Ramstad: Everyone wants fairness in Minnesota, but arguments about it can block progress

We can’t solve the Minnesota Paradox by being unfair to white people, some readers told me in reaction to my recent series of columns on money and race.

That may be why we’re having such a hard time fixing it.

Reader reaction to the five columns we labeled “Persisting Paradox” was mixed, of course. Some of you suggested I stay away from race in the Business pages. The biggest takeaway was readers’ caution about remedies. I received enough notes about fairness of remedies to conclude arguing about fairness is the obstacle to progress.

Minnesota is in a challenging spot. The state’s white population has been falling since 2011, which means its economic growth hinges more than ever on the success of its residents of color. And yet we still have some of the worst gaps in economic outcomes by race of any state in the nation — a phenomenon that’s been called the Minnesota Paradox.

No reader said they are opposed to fixing this, but controversy arises over how.

“Decades of unfairness cannot be reversed without a time machine,” Mark Anderson of St. Louis Park wrote me. “The only way to improve current day society is to make life as fair as possible. Unfairness in the opposite direction is not fair, and only makes unfairness worse and more likely in the future.”

Two wrongs don’t make a right. However, this intense focus on fairness in a strange way may be keeping Minnesota from becoming a fairer place.

Since beginning this column last year, I’ve emphasized that Minnesota is growing more slowly than it ever has. For the state to continue to punch above its weight economically, change is needed on a level I’m not sure enough Minnesotans recognize, no matter their race.

My desire for fairer opportunity for Minnesotans of color motivated some remedies I suggested for the Minnesota Paradox. The deeper motive comes from my belief that ultra-low growth, or outright decline, is something Minnesotans should fight against. We don’t need to grow as fast as Florida or Texas, but we should aim for better than we’re doing now.

Also, contrary to what some readers took from the series, I’m not an advocate for equality of economic outcome. Individuals’ skills, experiences and ambitions vary greatly and should be rewarded differently. We compete with each other and cooperate with each other in varying degrees at varying times to make progress.

However, it is possible to reasonably address problems that harm Minnesotans of color and the state’s overall growth potential, particularly in schools and housing. For instance, in the series I recommended less concentration of affordable housing in Minneapolis and St. Paul and greater proliferation of it in the suburbs and exurbs.

I thought I’d get the most criticism for writing that Minnesota shouldn’t wait for the state Supreme Court to disrupt the business model that allowed most metro-area charter schools to become racial silos. I heard little about that, however. I suspect that’s because an investigative team at the Minnesota Star Tribune last month wrote about other problems in charter schools, citing one charter principal saying they have become “day cares.”

I visited several charter schools over the last year and each time was impressed by the creativity of leaders and teachers. They are innovators and risk-takers. And they’ve constantly faced pressure from state officials, teachers’ unions and regular public schools. My admiration stops when their approach for attracting students amounts to de facto segregation.

Over the last year, the best argument I heard for letting single-race-oriented charters continue came from a longtime charter advocate who recently passed away, so I’ll not name him. He said it was a temporary situation shaped by the desires of people in immigrant communities. That’s an unpersuasive argument for a better economic future in Minnesota.

I didn’t spend much time in the columns trying to explain the reasons for the Minnesota Paradox because they’ve been written about extensively. In a Minnesota Star Tribune article five years ago, for instance, the focus was on bank lending practices and real estate redlining.

Several readers suggested I should have acknowledged one reason for the gap is that white Minnesotans have done better economically and academically than white people in most states. In other words, there’s a high base of performance that we should not want to see come down.

Meanwhile, the lowest fifth in any Minnesota-related economic measure stays suppressed because the state is so welcoming to refugees and international immigrants, who tend to be poor people of color. Improvement among the poorest Minnesotans of color, in other words, gets masked as new people arrive.

It is fair to argue that the math around all this is difficult. That does not “let us off the hook,” as one reader put it in an e-mail.

In the series’ last column, I wrote even exurban counties should re-examine land-use policies to encourage more housing, and I included a policy example from Wright County I found extremely restrictive: not allowing more than one house on 40 acres of land in some parts of the county.

That led the county’s former planning director, Tom Salkowski, to send an e-mail saying my portrayal was too casual, even misleading. He explained how the policy sprang from a desire to prevent the misuse of agricultural land, such as creating many small lots with separate well and septic systems. The county also wanted to encourage development in towns, where it’s less costly to expand infrastructure.

“I agree with you that there are policies in the exurbs that need to be evaluated, but eating up farmland with large lots instead of building housing on municipal utilities is not one of them,” he wrote.

There is a lot of smart thinking like that behind most policies in Minnesota communities, schools and housing authorities. I wrote the series because the state is in a new economic situation thanks to demographic change. The things that used to make sense may not anymore.