Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Come for the Pizza, Stay for the People With Guns
Hi kids! Do you like free pizza and armed agents of the state? Well, hope you swung by the new Off Campus Safety Center in Dinkytown this weekend for some ‘za and some, uh, safety. Looks like it was the place to be.
I guess everyone must be just out of frame, having a great time. Or maybe they’re at Warehouse District Live.
The center, as you may recall, is located on 14th Ave. SE, on the site of the old favorite hang the Kitty Cat Klub. Though it opened a month ago, for many of us, this tweet was our first look at the revamped KCK, and… it doesn’t look like a trap at all, nope.
So, next time you’re in Dinkytown, swing by. Looks like there might be (Papa John's?) pizza left over still. Maybe you’ll even run into beloved public figure/center supporter Richard Painter the next time he decides to run for some random office.
Who knows how Dinkytown will improve next? Maybe next they can turn Al’s Breakfast into a crisis pregnancy center.
Homelessness Is Literally Everyone’s Problem
Finding shelter for the homeless is a difficult task for many reasons, and one complicating factor is that different government and private actors have overlapping responsibilities. In MinnPost today, Winter Keefer looks at how, in Hennepin County, the county, the city, and both nonprofit agencies and for-profit business interact with the unhoused.
The county, according to Keefer, is offering some better-than-expected news. Official numbers suggest that there are 496 people sleeping outside in Hennepin County, compared to 642 prior to the pandemic. That makes for 1 in 2,700 people, which is less than half the national average.
While the city’s function has been largely punitive, demolishing encampments, the county invested 40% of its pandemic recovery funds to prevent homelessness. Of course, now that those funds have dried up, the county is facing a $30 million gap. Another reminder that the “emergency” safety net established during the pandemic really needs to be an “everyday” safety net.
Local Haitians Not Exactly Thrilled by Trump/Vance Lies
While they haven’t been targeted by white supremacist insurgents (fingers crossed), Haitians in Minnesota are still feeling the effects of the Trump/Vance smear campaign against their fellow immigrants.
Today at Sahan Journal, Elza Goffaux talked to just a few of the 4,000 Haitians in Minnesota, many here under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a federal grant that allows migrants to work and live legally in the U.S. for a limited period of time. “Personally, it traumatizes me,” says Florencia Pierre, a Haitian artist known as “Maman Fofo,” of the racist slander propagated by the former president. “You feel that you always have to fight to be appreciated by others, you’re so stressed that you develop cardiovascular illnesses.”
The immigration limbo that TPS creates—once lifted, immigrants must either find another way to stay in the country legally or return to their country of origin—is an additional source of anxiety. And of course, we shouldn't forget that the U.S. and other colonial powers are responsible for many of Haiti’s woes. As Pierre says, “Many Haitians know that whatever their level of integration is in the U.S., since 1804, following the independence of the country, they have been punished systematically by the U.S. government, because of the fight for their freedom.”
Get Drunk… For Science!
I hate the phrase “secret weapon” because it’s corny and cliché and usually refers to something or someone not very secret, but dang if Richard Chin isn’t the Strib’s actual secret weapon. Whenever our paper of record runs an offbeat story that has Team Racket saying, “Why didn’t we think of that?” there’s a good chance the byline is Chin’s.
His latest story? A look at the many ways that U of M labs are testing drunk people. Chin spoke with Jeff Boissoneault, director of the Minnesota Alcohol and Pain Lab, a newly established entity that examines the connection between, you guessed it, alcohol and pain. (Insert hangover joke here.) So far, their findings have been unsurprising: Drinking raises your pain threshold, and drinking a lot raises your pain threshold a lot.
But they've done some interesting field work testing 149 volunteers at the Minnesota State Fair. Sadly, they’re not bonking test subjects on the head with a cartoon hammer and counting the little birds that circle around their heads, as I had quite reasonably assumed. Instead, the lab has a device that applies pressure to the meaty part of your thumb, which, apparently, hurts. (Unless you're drunk).
