3 min read January 2023 — Melvin Carter, mayor of Saint Paul, spoke with Invest: and shared his strategies for aiding members of his community. With projects addressing economic growth, housing accessibility, public safety and urban development, Carter said he is working toward a decisively better future for Saint Paul.
What are you working on in Saint Paul and what separates it from other cities?
Over the last 12 months, we’ve had a lot of things going on that we’ve been really excited to build out. One thing that I think is unique about Saint Paul is that we have two sites that are over 100-plus acres of ground-up urban redevelopment. One is the former Ford Motor Company’s Twin Cities assembly plant site. It’s now called the Highland Bridge site. We have a plan there for almost 4,000 units of housing and a significant water feature at the center of a large urban solar array. Once complete, it will be Minnesota’s largest urban solar array. Additionally, we have a 100-plus-acre site that was formerly a golf course, which our Port Authority has complete control over. We are in the planning process of essentially doing the exact same thing there. What’s exciting is that many of our housing developments today are being built without fossil gas connections to reflect our values on climate and park space. Seeing that come to fruition is pretty amazing for us. I believe Saint Paul probably has more opportunities for ground-up urban redevelopment than maybe any city in the country. Along University Avenue, one of our main thoroughfares, we have our light rail line that connects us to neighboring Minneapolis.. Along this route, we have a new soccer stadium where our Major League Soccer team plays. We’re also working with our county to establish a pretty large development that would change our city skyline along the riverfront. Saint Paul has more frontage on the Mississippi River than any other city in America. It’s always been a working river, and we’ve done very little to maximize the economic, social and cultural opportunities that water creates. That’s something that we’re changing right now and we’re really excited about the opportunity for that development.
When we talk to national developer-type audiences, we’re making sure that they’re aware of the incredible scope and magnitude of opportunity that exists in Saint Paul. We’re a majority people of color city and that creates an onus on us to think beyond just the macroeconomic growth, expanding our tax base and growing our skyline, to ensuring that we are building an inclusive economy, that our equity strategy is a growth strategy and that our growth strategy is an equity strategy.
How are you working to support employees?
We’ve raised the minimum wage in Saint Paul. We’ve launched CollegeBound Saint Paul, a college savings account initiative that starts every child born in our city after January 1, 2020, with $50. We launched an Office of Financial Empowerment that is designed to help people in our community think through strategies to make money work for them. One of the things that we’re doing with our American Rescue Plan funding is thinking through how a city can be instrumental in helping employees of a local business buy the business and convert it to an employee-owned business. It’s something that we have really bought into as a critical need for us. We see the number of businesses owned by baby boomers and the number of the baby boomers who are hoping to sell those businesses. It creates a real urgency around creating a plan to ensure the continuity of the operations of the business, the continuity of our tax base, the continuity of our employment bases and the continuity of our opportunity to create wealth for community members. We’re really excited about this approach and the potential it can bring to us.
What are your future and current plans for aiding the citizens of Saint Paul?
There’s just no limit to what our city can be, who our city can be. The wealth of colleges and universities that we have, the wealth of businesses large and small, the incredibly diverse community and majority people of color in our community provide us with the opportunities to really be a global marketplace. We are probably entering the most prolific period of economic expansion in our city’s history. We literally have billions of dollars that will add to our tax base in the immediate term. I’m really excited about all the opportunities that exist here and that we’re a growing city. Every day, we see more and more people coming into our community and recognizing this as a really great place to live or raise children or open a business.
In terms of our top priorities, they are largely unchanged. No. 1 is public safety. Our focus has been on expanding that through what we call our Community-First Public Safety framework, which includes two elements. One is an optimal response that focuses on when people call 911. More than half of the time when people call 911, it’s because somebody is in crisis, or somebody needs help, or somebody has some sort of neighborhood concern. There are many, many times in which a social worker or emergency housing counselor or something along those lines can help them meet the need more effectively and more cost-effectively than a police officer or a paramedic. As a result of this optimal response framework that we’ve built out, in the last couple of years we have reduced our response times by almost a full minute.
We’ve also worked with our county to put $75 million in American Rescue Plan dollars aside for affordable housing for our community. We, like cities across the country and across the planet, saw in the wake of the pandemic a more than tenfold increase in the number of our residents who are sheltering outdoors. We’re in the process of continuing to create a real national model for how to better serve individuals who have and who are experiencing homelessness and how to bring people out of the cold. When someone is experiencing homelessness in Alabama or Kentucky or Florida, it’s really sad. It’s frustrating. When people are homeless in Minnesota, especially during our winters, it can be deadly. I’m sitting here surrounded by snow and negative temperatures. In five instances during my time as mayor I’ve gotten a call that we lost a community member because they couldn’t find a warm, safe place to sleep. That’s unacceptable for us. It’s really forced us to come up with a new model for transitioning people indoors, transitioning people into more supportive, more permanent spaces. That’s critical for us.
For more information, visit:
https://www.stpaul.gov/
