An economic recovery advisory group recommended that Minneapolis spend more on youth employment, work closer with communities of color and expand access to money for entrepreneurs, businesses and first-time homebuyers.
The group highlighted the importance of helping people of color hit hard during the pandemic and civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd as about 42% of Minneapolis' population is people of color, according to the 2020 census.
"The recommendations are precise … we want to make sure that the precision of our solutions now are matching the precision of the harm that was initially inflicted on our Black and brown communities," Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said. "And this is about doing things better. This is about doing things right."
Frey formed the Inclusive Economic Recovery Work Group in November, soon after winning re-election, with a goal of speeding and improving the city's economic recovery. When he formed the group, Frey warned against simply a return to normal that would usher in the same economic disparities that plagued the city for decades. On Monday, the advisory group said the city faced a daunting task to "re-create the Black middle class in Minneapolis.
Black families in Minneapolis on average earn less than half that of typical white families. Homeownership lags among Black families, too.
Meanwhile, Frey joins other big city mayors presiding over downtowns and neighborhoods facing significant aftershocks from the pandemic, including hollowed out office spaces and storefronts, and a crime wave that rattled many residents in the closing months before the election.
The recommendations
The advisory group's ideas will come into play as city leaders prepare Minneapolis' next budget and decides how to spend additional COVID relief funds. They focused on the city's workforce, housing and entrepreneurship and small business.
Among the recommendations made were:
- Supporting employers that offer living wage jobs in or near historically marginalized communities.
- More money to expand sustainable and affordable homeownership to residents of color, including programs like Stable Homes Stable Schools, which gives rental assistance to homeless and provides incentives for landlords to provide affordable units.
- Increasing funding for the Commercial Property Development Fund — launched in 2019 to provide gap financing for small businesses.
- Expanding support and boosting the number of developers of color in all capital investment programs, including technical assistance and mentoring.
The goal is to protect small businesses from getting displaced when the values go up in the neighborhoods they helped build and to allow them to reap the economic gains of their work, Frey said. Minneapolis is also working to preserve lower-cost rental housing options that do not rely on government subsidies and to protect the city's affordable housing stock.
Addressing racial equity
According to co-chair PJ Hill, the group — 26 people from private businesses, nonprofits and labor organizations — wanted to build on ideas developed by the Minneapolis Forward Community Now Coalition, which the mayor put together in the wake of the unrest in 2020.
Hill said his group focused on racial equity.
"We built up their recommendations, and we tried to take it to another level," said Hill, a financial adviser with NorthRock Partners and vice president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. "Our goal was to make sure that we re-create the Black middle class in Minneapolis. We want to make sure we focus on these communities that historically have been left out."
Adam Duininck, the group's other co-chair, said a key conversation among members of the work group was how the city can better support young people for future jobs and better use its resources.
"The biggest thing that we started with is how do we align our resources? How do we think about what the city does well, what we could do better? And how do we work together with the public, private and nonprofit sectors to expand our reach as a city as a driver here," said Duininck, who's the director of governmental affairs at the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters.
Council members react
Council President Andrea Jenkins said the work group's recommendations are laudable but its goals are not clear.
"I'm not trying to pit ethnic community groups against each other or women against people of color, but I think the report is sending a mixed signal," Jenkins said. If the group's goal is to re-create the Black middle class, then the report should focus on that, she said.
Council member Jeremiah Ellison called the recommendations an "encouraging" start, but noted that the city must follow through with it to address "a long legacy of denying Black prosperity that we as a city and a country quite frankly need to overcome."
"If this is a new way we engage the Black community and other communities of color, it could be incredibly meaningful," Ellison said. "If we fail to make this approach last, it'll amount to little more than a trendy tokenization program."
Measurable investments
As Minneapolis begins to work with the recommendations, it should be "laser-like focused on the measurable investments, and policies that are needed to undo generations of ... the withholding of opportunities for building wealth in our Black and native communities and communities of color," said Tawanna Black, CEO and founder of St. Paul-based Center for Economic Inclusion.
"We have to be much more specific and intentional and incorporate the measures of accountability so that voters, families, know what they should expect, how soon they should expect it and what to do if it doesn't turn out," Black said.
"The recommendations are really solid," said Jonathan Weinhagen, president and CEO of the Minneapolis Regional Chamber. "Now we need to be accountable to those. It's not going to be one person or one organization or one thing that goes and does this; we're going to have to architect how to come together and co-create and do this work."
Data editor MaryJo Webster contributed to this story.