Ramstad: The get-growing drumbeat just got louder in the Twin Cities

There wasn’t a “Skol” chant at Wednesday’s big breakfast of Twin Cities business leaders, but there could have been one like this:

Grow. Grow. Grow!

Three of the region’s business groups — Greater MSP, the Minneapolis Regional Chamber and the St. Paul Area Chamber — brought together more than 300 executives, business owners, nonprofit and philanthropy leaders and educators to hammer home the message that the Twin Cities and Minnesota have fallen behind on economic and job growth.

They had new data to prove it with an update to the MSP Regional Indicators Dashboard, a tool created 10 years ago and maintained with help from about a dozen nonprofit organizations and government agencies around the Twin Cities.

“Minnesota’s overall economy has been relatively strong for decades. That’s a good thing that separates us from most states,” Shawntera Hardy, former commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, said at the start of the event.

“It means we haven’t faced a moment where most of our sectors are being tested and we needed to be all-in on economic growth,” she added.

Then she dropped the mic.

Wednesday’s event was the biggest I’ve seen to bring attention to Minnesota’s growth challenge. The problem is still under-recognized in the state, particularly I find by boomer-age Minnesotans who prospered during the state’s fast growth in the 1980s and 1990s.

I tend to see the growth challenge everywhere I go in Minnesota and in many news developments.

As Wednesday’s event ended, news came the Pohlad family decided not to sell the Minnesota Twins. With the new dashboard data swirling in my head, I wondered: Did prospective buyers for the team decide there’s not enough growth here to make a return on their investment?

For years before the pandemic, it was clear Minnesota was going to experience the slowest population growth in its history during the 2020s. The pandemic arrested that growth even more, in part because some people moved away from the state for sunnier climes or more scenic views while still being able to work for employers here.

The chambers and Greater MSP haven’t held an event to look at the regional data since 2019 because the pandemic caused such big swings in measurements of things like “net migration of 25-34 year-olds” and “bank loans to businesses with under $1 million in revenue.”

The dashboard compares the Twin Cities to 11 other metro regions: Atlanta, Austin, Texas, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle.

The Twin Cities ranked ninth in economic growth and 11th in job growth this past year among those metro areas.

One of the happier discoveries is the progress in the Twin Cities region on racial economic inclusion. The wage gap between the median wages of white workers and workers of color in the metro was 23.3%, down from 32% in 2015. That pushed the Twin Cities up to fourth place in income equality among the 12 regions.

And the Twin Cities ranked seventh in poverty among people of color, after the metro-area rate dropped from 25% a decade ago to 13% now.

“We are moving from the bottom of the pack to the middle of the pack in our peer group in our measures of racial inclusion,” said Nisha Botchwey, dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

“It is not time to let up on racial inclusion,” Botchwey said. “It is time to lean in, to recommit to policies, investments and civic leadership that fueled this momentum.”

Frosch told the crowd, “This is not about any kind of growth or blindly trusting the market to deliver what we want. It’s about growing faster and intentionally about who benefits.”

And yet, one of the other key messages at the event was this: You can’t have inclusive growth without growth.

At a moment when the mayoral and City Council races in Minneapolis and St. Paul involve progressive candidates who express little regard for economic growth, that gave Wednesday’s event a political edge.

“What got us here, we should not look at that as if it was the wrong growth,” Hardy, who now leads the consulting firm Amethyst Advisory Group in St. Paul, told me after the event. “The growth we need in the future requires us to think differently.”