David Trinh

The Star Tribune reports that the Vikings—fresh off their surprising winning streak—are currently pining for a new stadium at the state capitol.  Color me skeptical.  Not only am I philosophically opposed to the idea of government intervention in private industry but in an era of crippling budget shortfalls and budget cuts this is definitely not a sector that deserves a government handout.  Furthermore, it’s not entirely clear to me that a new Vikings stadium is even desirable.  After all, the Twin Cities will soon have five large sports and entertainment stadiums (the Target Center, Target Field, the Metrodome, TCF Bank Stadium and the Xcel Energy Center)—do we really need another sports arena capable of seating over 20,000 people?    Keep in mind that New York City, home to a little more than seven million people, also has five stadiums which it struggles to fill—seems to me that Minneapolis, which has a slightly smaller population, probably doesn’t need more stadium capacity than the largest city in America.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the economic argument for stadium subsidization when stadiums serve as critical components in community revitalization.  If a stadium can achieve high occupancy rates, it can certainly play an important role in anchoring a dense urban center.  However, if stadiums are going to achieve high usage rates they really need to be used for a variety of different things (NFL, MLB, NHL, college football, concerts, etc.).  Dividing these activities up between several locations creates massive money losing ventures while simultaneously depriving the areas surrounding stadiums of the critical mass of attendees needed to support local business.

Tonight I heard a fascinating tidbit about Minnesota from Peter Beinart, this evening’s guest at the Yale Political Union.  The story is summed up in this paragraph from an interview with Oleg Troyanovski:

OT: Well, bluffing was part of Khrushchev’s strategy. There was some bluffing when he delivered those ultimatums about Berlin, because he didn’t quite know where we go from there. And by the way, I can tell you a rather amusing story. When Senator Humphrey came to this country, he had a long talk at dinner, I think, with Khrushchev, and Khrushchev started bluffing a little bit about how strong we were in missiles, and he said, “What’s your home town, Senator?” And Humphrey said, “It’s Minneapolis, Minnesota.” So Khrushchev went to a big map he had in his office, and drew a ring around Minneapolis and said, “I must not forget that we shouldn’t hit that town.” (Laughs) And Humphrey said, “Where is your home town?” Khrushchev said, “Moscow.” And Humphrey said, “Oh, sorry.” (Laughter)

Good stuff.  I certainly hope that Minneapolis is on some sort of do-not-strike list in the event we ever end up in a shooting war with the Soviets.

I’ve been getting quite a few emails and facebook invites over the past few weeks from the “Draft RT Rybak” movement.  I’ve also heard quite a bit of chatter from friends back home that Rybak’s campaign is going out of its way to encourage its supporters to support this proto-gubernatorial campaign.  Given all this I can only assume that RT is reasonably serious about launching a campaign for the Governor’s mansion sometime shortly after he wins reelection as the mayor of Minneapolis this November.

I’ll admit a few months ago I was positively smitten with the idea of Rybak as the DFL nominee.  After all, he’s smart, charismatic, progressive and has genuine cred with younger voters as a result of his early endorsement of Barack Obama in 2007.  I also have to give him credit for winning two election in Minneapolis (and successfully governing!) without embracing the loony fringe of Minneapolis politics.

Over the past few months though, I’ve begun to have second thoughts about a Rybak run.  In particular, I’ve begun to question whether it’s appropriate for someone to run for another term with the express intention of immediately running for higher office after winning reelection.  Rybak has clearly been planning a run for statewide office for some time now—accordingly, I am dumbfounded as to why Rybak didn’t decide to retire, concentrate on a run for governor, and allow a new leader to begin confronting the challenges facing his city.

I’ll grant that I may not be taking into account the power of Machiavellian politics— why give up a position of power, if you don’t have to? But I can’t help thinking that this particular stratagem is a bit unseemly.  This is certainly an issue that a hypothetical-Rybak campaign is going to have to address if they want to earn the support of this believer in good government.

Forbes has a new list of the top forty “cities for singles.”  Exciting!  Plus, Forbes somehow managed to quantify “coolness;” although, as an expert in “cool”, this seems like a decidedly uncool thing to do.  ANYWAY, your old standbys like New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Washington D.C. round out the top five.  Reasonable.  However, as the list progresses it starts to get a little weird.  For instance, Milwaukee is number nine and Providence clocks in at fifteen.  Really?  I didn’t know urban decay was so sexy.

The most unjust placement on the entire list though is Minneapolis in the 19^th slot.  This middling rating seems in large part to be due to Minneapolis’ dearth of “nightlife.”  How the good people at Forbes go about calculating a city’s nightlife is beyond me (checked the methodology and apparently they total up the number of theaters, bars and clubs) but I can attest after living a year in the Warehouse District that Minneapolis can be pretty lively place.

Lists like this annoy me—a lot.

The Strib reports that Bellanotte, widely regarded as one of the worst restaurants in Minneapolis, is closing its doors.  You have to figure at the rate Block E is losing tenets pretty soon it’s going to make sense to just level the place and turn it into a seedy parking lot.

The City of Minneapolis is evidentially thinking of putting restrictions on the number of 18-plus—as opposed to 21-plus—nights that downtown clubs can offer:

In downtown Minneapolis, where 18-and-older club events are a large slice of the nightlife pie, bar owners are buzzing over rumors that the city wants to curtail these lucrative nights…

Cervantes [a Minneapolis' licensing director] said, “Something needs to be done. This is really a safety issue in the sense that we have underage people who are consuming alcohol — and that combination often times leads to criminal behavior.

As someone who lived in the warehouse district (next to the Gay 90s) for a year, I can attest that downtown clubbers are obnoxious.  Every weekend they descended onto my neighborhood like a plague of scantily-clad, intoxicated locust, and generally made asses of themselves as they tried to mate with one another in the street, my alley, and the lobby of my apartment building.  And, I agree, the younger members of this unfortunate swarm were generally the worst.

However, while it may make sense to put more stringent age restrictions in place, let’s not pretend that the problem here is exclusively the fault of the 18-21 crowd that decides to spend a night on the town.  In my opinion, the underlying issue is the fact that America’s overly stringent age restrictions on drinking create perverse incentives for people who can’t legally drink to get as drunk as they possibly can before they hit the clubs on a Friday or Saturday night.  After all, if one can’t legally drink at a club, one needs to guzzle a lot of alcohol before one goes out in order to keep a decent buzz going—hence the horde of extremely inebriated 18-21 year olds who consume far too much at the beginning of the night and cause mayhem as the evening progresses.

Sure.  Minneapolis should an ordinance cracking down on 18-plus clubs, but it’s also time to revisit an expansion of the drinking franchise as well.

Matt Yglesias responds to a piece I read in the Times this morning about a nationwide glut of stadium space:

Charles Bagli has an interesting piece in the New York Times about metropolitan areas suffering from a glut of arenas. He leads with the case of New York City, but the most clear-cut example is probably one he gets to later, Minneapolis. They have the Target Center in Minneapolis and a separate Excel Energy Arena in St. Paul for the NHL’s Wild. Meanwhile, “Both sites are losing money, and they must also compete with the University of Minnesota, which has two arenas.” On top of all that, Minneapolis just isn’t an especially large metropolitan area.

This is too bad. Unlike a football stadium, an indoor arena really can serve as an important element in neighborhood revitalization. That’s because an arena fits relatively comfortably into the urban landscape and also because, in principle, an arena can be used on a high proportion of days. But of course to get a high usage rate, you need to pack a bunch of different things—NBA, NHL, maybe a WNBA or Arena Football, concerts, etc.—all into one space. Splitting it up among two or three not only creates money-losing arenas, but deprives the arena neighborhood of the critical mass of foot traffic that can turn it into something worthwhile.

Exactly.  I would add that not only is this problem bad but it’s going to get even worsewhen Target Field, the new Twins stadium, opens in the warehouse district next year.   When the Twins leave the Metrodome (another facility which both the Times and Yglesias neglect to mention) will be deprived of one of its biggest clients.  To top all that off, the Vikings too are begging for a stadium, so it’s entirely possible that the Twin Cities will soon have five massive arenas serving a metropolitan area which is much, much smaller than New York City.  If New York can’t support this many arenas, I don’t see how Minneapolis and St. Paul can possibly fill the same number of seats. 

In brief, this is why I believe it is extremely irresponsible for municipalities and other levels of governments to involve themselves in large commercial development projects.  If the Twins need a new stadium, then the owners of the team should front the money and pay for it themselves.  Instead the taxpayers of Hennepin County are subsidizing a massive public works project (to the tune of $392 million), a project which is less than germane to the public’s welfare. 

Look, big shiny new buildings are certainly sexy; however, the government’s job is not to support huge entertainment complexes, especially when such support gets in the way of arguably more important things like public safety and road repair.  Further, not only are projects like this outside of the scope of government but, more often than not, government actually does a pretty poor job of encouraging the right kind of development: the most strikingly egregious example of intervention obviously being the Block E in downtown Minneapolis (seriously, go read the Yelp reviews for this place– they’re a riot).  If there is a bright side to any of this it is that Target Field is being built right next to both the failed Target Center and the apocalyptically awful Block E, so at the very least this new urban hellhole will be contained to a few sad square blocks.

A few weeks ago I was asked for pizza recommendations by some fellow Yalies who in Minnesota this summer working at internships around the Twin Cities.  Specifically, these Elis asked whether Pizza Luce was a good choice.  “No, No, No!”  I exclaimed, an outburst which was followed by a savage denunciation of Pizza Luce for its low-quality, over-priced and generally uninspired pies.  Needless to say, my fellow interns were a little taken aback, and perhaps thought I had taken my critique a bit far.  In my defense though, according to Minnesota Monthly, I’m not pretentious about pizza, I’m just Minnesotan:

Some think Minnesota Nice is the quality of helpfulness that arose from people living together through unforgiving winters, but we all know it’s really the frosty détente that has evolved from 4 million people stuck together around some lakes trying not to tell one another: “Your favorite pizza is beneath contempt.”

Indeed, we do take our pizza seriously here!  Personally, I’m partial to the Neapolitan pizza served up by Bricks, Punch or Pizza Nea and in a pinch will settle for a pie from Black Sheep.  Of course while reasonable minds can disagree about pizza, just as they can disagree about any restaurant, I really do think that there are some truly bad options in Minneapolis.  Pizza Luce is near the bottom of the list for selling heavy, flavorless monstrosities which push $20 a piece and Galactic Pizza also warrants a mentions for producing some truly objectionable pie.

Anyway, if you want to find something that suits your palate, head on over to Minnesota Monthly’s pizza personality quiz to get a recommendation for yourself (and don’t fear, neither Luce nor Galactic are recommended for anyone). Interestingly enough, I got pegged as ‘the observer’ which evidently means I believe “life with low standards isn’t worth living.”  Too true.

Cool:

Travel and Leisure Magazine has published its 10 Top Biking Cities in the world and Minneapolis is one of only three in the United States to make the cut.

Portland, Oregon, and Seattle also made the list.

Endorsing Minneapolis’ bike-friendliness, the magazine noted: “Like many of the world’s best biking cities, Minneapolis has built an infrastructure that promotes bicycling on many fronts. From bike lockers and designated street lanes to recreational trails and snowplows dedicated to clearing off-street paths, a system exists to make transportation on a bike efficient, safe, and hassle-free.”

I’m somewhat surprised that the Twin Cities made this list, simply because if you actually bike in Minneapolis/St. Paul you quickly realize that the abysmal drivers more than balance out the well-developed biking infrastructure.

There’s an… interesting article in the style section of today’s Times about the ‘return of the speakeasy.’  Overall the Times seems smitten with the speakeasy concept but I can’t help thinking the whole marketing concept is a little hokey.

What is the appeal of going to a fake speakeasy?  Do people get a thrill out of mumbling a “codeword” through a slit of a door, drinking martinis out of ceramic mugs that stifle their drinks and pretending that their modernized cocktails are concoctions from a bygone era?

I imagine the excitement that lies in going to a real speakeasy probably comes from the (rather undesirable) anxiety that the police might burst through your door to spirit you away to the slammer.  Is that really the emotion that people want to experience?  I imagine we all had a brief phase where we sneaked a bit of booze from our parent’s bottles, but does anyone really want to relive that for the sake of nostalgic excitement?

I’m all for reviving old cocktail recipes-see Bradstreet, an excellent new bar in downtown Minneapolis-but this particular throwback to prohibition reminds me a bit too much of Medieval Times.