Apologies for the incomplete scan on the second image, but it's all that would fit on the scanner bed. Again, click to enlarge and read.
Mondale's gone, but Peter Bell and Natalie Haas-Steffen, prime mover from Ramsey to have done this to Ramsey, continue the flawed legacy. Natalie was key, although she could not have done it alone, see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Note, that's seven links, somewhat random in order but counting one for each council seat. Here is one particularly for James Norman. More could be said. That's however enough.
Prime Ramsey commercial-industrial land by the tracks and Highway, on the planning maps called "places to work" and fit for building a high-end quality jobs base in Ramsey, and via greed and misjudgment it got put into the Mondale - Haas Steffen house-'em-tightly thinking, and it sits on the ground telling us all the truth.
Met Council owes Ramsey a bailout, for facilitating too closely the effort of James Norman, the Kuraks, and others to make our home community a %&*%*#%_@&$ PLANNING GUINEA PIG IN ITS FRANKENSTEINIAN DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY PLANNING EXPERIMENT called "Smart Growth."
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This half-smirking schmuck. This bozo. Guru of growth. Myron Olfield. An ex-legislator. As in "no longer there." He's the one cited in the 1999 Strib article as the intellectual voice for the "livable community" and Mondale's "smart growth" BS. The idea has failed and is unpopular and he's moved on from being a legislator to being a law school professor. Who else but a swell-headed person would put out a 20 page vita? Come on. Edit it, Myron, get real. You're not in that big a pond. Don't buy this book. Study what of it is online. Know the enemy. But don't aid his gaining any royalties. Not after what's happened to Ramsey. Boycott the book. It is part of his spread the slums to the burbs screed, which has not helped North Minneapolis nor Brooklyn Center, where moving low-income people into chintzy little rabbit hutches in bunches is not the way to do Section 8 or other diversification effort. These "walkable community" things after two or three cycles of ownership will slip further and further into rentals not owner-occupied and will become "projects" or the equivalent, not because of any inherent defect in poor people, there is no universal defect to them beyond having little money, but because of intentional and unnatural density and crowding together with one another, without diversified more successful neighbors nearby to help and be emulated, and without the vibrant urban amenities a true city can offer in exchange for dense housing acceptance. There's nothing vibrant about the culture of Ramsey. It is a place where it used to be true you could get more house and more lot for the money. And where taxes used to be low, in line with the level of public services offered.
Orfield's and Haas Steffen's viewpoint is advocacy for michief which, through intermediaries, Ramsey has suffered.
Note in the tail end of that 1999 article, this true-enough statement:
Karen Christofferson, public policy director for the Builders Association, said: "We support [Mondale's] efforts to create a way to get cities to cooperate more on following the Met Council's blueprint. If the blueprint fails, we fail."
True, the builders liked Ted Mondale's maneuvering. Now, however --- it's failed.
What next? More of the same, or some sane rethinking for a change? More cash down the same rathole, or be smart and don't pursue bad policy because of sunk capital? Take your losses, don't multiply them? Why not just let the bank sit with its non-foreclosing Ramsey Town Center foreclosure. Let the property sit. The weeds won't get much taller, and they die back each winter. Let it be. Leave it exactly as is until the bank and some developer get off the dime and decide they want to take a private sector risk WITHOUT any further public sector subsidy. There's been enough of that already. The Kuraks made themselves millionaires fourteen or fifteen times over, and the taxpayers pay more taxes. Cut the losses where they stand. Wait for that private sector risk taker, and if one never shows up, it proves the market knows best, and the moribund project would be proven fully dead. But do not tart up the sad and sorry corpse. That's stupid. It's simply bad policy and bad fiscal management.
FINALLY: Here are screenshots, (click to enlarge). One is about AN Olfield planning and policy guidebook, and the other gives us its introductory page.
This Olfield "emperor" is wholly unclothed. There is no nice new set of threads. And while the Olfield books do try some dressing up mythology, it's a crock.
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For more on Myron Olfield, see here, (about his ex-legislator status), here, here (about the corporate cash cow he keeps for milking - his equivalent of "Tinklenberg Group"), here (where he or some editor keeps self-congratulatory things to a page), and here (showing his law school position where he discerns problems of poverty and race from a sensitive wealthy white-guy perspective).