Ramstad: Minnesota’s beef town, Long Prairie, unpacks growth problems of the 2020s

Jim Kreemer was making $1.85 an hour working at the rendering plant in Long Prairie when he and his wife decided to leave her parents’ dairy farm and move into town.

It was the early 1980s, and they were about to sign a lease on a unit for an apartment, but his father-in-law told them they were wasting their money.

“Find another way,” Kreemer recalled being told. So the couple went to the local office of the Farmers Home Administration and learned they qualified for a low-interest loan with no down payment. They bought a three-bedroom rambler they still live in today.

“That was back in 1980,” he said. “The programs were there. The house was affordable.”

Now retired after several decades as the fire chief of Long Prairie, Kreemer is the mayor of the central Minnesota town of 3,700 and spends much of his time trying to solve its housing shortage. Costs are much higher today, and there is less help for homebuyers. The Farmers Home Administration, for instance, disappeared in the early 1990s.

“There’s no easy answers,” Kreemer told me. “We need housing. We need to rehab the old housing. When you have people that are paying $500, $600 a month to rent a bedroom — to rent a bedroom, and it’s going on all over town — you can’t tell me we don’t.”

I visited Long Prairie last month as Kreemer and other town leaders started the final steps in an update to a long-term comprehensive economic development plan. The Long Prairie City Council voted its final approval on Sept. 10.

Two generations of people have been born and grown into adults in the 45 years since Kreemer bought his house.

Over that time in Long Prairie and all across the country, incomes have not grown as quickly as costs; population growth has slowed; and programs to help people get their lives started have shifted from government to charities.

Long Prairie, in many ways, has a bigger challenge than most communities in Minnesota. It is the seat of Todd County, which has the third-lowest average median income of the state’s 87 counties. The two counties with lower incomes, Mahnomen and Aitkin, are entirely or partially within Native American reservations.

Long Prairie has no natural economic advantages. It’s got a small river running through it, though not commercially navigable. The town is about 25 miles off the nearest interstate. And the surrounding rural area has considerably fewer of the recreational lakes that draw tourists and cabin owners.

The town depends to an uncomfortable degree on one employer, the meatpacking company American Foods Group, which operates the state’s largest beef products plant there. A handful of other companies in town provide services that are dependent on the plant.

Like nearly all other food processors, the company relies heavily on recent immigrants for workers. As a result, Long Prairie has transformed into one of the most diverse communities in the state. Hispanic children represent the majority of students in its schools. And the company and community have been navigating the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, notably after rumors about a sweep on Haitian immigrants that didn’t happen.

Long Prairie’s population has grown about 2% since the 2020 census, slightly below the state’s rate, but enough to put more pressure on its limited housing stock. After some initial resistance from the community, American Foods earlier this year completed a 61-unit apartment complex for its workers.

The community could use another three or four buildings like it to meet the current demand for housing, Kreemer and other town leaders told me. They cited examples of houses in town that are being divided into duplexes or even fourplexes. They recently learned 21 people were living in a house with two bedrooms.

On the other hand, the mayor also pointed out Long Prairie’s dependence challenge. “My biggest fear — and I know it won’t happen, but being an old fire chief I think about the worst-case scenario — is someday we will get all the housing built that we need, and then American Foods is going to say, ‘We’re closing down,’” Kreemer said.

That’s a rational worry; American Foods closed a processing plant in Yankton, S.D., earlier this year. But it’s not something Long Prairie should assume.

The real work happens in smaller steps, such as cleaning up a well after a dry cleaner closed.

This past week, Luan Thomas-Brunkhorst, who leads the Long Prairie Chamber of Commerce, sent me a list of 28 projects that got done this summer with Main Street Revitalization grants from the state Department of Employment and Economic Development and the Initiative Foundation. Among them, the local lumberyard got its parking lot paved, an empty downtown building was turned into apartments and the drive-in movie theater got re-graded.

The town is short of child care facilities for an estimated 160 to 200 young children of working parents. Thomas-Brunkhorst said Long Prairie is working with Business of Child Care, a Bloomington-based provider of child care construction and other services, to build three homes that will be leased to individual providers of child care.