The tl;dr here is to vote for Aurin Chowdhury but this is going to be a pretty long post because one of her opponents is presenting himself on his website as a lot more progressive than he is in any other context.

On the ballot:

Aurin Chowdhury
Luther Ranheim
Nancy Ford

Nancy Ford

Nancy is on the ballot as a DFLer but was quoted in an ad for the utterly reprehensible Shawn Holster calling him a “pragmatist, not an activist.” (Holster ran against Zaynab Mohamed last year and is a 3%er with a Twitter feed full of transphobia.) Nancy ran in 2021 and when asked about rent control responded by talking about how much she resented having to pay the minimum wage: “I was a property owner. I wouldn’t want to have government come in and tell me how to manage my property. I’m unhappy enough with them telling me what I have to pay my employees and x, y and z.”

I would not rank Nancy, and Luther’s willingness to actively campaign with her (Luther and Nancy are both encouraging their supporters to rank them 1 and 2) is at the top of a long list of reasons why his self-presentation on his website is disingenuous as hell.

Luther Ranheim

If you look just at Luther’s website, he seems less awful than you’d expect: he talks about alternatives to police response for nonviolent crimes, the People’s Climate Equity Plan (I assume he means The People’s Climate and Equity Plan from MN350), and some other progressive-sounding stuff. Here’s where the rubber meets the road, though, as Luther would say.

1. He’s actively campaigning with Nancy Ford, friend to Republicans, and encouraging his supporters to rank her second.
2. An April fundraiser for Luther was hosted by Jackie Cherryhomes, Steve Minn (more on Minn here), and Steve Cramer of the Downtown Council; the point of contact was (documented asshole and former campaign manager for liar Mickey Moore) Alex Minn. More recently he had a fundraiser hosted in part by Carol Becker. The people embracing Luther are among the absolute worst people in Minneapolis politics.
3. When he thinks he’s among friends (by which I mean landlords), he will say that he thinks Minneapolis can solve its financial problems by cutting the budget for bike lanes, which ludicrous on multiple levels. The fact that he dramatically changes his stance depending on who he’s talking to should be a warning sign to literally everyone who thinks he’s an acceptable candidate.
4. Luther is completely unambiguous on his call with the landlords that he will oppose any form of rent control or rent stabilization. Again, in other contexts, he’s all mealy-mouthed about bringing everyone together to figure out the right numbers blah blah etc. (To be fair, he was also blunt about this at the Ward 12 forum, saying that rent control is unnecessary in Minneapolis.)

Anyway, just to reiterate, Luther is conservative, his friends are terrible, and you cannot and should not trust his stance on any issue.

Aurin Chowdhury

In some wards Aurin would absolutely be the centrist option: she wants to bring up police staffing to meet the minimums required by the charter (rather than pointing out that this requirement is bullshit and should be removed from the charter), for example, and while she’s open to rent control it’s clearly with caveats (“Rent Stabilization is not the silver bullet for addressing the housing crisis but prevents predatory rent hikes which are happening now in our city and are displacing the most vulnerable in our community. I support new construction exemptions and creating a system to support small landlords in our city. I have not committed to any other feature because I want to ensure that Ward 12 residents have a voice in the policy-making process.” — I should note, I have a lot of doubts about rent control, especially as it was implemented in St. Paul, so I like her policy here more than a lot of the other people I’ve endorsed.)

Aurin’s endorsements are the polar opposite of Luther’s (the DFL, Take Action MN, and a bunch of elected officials I like). For that alone, I view her as the obvious choice. I would enthusiastically vote for Aurin Chowdhury if I lived in Ward 12. I would not rank either of the other two.

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