Race, rural economy and a housing shortage collide in Long Prairie apartment fight

LONG PRAIRIE, MINN. — The last big beef packing plant in Minnesota sits along a quiet river in this town of about 3,500 residents, where many workers clock out from jobs slaughtering cattle and go home to substandard housing.

A planned apartment building, owned by the packing plant, could bring relief for employees. It could also encourage new workers, many immigrants, to come north for opportunity to central Minnesota.

But not everyone in town is welcoming the slaughterhouse's housing project.

When the Long Prairie City Council voted unanimously in November to approve a conditional use permit for Long Prairie Packing Co. to construct a 61-unit apartment for its employees, it opened divisions in town over immigration, rural housing and the state's beef producers.

Momentum for the project suddenly stalled Tuesday night at a City Council meeting. Mayor Jodi Dixon moved to table a vote for a tax abatement for the project, rejected earlier in the day by county commissioners, because two City Council members were absent and City Hall was packed with opponents.

It didn't take long for race to come to the fore. One resident spoke about the police force not pulling over Latino residents with tinted windshields; another woman at the meeting contended that police treated white residents more harshly, "Because you're the wrong skin tone."

Before the vote, Dixon told the Star Tribune that the fight over the apartment has "brought out a lot of ugly in a small town."

"It's heartbreaking to me," Dixon said. "How could you not want this? These people come here with nothing to begin with."

The tensions in Long Prairie are coming to a boil at the outset of a national presidential election year. Nearly one-fifth of the town's residents were born outside the United States, according to the latest federal Census data.

At stake is an ag economy, battered by years of consolidation, fighting for population survival with the help of low-wage workers. As in many meatpacking towns, this latest fight is centered on housing.

Housing agricultural workers, some of them immigrants or foreign-born green-card holders has become a business challenge for agriculture and food producers.

Earlier this month, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a wage theft lawsuit against a dairy near Paynesville, about an hour from Long Prairie, that also alleged that the company was housing its mostly Mexican workers in employer-owned, moldy, heater-less bunkhouses.

Last year, there was such a lack of affordable, quality workforce housing in Windom that workers at the now-shuttered HyLife pork plant in town were bused daily between a hotel in Mankato, an hour away, and the slaughterhouse.

Fidelina Castro, 58, rents a wood-paneled basement up the road from the Long Prairie slaughterhouse. While grilling chicken on an electric skillet in a spartan kitchen, she says she left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, arriving here two months ago. She hopes her husband will join her in February.

"I've been to the medical [staff] eight times already," Castro said, holding up her wrists, which ache from repetitive movements. "But now I'm used to it."

She hopes to buy furniture soon to fill the empty room. Many of her co-workers live in the nearby mobile home park, making in a week three times what they made in a month back home in Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.

The Long Prairie packing plant employs about 550 people and processes up to 2,000 cattle a day. In the 1970s, Fairmont-based beef producer Rosen's Diversified bought the plant, which is a staple for the state's stock growers.

Long Prairie Packing is owned by American Foods Group, a subsidiary of Rosen's Diversified.

"Four slaughter companies own a large portion of the meat in this country," said Pete Berscheit, who raises angus beef cattle outside Grey Eagle, Minn. "So it's regional slaughter plants like Long Prairie Packing that keeps that from becoming so consolidated that there's no competition in the marketplace whatsoever."

Like packing towns in southwestern Minnesota, the plant's physically demanding — sometimes dangerous — jobs on the kill floor have drawn many immigrants, mostly Latino, occasionally to the chagrin of older, white neighbors.

There have been two stabbings in two years at a motel housing beef plant workers in nearby Alexandria. Long Prairie police investigated a fatal shooting in town in 2021. This summer, 12 shots were fired in the alley behind the Red Lounge bar, now closed.

The Red Lounge "was always full on Friday and Saturday nights," said Roni Garcia, who was working Tuesday at the family store. He noted that few bars in town are welcoming to Latinos. "Where else are people going to go?"

If the slaughterhouse's mostly Latino workforce in town didn't already feel shunned, they might when reading a sign in a local bar decrying an "invasion" of immigrants.

At a town summer festival, loud music and wild ATV driving led some residents to blame the nuisance on plant workers. This past October, after a Todd County commissioner asked about the U.S. border with Mexico "being wide open," a county health official said there was an increase in services for immigrants, spurring coverage in the Long Prairie Leader, the local newspaper.

After the council initially voted down a plan to build the apartments in a different location, advocates for the packing plant and the immigrant community pushed back.

At the November City Council meeting, Luan Thomas-Brunkhorst, director of the Long Prairie Area Chamber of Commerce, acknowledged complaints over noise and drug use during the Prairie Days festival, but questioned the fairness of blaming all such nuisances on the plant workers.

"Your generalizations are too broad," Thomas-Brunkhorst said. "You may not agree with everything the packing plant does, but they are doing the right thing for their employees with this housing initiative."

Another resident at the meeting, Kevin Klimek, who said he's lived in Long Prairie since 1972, said townspeople didn't want to see more crime.

He said his resistance to an apartment was not about "race, color or creed."

Resident Jody Bebault added that she objected to employees' noise ordinance violations.

"Their culture is different from our culture," Bebault told the City Council. "And the residents that live close to us play [music] all night."

For some, their opposition to the housing expansion is rooted more in general frustrations with the packing company.

Pat Schultz, who can see the slaughterhouse from his window, has decried vibrations caused by reefer trailers, for chilled beef, that for years sat in the parking lot. He can point to cracks in his living room wall that he says were caused by tremors originating at the plant.

He also says the new housing development will be in a flood plain. The city disputes this claim.

"I wake up in the morning and my hands are just shaking [from the plant's vibrations]," Schultz said.

Long Prairie City Administrator Ted Gray, whose family also raises beef, has steered the apartment's plans through an obstacle course of meetings. He said the town could be the envy of many small towns, with plants churning out everything from eggs to pasta to deli meats.

"The benefit [of the abatement] would be for us to pursue future housing opportunities," Gray said.

Rosen's and American Foods Group didn't respond to requests for comment. But Gray said it's unclear whether the firm will proceed with the $7 million project without the tax abatement.

"None of us want to be in the housing and landlord business," David Paskach, Rosen's vice president of human resources, told Long Prairie's council in November. "It seems to be the only real answer we have to deal with housing shortages like we have in greater Minnesota."

Many workers currently live at either the motel in Alexandria or another apartment complex in Long Prairie. Far from being crime hot spots, the apartments have given short-staffed local police little trouble, said Police Chief Ryan Hanson.

"Realistically, we've had some 911 hang-ups, some medicals, and I believe unwanted persons," he said, describing the new housing for families as "good all the way around."

Company renderings show the new apartment complex would have a patio, a playground and a school bus pad for children.

Workers say the housing will allow the plant to hire more workers, giving existing employees a chance to work fewer hours and spend more time with their family.

Construction on the apartments, if it happens, is slated to begin later this year.

"It's Latin people working in the plant," Gabriel Perez Torres, a business owner who once worked at the plant, told the November meeting. "It's 12 hours everyday. ... All the time, it's work, work, work, work," with no time to spend with family.