Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Uptown Is Dead For Sale
Wanna buy 65,000 square feet of office space in Uptown? Probably not! But regardless of your wants or needs, MoZaic East and West, located at Hennepin and Lagoon, are going on the block, as is the nearby Lagoon Cinema, reports Nick Halter at Axios. Halter says the properties are mostly vacant and valued far below what they cost to build, and much of his story seems to blame this on instability in the neighborhood, noting crime as well as “looting and burning” after George Floyd’s murder (though from what I can tell there was none of the latter in Uptown). Still, an 84% vacancy rate and a $44 million drop in value suggests that while the upheaval of the past few years may not have helped matters, maybe MoZaic was just a poorly thought through investment to begin with. In fact, much of the commercial vacancy in Uptown seems the result of a lack of foresight on the part of landlords and developers, as the neighborhood transitions from a destination site to, well, a neighborhood. Sometimes investments just don’t work out!
Catching Up With Coaching
Minneapolis City Council President Elliott Payne wants the city auditor to assess the MPD’s recent use of its “coaching” process, writes Andy Mannix in the Strib. The practice is ostensibly reserved for low level policy violations, but because it’s not technically disciplinary and isn’t a matter of public record, the department has used it to cover up more serious infractions in the past. Mannix says these include “mishandling a gun and firing into the precinct wall, failing to report a colleague’s use of force, and letting a police dog off leash and allowing it to attack a civilian.” You know, little stuff.
As part of a settlement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights a court-appointed monitor will eventually determine whether the city’s use of coaching complies with agreed-upon changes to MPD practices. But Payne says that process may take decades and that the city should get coaching under control now. Meanwhile, Police Chief Brian O’Hara says he has reviewed each instance of coaching since he took office in November 2022 and “every one of those violations has been appropriate.” OK then.
Turns Out I Am a Financial Genius!
I have been a renter all my non-dependent life, which, the conventional wisdom says, is an extreme waste of money. Not so fast, says Adam Schwalbe at Streets.MN! Renting in the Minneapolis can be more profitable than buying these days, according to Schwalbe. I’ll skip the details (or you can find them in his report), but essentially he argues that if you take the money you’re prepared to sink into a down payment and invest it instead in an index fund, you’d come out ahead in the long run. (Have I done that? Uh, yeah, of course.) Anyway, it’s a provocative read, given the U.S. faith in home ownership as a cornerstone of middle class stability, as well as VP Harris’s proposed $25K in down payment assistance for first-time buyers. Now if you homeowners will excuse me, I’m going to call my landlord and tell him to fix something that you’d have to fix yourselves.
WALZ WATCH: A Revelatory Dreamcast Obsession?
Is there anything still to learn about Tim Walz after the past two weeks? Maybe not—but that means it’s time to interpret what we’ve learned. For instance, the New York Times previously reported that Walz, in his teaching days, was so addicted to his Sega Dreamcast that his wife Gwen had to hide it from him. A cute, colorful detail humanizing a politician… or a glimpse into one man’s soul? Simon Parkin believes the latter, and this week in the Washington Post he claims that Walz’s choice of the Dreamcast and its “bright, inventive, joyous, and doomed” games carries “a peculiar set of subtle associations” and “suggests something of his tastes and sensibilities.” We don’t really come away with much of a sense of what Perkin means by that, but we do get a quick history of the ill-fated Dreamcast and come away with a nice image of Walz shaking wired maracas in time to Gipsy Kings while playing Samba de Amigo—whether that really happened or not.
