Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Mom 'n' Pop Resort Report
“My goal is to die at 104 at the end of this big dock, watching the sunset, listening to the loons, bouncing my last check to the local undertakers and giving my body to the U,” Bob Dickerson, owner of Dickerson’s Lake Florida Resort, tells the Star Tribune's Reid Forgrave. Dickerson, 77, is the third-generation owner of his family's quaint cabin constellation in Spicer, Minnesota, the type of place that supplies homemade pizza and donuts to loyal guests, many of whom have their own family memories tied up in Lake Florida. But the economics of resort ownership have changed dramatically since Bob's great-grandpa entered the game 100 years ago; today, fewer than 700 mom 'n' pop resorts exist around the state, down from a mid-century peak of 3,000+.
Today, mega-resorts like Cragun’s in Brainerd, which just invested $17 million into its golf course, can afford the spiking costs of property and luxe expectations of travelers. For Bob, the future is as murky as a metro lake. A developer recently offered him $3.5 million, with hopes of turning the resort into a lake condo complex. “I walked him back to his Cadillac and said, ‘Don’t bring anybody here like this again,’” the proprietor remembers, we'd like to think proudly. Bob says he wants to preserve the resort as a “healing place” well after he retires, though, obviously, not every mom 'n' pop resort owner can turn down pre-retirement paydays with that kind of old-school swagger.
Twist Our Arm: Let's Talk Weather
Now that the record-setting State Fair is in the books, it's time to reflect on the wet, mild summer that was. In fact, Minnesota just experienced its coolest summer in nine years, reports meteorologist Sven Sundgaard for Bring Me the News. But, but, but! A new Ice Age is not upon us, he adds: Stacked against a large historical sample size, this past summer was actually hotter than average, which really drives home how historically sweltering the past decade has been. "Winter warming gets the most attention as it’s the greatest magnitude of warming in total degrees (4 to 5 degrees) compared to summer (1 to 2 degrees)," Sundgaard writes. "But the variability or standard deviation is also less in the summer so from a ‘normalized’ perspective (i.e. adjusting the values so we’re comparing apples to apples rather than apples to oranges) they are similar in magnitude." So yeah, not great. Sven goes on to detail 2024's "staggering" rainfall totals, including in the Twin Cities where we got hammered with about 80% of our average annual inches in just three months.
Remembering MN's Labor History
And now that the hot dog-scarfing holiday known as Labor Day is in the books, we better reflect on the true reason for the season: workers' rights and class politics. (Real quick, speaking of hot dogs: Chestnut beat Kobayashi yesterday, setting a new world record of 83 consumed dogs.) There's nobody better suited for that task than Peter Rachleff, professor emeritus at Macalester College and co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library, who just authored this capsule history of labor in Minnesota for the Reformer. It's timed to the 90th anniversary of the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes, which culminated in the "Bloody Friday" clashes that labor groups have been remembering all summer long. "[Those strikes] transformed Minneapolis from one of the country’s most notorious anti-union citadels into a 'union town' and inspired labor organization from Fargo to Omaha and Duluth to St. Louis," writes Rachleff, whose name you might recognize from several Racket labor stories. It'd be easy to end on a dour note, as unionization membership stagnates near historic lows around the country, but Rachleff doesn't, instead focusing on the diverse, youthful energy being infused into the labor movement. "We are living in exciting times," he concludes.
Wanna Buy the Most Expensive Home Ever Listed in MN?
Weird transition here, coming from labor history... um, uh, so how much ill-gotten, hoarded wealth will it take one member of the financial ruling class to afford the most expensive single-family home ever listed in Minnesota? Sixty-eight million (!), according to the Wall Street Journal, who had the scoop last month. It's hard to overstate how eye-poppingly bonkers expensive that is for Minnesota, a state where the highest-dollar homes tend to top out around $15 million. Making matters even wackier: The 28,000-square-footer built on eight acres is brand new, apparently built on spec for some TBD billionaire. Now, I'm far from a billionaire, but if I'm investing absurd cash into my dream home? I'm building the dream home of my dreams.
In any event, Jim Buchta at the Strib reports that plenty of potential buyers could emerge, as home shoppers in the highly desirable Lake Minnetonka area have no issue with knocking down $3.2 million houses to start from scratch. Some of his sources, however, are skeptical about the $68M project that involved 90+ companies. “It’s hard for people to believe that they will ever achieve a price near that number,” says real estate agent Carrie Hey. John Adams, the agent tasked with selling it, is predictably more optimistic: “It’s simply the most spectacular waterfront estate ever constructed in the Midwest," he tells Buchta. Take a look for yourself, courtesy of Spacecrafting Photography:
