American cities, like states, are moving in two very different directions. Some, like Miami, Nashville, Austin, Charleston and Salt Lake City, are thriving and growing. Others, like Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and–soon, anyway–New York, are caught in a downward spiral. It all depends on governance, at the local level but also on the state level, as it is much easier to thrive in Tennessee, for example, than in Oregon.
Minneapolis is a case in point. Its leadership in recent years has been terrible. The Minneapolis City Council is one of the most absurdly left-wing bodies in the U.S. And it suffers further from bad policies at the state level–high taxes, overregulation, rampant fraud and corruption, and so on.
As a consequence, commercial real estate values in Minneapolis have cratered:
Commercial real estate down by 90% may SEEM like a bad sign for Minneapolis, but really this is creative destruction, opening up space for 21st century industries like medical fraud and anarchist street militia checkpoints. https://t.co/1sxlSNnl9u
— arctotherium (@arctotherium42) March 15, 2026
Commercial real estate being down by 90% may sound like hyperbole, but it isn’t. This is the text of the original tweet:
Minneapolis Office Sales
Ameriprise Financial Center $6.25M vs $200M in 2016 ↓97%
Wells Fargo Center $85M vs $314M in 2019 ↓73%
Forum $6.5M vs $73.7M in 2019 ↓91%
Kickernick $3.79M vs $19.15M in 2017 ↓80%
Lumber Exchange $1 vs $24.3M in 2019 ↓99+%
Minneapolis St. Paul Vacancy
22,227,839 SF
Minneapolis CBD 32.6%
St. Paul CBD 33.1%
Vacancy rates don’t tell the whole story, because they only measure space on which rent is not being paid. There is a vast quantity of office space in Minneapolis (St. Paul, too) that is in fact vacant, on which the tenant will stop paying rent as soon as its lease expires. So the worst is yet to come.
The Minneapolis City Council can’t envision the possibility of cutting spending, so the city’s collapsing commercial real estate market is shifting the property tax burden to homeowners. This, in turn, will cause people to leave the city and will make others reluctant to move in, driving residential property values down further. It could be a death spiral.
Minneapolis’s collapse has nothing to do with covid, as many cities around the country are thriving. And it has nothing to do with climate; Minneapolis could only dream of growing at the rate of Sioux Falls. It is 100% due to lousy liberal policies at both the local and state levels.
