Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is trying a unique strategy to get remote workers to return downtown: insulting them.
“I don’t know if you saw this study the other day,” Frey told an audience of 1,000 at Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting on Wednesday. “What this study clearly showed … is that when people who have the ability to come downtown to an office don’t — when they stay home sitting on their couch, with their nasty cat blanket, diddling on their laptop — if they do that for a few months, you become a loser!”
The comment was a “complete joke” and the study was made-up, the Minneapolis mayor’s office told Fortune, but there are serious facts to back up Frey’s worry about the impact of remote work on Minneapolis’ downtown economy.
Who even elected him?
Definitely the white centrist boomers living around Minneapolis. It was the time when rent control and replacing the police department with a department of public safety was on the ballot. And Frey was against both of those things. I remember talking with some of my elderly in-laws who all live in south Minneapolis. They all voted for him. Plus with ranked choice voting, people had to specifically take him off the ballot in order to win.