Minneapolis Is ‘a City Run by Gangs,’ Downtown Restaurant Owner Says

Caption of photo says: Around 2:15 p.m., police were dispatched to a report of a person "down" near Lowry and Penn Ave N. Other reports indicated it was a "domestic." As police were arriving, witnesses told police that a male had gotten the female up and dragged her into a residence at 31xx Oliver Ave N. Police arrived and had to force entry to the residence and EMS was cleared in for the victim. If/when we can get info about any arrested party we'll update

Minneapolis is “run by gangs,” an owner of a Minneapolis restaurant and bar remarked in a recent interview, saying he has stopped trying to contact the city about it.

“I don’t talk to the city. I don’t talk to the politicians. I’ve given up. There’s no point,” Ken Sherman, owner of Seven Steakhouse, told WCCO last week.

Seven is a rooftop restaurant, bar, and nightclub located on Seventh and Hennepin in downtown Minneapolis. Sherman, who has owned the business since 2017, now operates his own security team nightly, according to a story in the August/September 2021 issue of Twin Cities Business.

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Biden Plan to Eliminate Suburb-Friendly Zoning Might Land in Dems’ Budget Bill

Housing development

President Joe Biden’s plan to “eliminate exclusionary zoning” for single-family homes in America’s cities and towns might land in the filibuster-proof budget bill that Democratic leaders in Congress are drafting.

A portion of President Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan offers grants to cities that “take concrete steps” to end “exclusionary zoning” for single-family homes.

Under a section titled “Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies,” Biden’s jobs plan argues that “for decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities.”

According to the White House fact sheet on the plan, which has not been formally drafted into legislation yet, Biden is “calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.”

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Poll: US Rural and Urban Political Divisions Also Split Suburbs

America’s suburbs are today’s great political battleground, long seen as an independent pivot between the country’s liberal cities and conservative small towns and rural expanse. But it’s not that simple. It turns out that these places in-between may be the most politically polarized of all — and when figuring out the partisan leanings of people living in the suburbs, where they came from makes a difference. Fewer suburbanites describe themselves as politically independent than do residents of the nation’s urban and rural areas, according to a survey released Tuesday by the University of Chicago Harris School for Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll also found that the partisan leanings of suburban residents are closely linked to whether they have previously lived in a city. “In the last decade, particularly in the past five years, I’ve felt a shift in having some liberal neighbors,” said Nancy Wieman, 63, a registered Republican and staunch conservative who has lived in suburban Jefferson County outside of Denver her entire life. “The ones who are markedly liberal have moved from Denver or other cities.” Suburbanites who previously lived in a city are about as likely as city-dwellers to…

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Commentary: Limousine Liberalism Goes Mainstream

by Scott Yenar and Jackson Yenar   Suburbs are the battleground in American politics. Republicans continue to increase their hold on rural America and Democrats continue to dominate the cities. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), when it was clear the Democrats would retake the House, remarked, “We’ve got to address the suburban women problem, because it’s real.” Karl Rove sounded a similar alarm at the Washington Examiner’s Sea Island Summit. The new suburban problem defies the old logic of American politics, where we learned to expect the upwardly mobile to favor the lower taxes, limited government, and local control offered by the Republicans. Instead, the “suburban problem” appears to be limousine liberalism gone mainstream. In the 1970s, limousine liberals forced busing while sending their own kids to tony private schools. They willingly paid high taxes that crippled small business, among other things. Today’s limousine liberals have different policies, but signal their membership with similar hypocrisies. They define themselves by “values” more than by wealth, though they are mostly well off or, at least, better off than most. They bemoan the racism and other phobias in America while pricing the middle class and minorities out of their school districts; they drive SUVs;…

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