A multi-story YMCA opened just off downtown St. Paul’s Galtier Plaza in the mid-1980s, drawing scores of patrons to its half-Olympic size swimming pool and skyway-level entrances. After serving two generations of visitors, the fitness and foot traffic came to a halt in 2020, when the pandemic temporarily shuttered gyms.

The downtown Y never reopened, a victim to COVID-19, decreased patronage in the era of remote work and the nonprofit’s reshuffled priorities. Bigos Management, which acquired Galtier/Cray Plaza for roughly $5 million in 2019, has drawn up and revisited plans for repositioning the former office building that once housed the Cray supercomputer company at least twice throughout the pandemic. For now, the seven floors of commercial space sit quiet, the last office tenant having vacated the property last fall.

The exception is the former YMCA gym, which still draws members from the five residential Bigos properties downtown, four of which ring Mears Park.

Access to the recently-refurbished “Lowertown Skyrec” — Lowertownskyrec.com — is a free perk to tenants of the neighboring Galtier Towers Apartments, Mears Park Place, the Historic Lowertown Lofts, the newly-acquired Cosmopolitan Apartments and the Kellogg Square building a few blocks away.

“I’ve had numerous residents go, ‘I didn’t even know this was here,’” said Nicholas Geng, a facilities manager with Bigos Management. “They absolutely love it.”

‘Events return to Mears Park’

The dumbbells and weight machines have been cleared out, but the former YMCA’s swimming pool, walking track, two full basketball courts, five pickleball courts and men’s and women’s locker room saunas reopened on three levels last November as a private facility available exclusively to the 1,500 tenants of the downtown Bigos properties.

The YMCA’s former skyway footprint is gone, likely destined to become housing, but a hot tub, volleyball court, family activity rooms, foosball tables and a roomy crafts room/maker’s space now line the floors above.

“When he’s shooting his hoops, I can do my workout,” said Rey Row, a single-mother to 13-year-old Isaac, pointing to the elevated walking track overlooking the basketball courts on Tuesday afternoon. “We shoot hoops or go swimming or play foosball.”

The Lowertown Skyrec spans 50,000 square feet of activity space across its three floors. The space “sat vacant until we started renovations this summer, but we bought it in October 2021,” said Stephanie Simmons, a property manager with Bigos Management who used to live in the Galtier Towers. “I had a lot of hurt watching what we’ve gone through with COVID and the unrest, and it’s been great seeing things come back as events return to Mears Park.”

Bill Hanley, a longtime Lowertown resident, called the uptick in skyway-level foot traffic each morning long overdue and much appreciated.

“It’s spectacular,” he said. “Those of us who are not Bigos residents who are in adjoining buildings are lobbying for some inclusion.”

‘Ready for it not to be empty’

Simmons said after multiple revisions, Bigos Management is likely to move forward next year with converting the vacant Galtier Plaza into seven levels of housing adjoining the residential Sibley and Jackson Street high-rise towers of the Galtier Towers Apartments. Cray, the supercomputer company, served as the office building’s anchor tenant from 2009 until 2017, when it relocated to Bloomington.

Cray Plaza’s few remaining commercial tenants soon scattered, with the last of them — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General — moving out last September.

“We’re ready for it to not be empty,” Simmons said.

In late January, Bigos Management acquired the 258-unit Cosmopolitan Apartments in Lowertown from a Boston-based ownership group for $34 million, a relative bargain. According to Ramsey County property tax records, the eight-story building carries an estimated market value this year of $45 million.

The building, which is located at 250 Sixth St. and dates to 1915, last sold in 2008 for $24 million.

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It’s budget season in Washington, which means the politicians are delivering their annual warnings about the looming Social Security crisis. How big of a crisis — and how close it looms — is largely within their control, and there are basically three proposals to address it: one from House Republicans, one from President Joe Biden, and one from former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s plan is so bad that Republicans decided to attribute it to Biden instead. The budget proposal from the House’s Republican Study Committee, released earlier this month, points out that if no changes are made, the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted by 2032. “Ignoring this fact, as the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats have, will lead to the largest across-the-board cuts to current Social Security retirement beneficiaries in history,” its report reads.

This is a valid point. But “do nothing and let massive automatic benefit cuts occur” is in fact Trump’s position on Social Security, not Biden’s. The Biden administration released a Social Security plan earlier this month that would restore solvency to the trust fund by raising taxes on people who earn more than $400,000 a year.

As for House Republicans? Their plan calls for raising the retirement age “to account for increases in life expectancy.” They realize this is risky — the Biden administration has already pounced on it — which may explain their attempt to sow confusion by pretending their nominee’s plan is actually the other guy’s.

Painful changes needed, but …

Nonetheless, the plan from the Republican Study Committee, which represents almost 80% of the party’s House membership, is worth taking seriously. And in the universe of possible benefit cuts, the GOP preference for a higher retirement age is one of the worst possible options. It’s essentially a benefit cut that targets people with below-average life expectancy. Social Security needs painful changes, but it’s a strangely regressive choice to make them at such a cost to a group that’s poorer than average.

Progress on life expectancy has been very uneven across U.S. society. Educated Americans are living much longer than we used to, but those without bachelor’s degrees are not. Contemporary Republicans like to cast themselves as champions of the working class, but they haven’t updated their policy playbook on major issues accordingly.

Beyond the specific class skew, meanwhile, there’s just something peculiar and cruel about singling out people in poor health for benefit cuts.

On average, the rich are in better shape than the poor. But there are exceptions. And almost everyone would trade money for better health and longer life if they had the opportunity. Increasing the retirement age essentially singles out the very worse-off class of elderly people — and makes them worse off.

Then there is the already-regressive nature of Social Security: The richer you are, the larger your monthly benefit check. Liberals generally admire Social Security for being a “universal” program rather than a means-tested one, providing a guarantee of dignified retirement to all Americans without a lot of elaborate administrative rigamarole. But most people’s understanding of a universal program is something like a public library or a bus — a service available on equal terms to everyone. Social Security is not like that. It pays larger benefit checks to higher-income people who paid more taxes during their working life.

The theoretical rationale here is that Social Security is supposed to be a kind of mandatory insurance program with a pension-like structure of payments and payouts.

In reality, though, Social Security is redistributive — those who pay higher taxes receive higher benefits, but not in proportion to what they pay. The point of the Democrats’ tax-raising plan is to make the program more redistributive.

But precisely because the existing benefit structure is skewed to the rich, you can achieve the Democratic goal of making the program more redistributive — and the Republican goal of cutting spending — by simply making the program flatter. Take the current 80th percentile of benefits (or 60th or 40th or whatever number you want to compromise on), and make it the maximum benefit. That creates a spending cut that targets not exactly rich people, but at least non-poor people. And because more affluent people live longer, reducing an affluent person’s monthly check does more for the Treasury than cutting spending on the poor.

A tax cut for those who keep working?

All this said, the idea of raising the retirement age is not completely without merit. In fact, the research shows that retirement itself is something of a mixed blessing.

There are clearly people who, due to their physical condition or the nature of their work, benefit from the opportunity to retire earlier rather than later. On average, however, retiring seems to lead to worse physical and mental health due to a reduction in activity and social connectedness.

Beyond the narrow budgetary questions of retirement programs, there is clearly a large economic benefit to having able-bodied people work rather than not, even if they are in their 60s or 70s. Rather than cut benefits for those who want to retire, America might consider cutting taxes on people who choose to continue working past retirement age. At the very least, the government shouldn’t actively discourage the elderly from participating in the labor market.

The main health benefits of continued work seem to accrue with part-time hours — it’s avoiding total inactivity, in other words — and for many people that may be the ideal situation. Part-time work gives the able-bodied elderly a continued connection to coworkers and a role in the national economy, while also generating additional free time to spend with grandchildren or on hobbies. The U.S. should consider creating an active labor market program oriented toward connecting sixty- and seventy-something people with part-time job opportunities.

Smaller tax increases, more careful cuts

It may be boring to say that Republicans want to cut benefits and Democrats want to raise taxes, and that the best solution is some kind of bipartisan compromise that does a mix of the two. But realistically, the optimal policy probably involves tax increases smaller than Biden proposes paired with spending cuts more careful than Republicans suggest.

At least both parties agree — one explicitly, one implicitly — that there is no place in this debate for Trump’s reckless indifference.

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

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