Was this written as bait for me?

1. It's a bit misleading to say "Duluth has 20% of its population since 1960" when all of that loss was in the first 30 years of that 60-year window. The flat trendline since isn't exactly indicative of a robust economy, but the decline is a distant memory.

2. We need to talk about why that population loss happened: Duluth was caught up in one of the greatest economic disruptions of the modern era when the Midwest/Great Lakes manufacturing base collapsed over the second half of the 20th century. Rochester, Sioux Falls, and Fargo saw none of that. They are farm towns, and also either a) the economic centers of their respective states, or b) home to a world-renowned medical institution. Better comparisons for Duluth are places like Flint, Youngstown, Erie, and South Bend: small industrial cities that are within a couple hours of other large markets. Duluth's recent history actually looks pretty decent in that light, though not always for thrilling reasons. (You can find me blathering about this in Saturday Essays on here in the past.)

3. Since the 1980s, Duluth's economy has actually become pretty diverse, largely out of necessity. The article doesn't mention health care, which has become by far the largest employer in the Duluth area. Education is a big employer, and there's a decent base of professional services serving a larger region. Duluth's manufacturing employment is actually relatively low compared to many comparable cities, though advanced manufacturing (requiring somewhat more skilled labor less easily offshored) has been a real area of growth nationally and has been an area of some success locally (e.g., Cirrus, Loll/Epicurian, Frost River). Aviation was an intentional effort to diversify, and while it has obviously taken its lumps during the pandemic, that was nearly impossible to predict and the longer-term prognosis for that industry is not bad. Tourism-related industries don't pay well, granted, but they are growing and have spillover effects on quality of life; that sector has rebounded well from the initial pandemic crash, and I don't see it slowing down. There's some good variety in the local economy.

4. I won't dispute that there's a hole in the information/tech industry area, but reality is that said industry is intensely clustered in a handful of very large metros. It seems like the more accurate critique is not that Duluth's economy isn't diverse, but that it lacks tech jobs, which are very different things. More here would be great, but that takes either very specific investments and/or just dumb luck in getting a very successful firm or firms in that space. They call the successful ones unicorns for a reason.

5. I don't disagree that UMD could be more of an engine for growth and have a stronger relationship with local economic development. I'd love to see all those proposed projects happen! But non-flagship public universities aren't exactly rolling in the dough these days, either. 

6. It's very easy to play Sim City and say "we should redevelop this as that!" when redevelopment of a building is often very expensive, between the costs of demolition, retrofitting, dealing with legacy issues in the soil, and so on. It's much more cost-effective to build new, and even then, Duluth invites all sorts of exciting challenges such as bedrock and slopes and wetlands everywhere. This is not a cheap place to build, whereas Fargo and Sioux Falls can just roll in and annex the next farm field.

I could go on and on, but I'll contain myself!

Good to see a punchy comment get a response! In response to a few of Kodiak's points:

This post got my hackles up because I work in economic development (though not for the city), so these debates are very familiar to me. Obviously the op-ed genre can be limiting. But when a person whose credentials seem to involve an undergraduate degree in the field from when he lived in the city 30 years ago (at least as presented in the article) appears to do a drive-by that doesn't seem to have much understanding of the situation on the ground or what has changed over the past 30 years (my entire lifetime), it'll get a reaction.

Take the "diversify the economy" claim. Duluth's politicians and economic developers have been trying very hard to do this for the past 40 years. That doesn't mean it's always been done well, or that anyone should rest on their laurels, but I wanted to acknowledge that there has, in fact, been a ton of progress, especially when you consider that the place Duluth started from looked a lot more like Youngstown than it did like Fargo. The thrust of my first few points was to acknowledge that there has been a lot of work here, and that it could've been a lot worse. That, along with the annoying pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps headline (which I realize the author may not have chosen) set me off.

It's pretty well-documented that the vast majority of tech growth is in a few major metros. This doesn't mean that there aren't some successes in places like Fargo or Boise, but what exactly does that mean for Duluth? Again, going back to the field of economic development: basically every city in America is now trying to create some sort of tech incubator or find these rare fortunate companies. (And Duluth has invested serious money here, going back to the launch the Tech Village 20 years ago.) Those very successful companies are rare, and it's hard to know what exactly a city can do to cultivate them (other than by building off of a research university, where we seem to be in agreement that there is potential, but also a lot of work to be done). I'm open to other original ways to grow them...but what are they?

I'm not following which part of point 6 you find circular. Are you claiming that demolition or rehab isn't more expensive than building on a greenfield site? That building on a slope isn't more expensive than on a flat field? That blasting through bedrock isn't expensive? I find the final line especially interesting, since a huge part of the growth of Fargo, Sioux Falls, etc. has been exactly through those cheaper cookie-cutter housing developments that you don't like. Maybe Duluth as a city doesn't want to develop much more new stuff, whether due to the environmental or aesthetic reasons others have cited here, but let's not pretend that such a mindset won't have certain consequences for the affordability of the desirable housing stock (absent other forces, such as a major government investment in housing) and the city's ability to add more people.