I am not a hero.

Unfortunately, this revelation wasn’t born from introspection but forced upon me through an unexpected reality check. Believe me, there was a point in time where I was convinced that I could play the role of the knight in shining armor, rescuing the damsel in distress or scaling a tree to save a stranded cat.

But when I was actually presented with a moment, the outcome was very different.

It’s the summer of 2020, and like most of us at that time I am overcome with a mix of emotions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. I’m cycling through moments of pain, anger and a desire to be part of something that creates a better society by the hour.

On May 31, I catch word about a protest taking place and I go. It was the largest gathering of people I had ever been a part of. The atmosphere was charged with a shared commitment to justice. However, my emotions took an unexpected turn when our route led us from University Avenue to the ramp of I-35 North.

Standing on an expressway for the first time was an eerie experience. The space is much larger than it appears from a car, and even the ground felt much different than standard pavement.

I was uneasy.

We took a knee on I-35 N, and that’s when the moment appeared. I’ll never forget the sound of a semi-truck barreling toward us. I ran for safety, heading to the median to cross over to the I-35 S side. When I got to the median, I was confronted with a 10-foot gap between the I-35 N and S. Stranded along the median, I watched in fear as the truck continued toward us.

I remember looking back and seeing people still in the way and I feared for them. But as the truck came closer, I witnessed people transition from individuals to heroes. Immediately they sprang into action. Some people jumped on top of the truck, others threw their bikes, while some grabbed people and moved them out of the path of the semi.

What I saw was a group of strangers take immediate, collective action to address what felt like an imminent threat. In that moment those individual strangers became collective heroes.

That united response has served as an inspiration to me to this day.

And now, as the executive director of Black Men Teach, I have an opportunity to be part of a group of collective heroes facing a different threat.

On April 2, 2024, Black Men Teach will be a part of launching a Collective Impact Coalition.

The coalition’s goal is to increase the proportion of Black male elementary school teachers to 20% of the teaching staff in partnering elementary schools (schools with 40% or more Black students) by the 2034-2035 school year. There are roughly 100 elementary schools that meet our partnership criteria with over 2,200 teaching staff.

To get to there, the Collective Impact Coalition is gearing up to facilitate the recruitment, preparation, placement, and retention of over 400 Black male educators. The impact of the coalition’s efforts extends beyond the quantitative increase in Black male teachers. We aim to increase academic outcomes, foster a more affirming learning atmosphere for K-5 students, and enable school environments where Black men not only survive but thrive.

Achieving this goal will be historic. Currently, across K-12, Black men constitute less than 0.05% of teachers in the state. Even more surprising, there are fewer than 50 Black men teaching in elementary schools in Minnesota today. Achieving this goal is also not optional.  The enormous gaps in the learning of our children threaten the well-being of us all. Most children in Minnesota can grow and graduate from our schools without ever having a Black male teacher. Yet if a Black student has a Black teacher the benefits are robust; they are more likely to graduate high school and to attend college, be held to higher expectations, attend school more frequently, are less likely to be perceived as excessively disruptive, less likely to be suspended, and, particularly in the case of low-income Black boys, are less likely to be referred to special education.

Addressing the scarcity of Black male teachers isn’t a challenge that BMT can tackle alone. It’s a community-level issue that has persisted without resolution, necessitating an unprecedented, united community effort to surmount. Roughly 20 organizations have walked alongside BMT every step of the process; examining data, meeting with Black male teachers, proposing solutions, and co-creating this ambitious but necessary goal and the means to achieve it.

As we prepare to embark on this historic journey, the parallels between the coalition and the protesters on I-35 become more evident to me. In both cases, the power of collective action is at the center. And it is my belief that the coalition’s collective effort will demonstrate that transformative change is not only possible but inevitable when individuals converge with a shared purpose.

Markus Flynn, a former classroom teacher, is executive director of Black Men Teach, a Minnesota-based non-profit headquartered in St. Paul. Members of the coalition include leadership from Education Minnesota, PELSB, Metro State University, the University of Minnesota, University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis College, Wallin Education Partners, Great Minnesota Schools, Minneapolis Public Schools, Saint Paul Public Schools, Excell Academy for Higher Learning, Serve Minnesota, Teach for America Twin Cities and more.

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“Has San Francisco lost its liberal soul?” So asked a New York Times headline earlier this month, after voters there approved ballot measures aimed at tackling crime and drug addiction. As Republicans campaign against urban dysfunction and Democrats stare down the possibility of a second Trump presidency, there has never been a better time to reconsider what it means to have a liberal soul.

To begin: What do the ballot measures in San Francisco actually do?

One measure gives more flexibility to the police department to fight crime, allowing it to install street cameras and use drones. It also aims to reduce the paperwork burden on officers, in part by making use of body camera footage, and it eliminates a ban on chasing violent-crime suspects fleeing in vehicles.

The other requires drug screening and treatment for single adults who are suspected of drug use and who receive cash assistance and other local benefits — to avoid subsidizing addiction and contributing to fatal overdoses.

Stunning? Not to people who live there

The Los Angeles Times called their passage “a stunning rightward shift” for the city. But it wasn’t stunning to Mayor London Breed, who championed the measures, or to voters, who are fed up with crime and heartbroken by drug addiction. Overdose deaths have soared to an average of more than two per day.

The referendum was of a piece with San Franciscans’ 2022 decisions to recall both a district attorney who scaled back prosecutions and school board members who seemed more concerned with removing the names of historical figures from schools than educating students.

So, the result wasn’t all that stunning. But was it a soul-losing moment and a “rightward shift?” It was, if the essence of liberalism is the old Cole Porter line, “anything goes,” where tolerance for transgressions and hostility to authority are its defining qualities. That has been the dominant perception of liberalism for decades, with devastating consequences for the Democratic Party.

New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably summarized this problem more than 30 years ago, when he bemoaned the trend of excusing street disorder and rejecting social norms as “defining deviancy down.” Liberalism became such a damaged brand that many Democrats began calling themselves progressives, without wrestling with the fact that progress is often at odds with permissiveness.

In the Progressive, New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society eras, the soul of liberalism — what breathed life into it as a political force — lay not in permissiveness toward individual lawbreaking, but in the advancement of collective freedom and equality through government action. Liberalism meant empowering public officials, not handcuffing them. And it meant holding high expectations of government, not low expectations of neighbors.

San Francisco voters, wanting their government to be more active and effective, are embracing what was long the essence of liberalism. What happened to those roots?

Tyranny of rules, fear of lawsuits

Much of the answer lies in “Everyday Freedom,” a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.

But to do so, as Howard explains, rather than adopting guiding principles that would allow for governmental flexibility and public accountability, lawmakers and regulators began writing millions of pages of prescriptive rules for every imaginable facet of life. That red tape, along with a corresponding expansion in litigation, greatly curtailed government’s freedom to address problems. Collective action was subjugated to an ever-expanding array of individual legal rights, and the idea of freedom, Howard writes, was reduced to “a solitary activity — ‘the right to be left alone.’”

It is not just technology that has turned alienation, loneliness, and isolation into social epidemics. Liberalism, instead of delivering the Great Society, has helped trap us at Walden Pond.

“Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible,” Howard writes, owing to fear of lawsuits and a tyranny of rules. That loss of authority — which is also a loss of freedom — has paralyzed government, demoralized the public, eroded public trust in institutions and fueled the anger and division promoted by Donald Trump and his most extreme supporters.

Rebelling against the loss of freedom

The good news: some Democratic leaders are beginning to rebel against this loss of freedom, and not just Mayor Breed. A state senator from San Francisco has proposed rolling back environmental regulations that have long blocked the creation of new housing, part of a new movement of YIMBYs (“Yes In My Backyard”). The city is starved for housing, and its density and mass transit mean that new development would yield major environmental benefits. The inability to build it is among the countless examples of regulations stymieing their own goals.

The problem of lost freedom is so endemic that we often fail to notice it, which is why Howard’s book is invaluable. At only 84 pages, it can be read in one sitting. I did, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever felt frustrated by government– and anyone who believes, as it seems most San Franciscans do, that the true soul of liberalism is worth saving.

Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.”

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The Heights, the future residential and commercial community planned at the former site of the Hillcrest Golf Course on St. Paul’s East Side, will soon be able to rely on Mother Earth for heating and cooling.

The newly-created Minnesota Climate Innovation Finance Authority awarded a $4.7 million loan — its first loan ever — to The Heights Community Energy, which plans to construct and operate one of the largest geothermal energy systems in the state.

A development agreement requires future multi-family housing and light-industrial buildings at The Heights to be connected to the low-carbon energy system, which would then be funded by the private sector’s utility payments. It will be the first aquifer-based district geothermal energy system in Minnesota.

“It’ll be a $12 million project, but this bridge loan will enable us to start getting that infrastructure in as housing moves forward this summer,” said St. Paul City Council Member Nelsie Yang on Wednesday.

The geothermal system will heat and cool buildings by extracting water from subsurface aquifers to cool buildings in the summer. Heat from the buildings will warm the water, which will then be injected into the aquifer for storage. The heated water can be then be accessed in the winter to warm the same structures.

The system is designed to reduce utility bills for future property owners while helping them to reduce their carbon emissions. To fund environmental infrastructure, the Minnesota Legislature last year created and funded MnCIFA, which is structured as a publicly accountable financing authority, otherwise known as a “green bank.”

The goal is to use public financing to fill in the gaps left by traditional financing for clean energy projects.

The Heights Community Energy will own and operate the geothermal system under the direction of District Energy St. Paul, the city’s long-standing nonprofit utility partner, and the St. Paul Port Authority, the owner and master developer of The Heights.

“This system will go a long way toward achieving our goals around the creation of a carbon neutral community at the Heights,” said Port Authority President Todd Hurley, in a written statement.

Chelsea DeArmond, founder of St. Paul 350, called the district system “a catalyst for more community-scale climate action for new and existing St. Paul neighborhoods.” The neighborhood-led environmental advocacy group has advocated for clean energy at The Heights over the past five years of planning.

Sherman Associates, the JO Companies and Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity plan 1,000 new housing units at The Heights, which is also expected to produce 1,000 living wage jobs, according to the St. Paul Port Authority.

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“The rent stabilized building bubble will persist as long as there are greater fools to cash out bad bets. If Albany bails out this market now, with bad data and before the market has started to price buildings properly, they risk turning taxpayers into the greatest fools of all.”

Adi Talwar

Apartments in the Bronx.

CityViews are readers’ opinions, not those of City Limits. Add your voice today!

As the largest lender on New York’s rent stabilized apartment buildings, many analysts and commentators have blamed the collapse of New York Community Bank’s stock over the past few months in part on the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (the “HTSPA”), which tightened rent regulations on these buildings that serve as the bedrock of New York’s affordable housing stock.

As a landlord and broker who has been participating in and analyzing the market for rent stabilized buildings for 15 years, I believe that this tempting narrative misdiagnoses the underlying problem and that the market for rent stabilized buildings was in a bubble before the HSTPA, to some degree still is, and the distress we’re seeing was inevitable.

I am speaking out because, as City Limits recently reported, lawmakers in Albany are considering a number of measures that would effectively bail-out rent stabilized landlords and lenders who made bad decisions—and I am concerned that if they do so without taking the time to collect and analyze high quality data and let the market start pricing these buildings properly, they risk stoking the dysfunction that got us into this situation in the first place, all on the public’s dime. 

Back in the boom times of the market for rent stabilized buildings there were two prevailing investment strategies. The first was to buy rent stabilized buildings in neighborhoods that were relatively rich and deregulate units in order to capture the neighborhood’s market rents, which were far higher than regulated rents. The second strategy was to buy rent stabilized buildings in relatively poor neighborhoods where market rents weren’t high enough to reach the deregulatory threshold, but where one could still use various means allowed under the pre-HSTPA regime to jack up rents.

The regulatory regime that allowed for deregulating units and aggressively boosting rents in excess of the annual allowances from the Rent Guidelines Board began in 1994, and by the time the HSTPA passed in 2019, the market had practically run out of buildings to execute the first strategy on, leaving the vast majority of the city’s current stock of rent stabilized buildings/units in relatively poor neighborhoods.

Consequently, most distressed rent stabilized buildings are also in these relatively low-income neighborhoods in which the second strategy was executed, so it’s worth asking—did the investments in these buildings that are now going sour even make investment sense to begin with, before the HSTPA tightened rent regulations?

I think to any real estate investor looking at these deals objectively, without ideological blinders on or a compensation structure tied to fees rather than returns, the answer is clearly no, these investments never made sense. The investment yields at which rent stabilized buildings were being purchased and financed were relatively similar regardless of either the potential for increased income from deregulation or the credit quality of their tenants. Rent Stabilized buildings in Mott Haven in the Bronx (median household income of $24,500) were being valued as if they had similar income growth potential and credit risk as rent stabilized buildings in Murray Hill in Manhattan (median household income of $124,740.)

Most new multifamily buildings in relatively poor neighborhoods require subsidies to be able to operate—so why should all these ancient, inefficient, unsubsidized buildings with similar tenants be priced as if they exist in some parallel economic universe?

Given the age and tenant credit quality of these distressed rent stabilized buildings, many of them will have to be bailed out by taxpayers in one form or another eventually in order to avoid falling into serious disrepair. Different parts of the real estate industry are pushing different proposals that, despite their representations to the contrary, would have public money prop up these buildings either directly or indirectly.

One proposal would have the regulated rents on vacant units reset to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s standards and paid by vouchers in exchange for renovations, which could sometimes result in the public subsidizing higher rents than what the market would otherwise bear. Another proposal would increase the ability of landlords to recapture renovation costs via rent increases, which, if not designed properly, could risk incentivizing, among other things, over-improvement of units to the point of their rents only being affordable to tenants via increased public assistance.

The tenant movement, for its part, has proposed, among other things, a whole new public authority that, in addition to building new social housing, would be able to buy distressed buildings like these using public funding.

While all of these potential solutions have some merit, they are being considered by lawmakers without high-quality data on market, building, or unit-level distress. Different housing agencies can’t even agree on how many vacant rent stabilized apartments there are. The court system, which is a venue for a lot of the building-level distress, theoretically has lots of useful data on what has befallen these buildings but is notoriously opaque.

In addition to having a responsibility to deal with the other more urgent and fundamental housing items on their legislative agenda, given that only so much government money is going to be appropriated for housing, lawmakers also have a responsibility to make sure taxpayers get as much bang for our buck as possible by investing it on an informed basis and not on above-market terms.

The rent stabilized building bubble will persist as long as there are greater fools to cash out bad bets. If Albany bails out this market now, with bad data and before the market has started to price buildings properly, they risk turning taxpayers into the greatest fools of all.

Ben Carlos Thypin is the CEO of Quantierra.