High-Contrast Ward 4 Race Shows Conventional Wisdom Has Changed in Saint Paul

[Detail of a frieze on Saint Paul City Hall.]

One of the narratives I bump into all the time in my role as a Saint Paul quasi-public official, vagabond, and blogger is this: there are certain political forces that constrain the limits of what the city can and cannot do.

For the issues I care most about -- transportation, housing, quality public space, and economic opportunity for everyone -- I sometimes bump into what are perceived to be the limits of change. Pick a big idea, i.e. getting rid of parking minimums, banning drive-thrus, removing Ayd Mill Road, or even something so seemingly simple as striping a bike lane on a residential street or allowing ADUs to be built city-wide, and you run into folks who will say "that won't work", "the politics are too much," or "there will be too much pushback." 

This kind of stance is understandable given how much time staff and elected officials  spend attending heated public hearings where, quite often, small groups of concerned neighbors leave a big impression. I can recall intense moments during public meetings where upset neighbors packed rooms in opposition to a relatively minor changes. The Linwood/Monroe School City Council vote and the Grand Avenue Parking Meter debaucle are two good examples, but there are many more.

(That last example is highly illustrative, as before the big public meeting held at behest of the Business Association, seemingly all the decision makers were lined up in support of the change to parking policy. This list included the Mayor, the Public Works director, the City Council incumbent, and both main challengers running for the office. And yet, the angry people at the meeting won the day.) 

The impression that you get from the public animosity that keeps popping up at the District Council level and in oppositional neighborhood organizing is that Saint Paul politics is a very sensitive landscape, and decision makers should tread carefully, paying close attention to the groups with the loudest voices. 

That's what makes the recent city elections so interesting, because Saint Paul's electoral results keep flying in the face of the conventional wisdom. Over the last few years, the idea that the concerned homeowners and change-averse groups are driving city politics has proven to be dead wrong.  

The great 2017 Ford Site debate is the classic example of this kind of change vs. stasis battle, with well-funded, well-heeled, and highly motivated howeowners  devoting thousands of volunteer hours and retirement dollars to stopping or reducing the size and scope of the development proposed for the old car factory. The animosity during public meetings was legendary, and the resulting yard sign and rhetorical bloodsport tested the patience and good natures of people all throughout the city. (Myself included... I had to walk out of the meeting at Gloria Dei.) 

But when it comes to actual votes and who gets elected at the city level, the results are nothing like the expectations.

Mayor Carter is the perfect example. During the 2017 mayoral campaign, he was the one candidate who outright supported the Ford Site plans without any caveats. He was the only candidate who refused to make vague promises to the "Stop the Ford Site" crowd; Pat Harris, on the other hand, tried hard to act like he was listening to this group.

If you attended the Planning Commission public hearing, you might have remembed one of the key anti-Ford organizers warning the room that "Highland elects the mayor," parroting the conventional wisdom that only catering to the well-heeled high-turnout homeowners of Highland would translate to electoral success. 

But when the election day came and went, Carter had swept the city. Noteably, he even won the precincts right in Highland, the places where presuambly the anti-Ford organizers would have been strongest.

The conventional wisdom was dead wrong. 

The same thing happened last night, with Mitra Jalali Nelson's dramatic win over Shirley Erstad in a high-contrast special election for City Council. This race was the most interesting I've seen in Saint Paul, because the differences between the two candidates were so stark. As she repeatedly made clear, Erstad is a long-time homeowner and neighborhood activist with deep dies to her Ward 4 District Council, and connections to the old guard of Saint Paul politics. She ran a campaign that catered to the concerns of homeowners worried about change, for example any new apartments that might come to Marshall Avenue.

It's worth saying that Ward 4 has long seemed like a bit of a paradox. One one hand, its a very liberal part of the city with largely older high-turnout, high-education, and high-income voters. On the other hand, its a part of the city where anti-development and anti-student housing issues carry a lot of weight. Much of Ward 4 is composed of the areas surrounding the Unviersities of Saint Thomas and Minnesota (Saint Paul campus.)

I can tell you that there are few issues in Saint Paul that incite so much hostitliy and public pressure as the town/gown behavioral problems that surround St. Thomas. (See also: "Tour de Franzia".) In my time at the Planning Commission, the student housing ordinance was one of the first issues that made me sit up and notice how angry people could become about zoning, and I remain troubled by the way that the ordinance and policy discriminates against young people.

(These were the kinds of hearings where the line that "renters are not invested in the community" and "renters should not have a voice" are stated routinely. This is one of the things that, when said, makes me absolutely irate.)

And yet, consistently over the years, otherwise left-leaning people living in and representing Ward 4 have promoted policies that restrict housing for students and young people. It's typically framed as a compromise with the inevitable pressures of political reality in Saint Paul, that  housing for young people was always the "third rail" of Ward 4 politics...

But if renters rights and new housing for young people was a shocking hot button, what's so remarkable about Mitra Jalali Nelson's campaign was that she just walked right up to it and pressed it over and over again. I've seen a lot of surprising Saint Paul "newcomers" run for office (and sometimes win), but in the past they have all maintained at least a pretense of following the conventional wisdom: catering to homeowners, district councils, and/or the local business association.

Jalali Nelson, on the other hand, was unabashed about where she was coming from. She explicitly told people she was a new renter who had just moved to the Ward, not apologetically but with a sense of pride. Mitra stated out loud that she wanted more housing built in her neighborhood; Shirley Erstad, on the other hand, said "we don't need more market rate housing" in Ward 4. When asked about district councils during the debate [embedded above], Mitra did not give many complements, instead saying that she wanted to make sure they had funding to do more organizing and be representative. Shirley on the other hand took every opportunity to talk up the existing system and pushed for giving these groups more power over city decisions. Mitra loved the Ford Site plans; Shirley was almost always critical. 

Those are just the policy contrasts. The contrasting tones and approach of the two campaigns were even more stark. It suffices to say that Mitra ran a hot pink, super hero, lightning bolt, tutu-sporting, unicorn balloon campaign, while Erstad did not.

And at the end of election night, Mitra won handily despite not following any of the conventional wisdom rules of Saint Paul politics. To me, it seems like she was able to do this because she worked very hard, is both smart and a good listener, organized very well, and tried to lead her part of Saint Paul into having a different conversation instead of following along with the usual narratives.

Here's my favorite part of her victory speech, given in a tutu surrounded by pink balloons on stage at the Turf Club [emphasis mine]:

One of the things I was thinking about today walking my very last door knock is that people have remembered us a lot. You’re Mitra you’re the pink campaign…  

We exploded into this race we had an idea from the beginning that we wanted to run true to ourselves and true to our values. For me this campaign was about realizing we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. ...  

Another way I feel we are changing our city and working to create some space in this campaign… You know, I really fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to be some kind of expert to participate in your government.  

I really fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to have lived somewhere for a million years, and been able to afford to own property for a million years in that place, in order to have a say or a stake in your democracy. 

This is about making room for all of us in our democracy. All means all. Everybody is in. This campaign is just an expression of that idea. 

That inclusive politics is about bringing people into the center, not just saying you can have a seat at the margins, but saying we’re going to center them. And saying that it’s not displacing other people to do that, but saying that all of of our futures are connected, we are all connected to each other. And when we bring in people who are less heard, that helps everybody. 

I reject people who would say that by taking about representation or bringing up issues of people who are not represented in the mainstream, that that comes at the expense of everybody else. I’m tired of of people saying that when other groups of people do well, that it comes at the expense of everyone else. 

We fundamentally put that idea to be tonight, the tis not true. When people can afford to live and stay in our city that helps every last one of us.  That’s something that I fundamentally believe in and that I care about.

Maybe it's just me, but that speech is an inspiring moment for Saint Paul city politics.

Sure, there are a lot of reasons why the usual politics of the city have shifted. Some of it is demographics, the increasing diversity of the city. Some of it is the increasing political hegemony of urban areas, which have become more and more liberal as the rest of the state (and country?) has become more conservative. Some is simply people growing older, and new ideas about what it means to live in a city taking root. 

But whatever the reasons, to me, the last two elections mean that Saint Paul can re-think how things are done. As a city, we can expand the horizons of our policy changes. We can think bigger about how to appraoch problems like transportation, street safety, equity, and ensuring quality of life for all. The connected and concerned folks who show up at public hearings might make a lot of noise, and those heated meetings might leave lasting impressions on the minds of the folks who spend their weeks at City Hall. But if the last few elections are any indication, little of that sound and fury translates at the local ballot box. 

Mitra Jalali Nelson will have a year and change to work within the existing systems, or make some new ones. We'll see if her inspiring ideas can translate into positive policies and meaningful changes to people's everyday lives in Saint Paul.

One thing's for sure: with her victory last night, she re-wrote the city's political playbook. To me, that's a very good thing.