The headline frames the story as "Caught between Minneapolis' past and present" but it is more about Minneapolis' ongoing war against "brown" jobs and its own aspiring middle class.
"Past" is represented by the 88-year-old Smith Foundry, an industrial business that recycles old metal into useful material for reuse by other industry. (Isn't that "green"?)
"Present" is represented by the ""creative class" strategy that emphasizes the role of "knowledge workers" in the new service economy. St. Anthony writes,
"But [this] strong-back-and-dirty-hands factory, which will generate a record $12 million in revenue this year, is not in vogue in a town where the mayor last week was hailing growth of the service sector. And neighborhood-based manufacturing has declined in Minneapolis for years, partly by design."
St. Anthony reports that the foundry "employs 10 administrative staff and 70 blue-collar workers at up to $23 an hour, plus benefits", but has been mired in no end of regulatory hassles to the point were the owner "fears that city elders want to banish Smith Foundry." Regulatory woes include,
- Rezoning. The foundry's neighborhood has been rezoned to the point where the 88-year-old business is "now a 'nonconforming use' in this location"
- Noise ordinances. A new ordinance designed to regulate noisy late-night, downtown bars is being used by a neighbor against the foundry.
- Right-of-way. Hennepin County is enforcing its property rights on the nearby Midtown Greenway bike trail to prevent the re-construction of a sand tank on the foundry's property. The county is reserving its space for a future trolley-car line.
"The city is not trying to shut down this foundry," said Council Member Gary Schiff. "This business can continue to operate. [The owner] has made good-faith efforts [on some recent noise-ordinance issues]. He's hired people locally and has a good name in the community. But if you were planning the city today, you would not put [a foundry] in the middle of that neighborhood. You would put it in a heavy-industry zone."
Ah, the "P"-word, "planning." First of all, what "heavy-industry" zone? The heavy industry is all but gone from Minneapolis. Second, why the need for planning? Why should the city decide what businesses stay and go?
Back to the trolley car line. The "creative class" is said to be enamoured of all forms of public transit, not that they use public transit, but they like to see it in the background as part of a bustling city-scape.
But why the hostility to the foundry? The foundry's owner explains,
"The idea was that everything along the Greenway eventually would become residential. We were in an industrial-preservation zone. But we got rezoned. And now we seem to be without a place to exist and grow."
Record revenue? High-paying blue-collar jobs, "hiring ex-felons and recovering addicts from a neighboring halfway house"? Sorry, doesn't fit the with new vision of a "cool" city.
These neighborhood industrial jobs are exactly the kind of businesses that we need to keep and attract to get our economy moving again. Bard College Professor Walter Russell Mead writes about the need for "bad" jobs,
"Think of the path to successful middle class living as a ladder; the lower rungs on that ladder are not nice places to be, but if those rungs don’t exist, nobody can climb. When politicians talk about creating jobs, they always talk about creating “good” jobs. That is all very well, but unless there are bad jobs and lots of them, people in the inner cities will have a hard time getting on the ladder at all, much less climbing into the middle class."
And Mead adds,
"To get these jobs, we have to change the way our cities work...The kind of metal bashing repair shops that fill the cities of the developing world are almost impossible to operate here."
You don't have to tell Smith Foundry.
No comments:
Post a Comment