, Jacobs added, “is to get together and debate and discuss—but to do it in a way that preserves the relationship so we can get together next week and do it again.” And the key to that, he added, was always trusting the community with the truth—“telling the community that [the solar Wi-Fi] is going south” as soon as that was apparent.
But to my mind the most revealing aspect of this incident was related by Pires, who oversaw all the technical aspects and had an actual heart attack soon after it failed. Pires recalled for me the day they announced the system was being dismantled—and before his heart gave out: “After we made the announcement, I went over for lunch to a coffee shop next to City Hall. It was called the Harvest Moon. And a guy at the counter there recognized me. He said: ‘Aren’t you the Wi-Fi guy?’”
And then the man said something that blew Pires away. He said: “Too bad the company failed to get it to work. What is the city going to try next?”
Too bad that didn’t work out. What is the city going to try next?
“I never forgot that,” Pires told me. “The community can tell when you are trying to work for them and being responsive.”
That is trust at work. Contrast that with what goes on in Washington today. Can anyone imagine any senator or representative saying to any president from another party regarding any issue today: “Too bad your idea didn’t work. I know you meant well for the country. What should we try next?”
In 2011, U.S. taxpayers had to write off $535 million in federal guarantees, extended by the Obama administration, to a solar-panel venture start-up, Solyndra, whose technology also failed to deliver. This led to years of Republican recriminations, investigations, and allegations. We should not just shrug off the loss of $53
5 million, but venture investing isn’t called “venture” for nothing; some projects are going to fail. The larger point is that in Washington, D.C.—no matter what the issue or the party—you are guilty today until proven innocent. In a healthy community, you are innocent until proven guilty, and even then people will cut you slack if they think you made a good-faith effort.
“Sometimes the wings come off the plane,” said Mayor Jacobs, “but people will accept that—if they think you’re trying to get to outer space. We were trying to do the right thing. The community was extraordinarily accepting of that. If you are terrified all the time of being excoriated in the press for some minor screwup, well, I have news for you, all progress happens in fits and starts … The space project would never have happened after the first rocket blew up if people did not accept that.” If you want to change the way people view government, “you have to change the way government views people. If you view them as a necessary evil, they won’t trust you—that is how they will view you.”
But government also has to do the little things well, added Jacobs, “because they are not little—the stop signs, the curbs, the sidewalks, mowing the parks—[they are] what make people feel like they are living in a community … We have only one stock in trade—it is not building sidewalks or plowing the streets—it is trust, and if you lose that, you have nothing.”
One of the reasons St. Louis Park has generated such a high level of trust is because it has taken civic engagement of the kind Michael Sandel talks about extremely seriously. It packs a lot of democracy into a small place. With only forty-seven thousand people, it has not only a city council, but thirty-five identified neighborhoods, and thirty of them have their own neighborhood associations, which the mayor and city manager use to build consensus and generate trust for all big decisions.
The city council in St. Louis Park is nonpartisan, although voters know each council member’s tendencies when he or she runs. “When you run as a Republican or Democrat you automatically get typecast with a certain set of ideas,” Jacobs told me. “[But] for the people subject to the decisions we make, what we do is less important than how we do it—the process we go through so people will trust it … There is a lot of transparency. If we don’t communicate with the public before we make decisions, we hear about it,” because, referring to the thirty neighborhood councils, “we have thirty little city councils inside our city.”
The city provides two-to-three-thousand-dollar-a-year grants to each neighborhood to create its own neighborhood board and hold picnics and other events to create a spirit of inclusion, such as carving out a neighborhood garden or green space. You can’t get the grant money, though, unless you’ve organized a neighborhood board with a president and treasurer.
“We’ve had other cities come in and study it and try to copy it,” said Jake Spano, who took over for Jacobs as mayor in 2016. It’s all about “getting to know your neighbors and what they see for the neighborhood … I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, very liberal. I could not tell you about a single neighborhood there, other than the one I grew up in. But in St. Louis Park, not only do I know my neighborhood, but I know all the other ones … and not only do I know those neighborhoods, I know the leaders of those neighborhoods.”
Once a year the city council has a neighborhood forum where all the leaders of every neighborhood get together and discuss things like how you pull off a successful neighborhood garage sale or block party or build a community garden, and everyone exchanges their best practices. “This did not happen overnight,” explained Pires. “This was a twenty-year-plus evolution. It started with neighborhoods wanting to create spaces for community gardens, finding plots and ways to collectively maintain them.” From that kernel, other forms of collaboration emerged, and eventually they ended up with a “tapestry of trust,” said Pires, within the neighborhoods and between them and the city council.
One of the most important jobs in St. Louis Park city government today is the neighborhood coordinator—a full-time staffer—who interfaces with them all. Jim Brimeyer, who had long served on the city council and was city manager in the 1990s, told me that they valued those neighborhood councils so much that when the state cut back aid to local governments in the early 2000s, “we cut cops and firefighters and public works people—but we would not cut the neighborhood councils coordinator.”
These councils are not only critical for improving governance in general; they become even more important as St. Louis Park’s population becomes much more international and nonwhite—and not just primarily secular Christians and Jews. St. Louis Park, explains the city manager, Tom Harmening, still has
a long way to go to make sure that everyone in our community who looks different is at the table. This building and our police station are ninety-five percent white. When we do our jobs we think about it from the perspective of a white middle-class person. We do not reflect the community we represent, but we are trying to represent the community … I don’t know what it is like working a third shift and having your twelve-year-old have to take care of your six-year-old. We are well intended but very clumsy and we don’t know what we don’t know and I feel uncomfortable or not sure of how I should ask questions … But we’re working on it. We now have one night each week in the summer where Somali women can come to the [recreation center] and swim in the pool without men. We do the same for orthodox Jewish women, so they can enjoy their community facilities in their own way.
Indeed, before I get up to leave City Hall, Harmening wants to make sure I understand: “St. Louis Park is not a suburb,” he says. “It’s a community.”
When I shared some of these stories with Michael Sandel, he remarked that this was precisely what Alexis de Tocqueville so admired in America as a visitor from the Old World in the 1830s. “Tocqueville, one of the keenest observers of American democracy, noticed that participation in local government can cultivate the ‘habits of the heart’ that democratic citizenship requires,” said Sandel. “The New England township, he wrote, enabled citizens ‘to practice the art of government in the small sphere within their reach.’ And that reach extends as the sphere expands. Civic habits and skills learned in local associations and neighborhood councils equip citizens to exercise self-government at the state and national level. Although Tocqueville did not make it to St. Louis Park, he would have recognized the civic virtues that led Minnesota-bred politicians to national political prominence.”
St. Somalia Park
While we were sitting around City Hall having this discussion in August 2015, the St. Louis Park High School student council was meeting in the room next door, so I asked whether the schools had maintained their standards and were still funded by the community at the level they needed to be and always used to be.
“In the last twenty-five years,” said Jacobs, “we’ve had seven or eight property tax increases [to improve the public schools] and they all typically pass in the range of seventy to thirty”—70 percent for and 30 percent against—“even though only about thirteen to fifteen percent of the households here have kids in [the K–12] public schools anymore. There has always been a connection between the city and the schools. If your schools are not any good, it doesn’t matter how well your streets are plowed. And if your roads are falling apart, if your housing stock is dilapidated, your government is dysfunctional so your quality of life suffers—your schools will follow suit.”
The next day I went over to St. Louis Park High to meet with the superintendent of schools, Rob Metz. He’s worked in St. Louis Park for nineteen years, as an elementary school principal, a high school principal, and a superintendent. I ask him, how has this place remained so progressive over three generations, spanning Swedes, Jews, Latinos, African Americans, and now Somalis? His view is that when St. Louis Park back in the 1950s and 1960s learned to absorb and accept the sudden wave of Jewish immigrants, with their emphasis on education, it changed the town forever. Now that the new wave consists of Africans from Somalia and Ethiopia, Latin
os, and African Americans, that imbedded habit of inclusion just got applied to them.
“There have been different waves of openness and acceptance—racial and religious,” said Metz, “but as each wave comes, that [impulse toward] acceptance has never left. In one generation it might be religious or racial or sexual orientation—but whatever the wave the school district and city say, ‘You come in and be part of this.’ And there has never been an ounce of ‘stay out.’ And in surrounding districts there is not such a welcoming mood. What held this place together were its values of openness … If you start building walls and keeping people away, that comes back to haunt you.”
Because of this inclusive impulse, added Metz, “all our academic success is pretty close to where it was back in the 1960s—with a completely different group of kids.” Indeed, the Washington Post’s assessment of America’s Most Challenging High Schools from 2015 listed St. Louis Park as the sixth-ranked high school in Minnesota.
The diversity “is incredible now, but the energy behind education has not changed,” added Brimeyer, the former city manager. There are now forty-some languages spoken in the St. Louis Park schools, and “yet they still perform above the average, which is not easy dealing with that kind of diversity.”
He then adds a small point that reveals something much larger—how the culture got embedded back in the 1950s and then just kept being passed down from one leader to the next. The school district’s boundary and the city’s boundary are the same, explained Brimeyer, so they cooperate on everything and never do bond issues in the same year. “When I took over as city manager,” he said, “the school superintendent called me and said, ‘This is how we do business here—we cooperate on everything on community education. If we do a bond issue for schools, you don’t have the city do one for infrastructure the same year,” and vice versa. “And when a new school superintendent came in, I sat him down and said, ‘This is how we do business here…’ And when I left he called my successor as city manager and said, ‘This is how we do business here…’”
Thank You for Being Late Page 49
