Only one person can solve Duluth mystery

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

•••

What is Kathy Cargill up to on Park Point?

If you have been following her story, perhaps you share the bewilderment. The spouse of an heir to the Cargill family fortune, she is drawing increasingly alarmed attention among her Duluth neighbors by steadily, apparently methodically, buying up land on Duluth’s Park Point.

Her company, North Shore LS LLC, has racked up a dozen or so houses and perhaps 20 parcels of land since it started acquiring them in 2021. In most cases, the houses have been promptly demolished. This after the LLC paid more, sometimes much more, than their asking price.

There’s probably a perfectly sensible explanation. But what is it? Does she dream of a family compound, Kennedy-style? The properties are not all grouped together. Does she secretly plan to donate the land to the Nature Conservancy?

Is she gambling on Duluth’s growing reputation as a climate refuge, hoping to make a killing as a land speculator? Does she envision a 7-mile-long wind farm, harnessing the power of Lake Superior’s famous gales?

Reinert has assured Duluthians that, whatever Cargill is doing, she will not impede public access to the Point or its beloved beach. Park Point is basically a sandbar with houses on it, although the stock of houses is falling as Cargill goes about her business.

Duluth suffers from a well-known shortage of housing, particularly of homes suitable for families — like those Cargill has been tearing down. “I’m very concerned about withdrawing housing stock from our portfolio when we’ve struggled to create new homes, when we need new, especially single-family, for-purchase homes,” Reinert told Northern News Now.

In one of her few public comments, Cargill expressed skepticism to the Duluth News Tribune that anyone would miss the houses. She reportedly called them “pieces of crap,” and added, “I couldn’t imagine living in any of them.”

A longtime resident of Duluth and onetime resident of Park Point, Lucie Amundsen, disagreed with Cargill’s assessment of the demolished homes. “If you look at them on Zillow,” she told an editorial writer, “they were nice houses.”

Amundsen said she is baffled by what Cargill is doing, but described her “complete sadness” that Park Point “is being discovered by big money now.” The Point’s charm, she said, has been rooted in its humble character. “I think Park Point remained a middle-class secret much longer than it would have anywhere else,” she said.

She obviously has the means. She’s married to James Cargill II, one of a dozen heirs to the Minnetonka-based global food and agribusiness giant Cargill Inc. — believed to be the largest privately held company in the nation.

Cargill may feel that she owes no one an explanation for whatever she’s up to, and she’d be right about that. But we assume that she has the best interests of her community — that is, her adopted community of Duluth — at heart. Why not display a bit of citizenship, and let people know her plans?