OK: I’m going to level with you. I am not going to research this one anywhere near as thoroughly as I researched Ward 6, because this one, thank goodness, is frankly pretty straightforward and honestly, anyone who is willing to spend two minutes looking at the candidate websites doesn’t need my advice on this race anyway.
The candidates:
Scott Graham
Katie Cashman
Kenneth Foxworth
Kenneth Foxworth is on the ballot and has a website, but it’s the kind of website where the “latest news” link takes you to a page that says “blog” and has nothing else. He is on the ballot but he’s not really in the race.
Scott Graham is endorsed by an amazing selection of groups and individuals I don’t like, including retiring Council Member Lisa Goodman herself but also Martha Holton Dimick, Tom Hoch, and Mark Globus; he’s also the All of Mpls pick (All of Mpls is a group aligned with the law-and-order faction of the city government: they love cops, they love landlords, and they love parking spots.) He also made a campaign ad all about how he’s a former Eagle Scout. This guy is in his 60s: if your campaign ad highlights an achievement from the 1970s, it suggests your more recent achievements wouldn’t play well, and given that he’s a landlord with unhappy tenants, he might be right about that. (Link goes to Twitter; @happyifydesign says, “He was my extremely incompetent and delinquent landlord and if his ability to responsibly manage properties is any indication…”)
OK, honestly, it’s probably worth highlighting some of the other stuff happifydesign has mentioned about Scott. From that tweet (posted in November 2021, well before he decided to run for office): “One triplex I lived, the downstairs neighbors moved out because their toilet froze solid. We spent multiple winters trying to get the heat fixed, but the landlord did nothing until we went to the City–then he fixed it (+ other violations) and sold the building and kicked us out.” Further down the thread: “Two of us ended up needing stitches due to injuries from his poorly kept unit (things not affixed safely). He wouldn’t remove the dead squirrel from inside the wall, nor did he care about the rapidly increasing population of carpenter ants, nor the ice dams leaking into the house.” And an even earlier thread: “Housing inspections had a long list of things for him to fix. He did so in a way that was absolutely punitive to us–like tearing down our three season porch with no notice whatsoever one day while I was working from home, with teens who hooked a jeep up to it with chains. Then rebuilt it EXTREMELY slowly with our wall a gaping hole with a tarp the whole time. I think it was open from April to October? I remember light snow blowing in at the end. He was just spectacularly unfit to be a landlord, based on his (lack of) respect for the structural integrity of buildings and his extreme defensiveness triggered by any requests from tenants. … We ran into a neighbor we’d never met at a party who was shocked to hear people lived in our building–they thought it had been condemned. We also found a note with phone number on the door from a handyman offering to help finish tearing the house down. … He mixed concrete in my roommate’s vintage catherine holm bowls–and left them dirty with concrete in the sink, which is how she figured it out. The three different units of the building were instructed to send our rent to three different entities.”
Maybe you live in Ward 7 and like Lisa Goodman because of her constituent services. I don’t think you’re going to get this level of service from Scott.
ETA: John Edwards of WedgeLive followed up on this and interviewed the tenant. You can watch that interview here, or you can listen to it as a podcast here. He also has some additional information on his website, including an article Scott wrote back in 2001 about buying “derelict properties in prime neighborhoods” and rehabbing them.
Here’s my favorite bit from that interview.
John: Tell me, how did the missing wall come about?
Julia: When we were trying to get heat in the apartment, Scott was just evasive and saying things that weren’t turning into action, and it was really unclear if we would get any heat. The other roommates who’d been there longer had suggestions, like maybe if we can’t get the heat replaced the landlord [could] cover part of the electric so that we can run space heaters. We’d done things like putting the plastic — this is the long answer — putting the plastic over all the windows. Scott was not responsive and we ended up trying to figure out what else we could do. We talked to the city and found out that one option to really put pressure on was to look into putting rent into escrow or starting an inspection process. […] So the city did an inspection which revealed additional violations. Including the three-season porch on the front which led to the wall coming off.
John: So the thing you didn’t even complain about — the city shows up to inspect the thing you were complaining about, finds more problems, and that turns into a big repair job.
Julia: I mean repair would really be an understatement. It was a demolition job. […]
John: So you had a big gaping hole in the side of the house, is that accurate?
Julia: There were tarps.
You know, the thing that really strikes me about the whole story is how much Scott’s tenants tried to work with him. How much they didn’t want to go to the city. How much they put up with. And this is so! common! among renters! And she goes on to say that she thinks Scott mistreated them because they’d been “the squeaky wheel” because they pushed him repeatedly on not having any heat and squirrels living in the walls and the roof leaking and being left with a tarp covering the front of the house for multiple months.
Katie Cashman is endorsed by Faith in Minnesota (a left-wing progressive group, if you’re unfamiliar with them), OutFront, some environmental groups, and then also a whole bunch of people I like a lot, including Jim Davnie, Tom Olsen, and Becky Alper. She’s also the Minneapolis for the Many candidate (Minneapolis for the Many is a PAC created to support candidates who support things like police accountability and tenant’s rights.)
She comes at housing questions from the perspective of a renter, rather than a landlord. While both Katie and Scott talk about building more affordable housing, Katie talks about funding free legal counsel for tenants facing evictions. She also offers up specifics for dealing with homelessness like housing-first approaches and offering co-ed and gender-neutral shelter spaces.
She commits to a bunch of very specific goals for constituent service (forums before budget meetings, office hours for constituents, neighborhood association visits, newsletters…) (Scott just says he’ll provide “the highest level of service,” he doesn’t say what that means. Someone should ask him whether he believes he provides the highest level of service to his tenants.)
Fundamentally, though, this is one of those races where the endorsements make it really easy. I would absolutely vote for Katie Cashman if i lived in Ward 7.
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