Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Anondson
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Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Anondson » September 1st, 2017, 6:36 pm

Different corners of the state have wildly different economic conditions. The Arrowhead mining downturn just isn’t turning around and it seems the people elected there have little on their mind except reinvigorating mining first, something else second.

But northwest Minnesota is having a jobs boom so strong they have to bus people in from Bay Area-commute type distances.

Businesses there expand there and have turned to begging local government to help attract workers.

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/ ... -next.html

The jobs boom in north west Minnesota isn’t sudden, it’s been going on a long while and they still can figure out how to make housing there cheaper to attract workers for the booming manufacturers.

MinneapBliss
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Re: Out state job market

Postby MinneapBliss » June 21st, 2021, 11:44 am

This seems like huge news for this area: https://www.startribune.com/new-440-mil ... 600070455/
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Anondson
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Anondson » July 27th, 2021, 10:49 am

Grand Marais is shocked, SHOCKED! that there is a housing shortage for seasonal workers. And believe there is nothing at all to be done within the city borders.

https://www.minnpost.com/twin-cities-bu ... -tourists/

MNdible
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby MNdible » July 27th, 2021, 11:13 am

That feels like an unnecessarily dickish reading of the article. Affordable housing is a difficult, thorny, often money losing proposition. In the metro area, there are developers who specialize in navigating the byzantine funding sources and lean on a deep bench of experience to execute it. To make it more complicated, this is a seasonal problem -- who's going to build affordable housing that sits empty for eight months out of the year?

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby bubzki2 » July 27th, 2021, 11:34 am

Grand Marais has had a well known, house-of-cards staffing problem for years. Those J-1 visas were never really a solution. Now their staffing issues are apparently laid bare.

Besides Mr. Backlund buying a house/building to put employees in, it's hard to see a direct solution here. The whole region could try harder to stretch the peak season beyond the usual summer/fall and brief ski time frames.

Raise prices and raise wages is Occam's Razor.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Anondson » July 27th, 2021, 12:32 pm

Grand Marais’ predicament isn’t as instant as it seems to be presented. They didn’t suddenly shift to needing season workers, and all these years the seasonal workers lived somewhere all along. This was slow motion in front of everyone’s eyes.

They just hoped it would swing back in the direction of abundant vacant cabins to stash their seasonal workers out of sight.

If they want to find places in the town, they will need to accept the form of the town will end up changing. Seasonal workforce housing isn’t a new problem in the world. The vacant cabins option looks like it’ll be off the table for a long time.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby MNdible » July 27th, 2021, 1:11 pm

Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anywhere in the article where anybody said they were opposed to building affordable housing in town. These could be almost dorm style units, but still somebody has to step up with the cash and organization and management to actually build what is, on its own, a money losing proposition. This is a collection of small businesses we're talking about, not Valley Fair.

Mdcastle
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Mdcastle » July 28th, 2021, 7:37 am

Since you bring up Valleyfair, they managed to solve their "no J1s to work for peanuts" issue by paying $17 an hour for most positions and found Americans coming out of the woodwork to fill them . What do these vacant positions in Grand Marais pay?

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby LakeCharles » July 28th, 2021, 8:44 am

Since you bring up Valleyfair, they managed to solve their "no J1s to work for peanuts" issue by paying $17 an hour for most positions and found Americans coming out of the woodwork to fill them . What do these vacant positions in Grand Marais pay?
It's a good question, but their claim is that wages are irrelevant because there are no houses. But obviously there exists a high enough wage to start making a new apartment building pencil out. I'm not clear just how high that wage has to be though.

If they were able to attract any tourists from October to April, the town would be just fine. But these business owners surely know that running a business based on 5 months of tourism over 2 hours from the nearest population center (and over 4 hours from the actual source of tourists) is probably always going to be a tenuous existence.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby MNdible » July 28th, 2021, 8:55 am

Cook County, where Grand Marais is located, has a total population of about 5,500 people, and it has one of the oldest median ages of any county in Minnesota. (For comparison, the city of Shakopee alone has over 40,000 people and their median age is almost 10 years younger.) There just aren't a lot of locals sitting on their hands waiting for a bump in wage rates.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby bubzki2 » July 28th, 2021, 12:35 pm

Grand Marais does have high-speed internet now, though. More mobility to work remotely could lead some to move there full-time or nearly so. I considered it, but too many attachments locally for me.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby BoredAgain » July 29th, 2021, 8:55 am

Grand Marais does have high-speed internet now, though. More mobility to work remotely could lead some to move there full-time or nearly so. I considered it, but too many attachments locally for me.
That would contribute almost nothing to the low-skill workforce needs (maybe some working age kids) and make the affordable housing trend worse.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby SurlyLHT » July 29th, 2021, 10:07 am

Grand Marais should try to get some COVID or bonding money from the state for affordable housing. I'm also guessing the city and local developers don't have the resources or knowledge to bring in affordable housing. There is a lot of paperwork and etc involved. They also could try to recruit Commonbond or someone to help. The solution is likely outside their town with the State or outside organizations.

I visited a small town in Southern Minnesota 30 mins from Rochester for the Fourth and it was pretty nice. I thought it might be a nice place to live instead of Minneapolis. When I looked at their info on Wikipedia I saw that the population and tax-base have been decaying. There taxes are more than mine in Minneapolis.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby mattaudio » July 29th, 2021, 10:34 am

I now live in a similar small town in a touristy area of rural Minnesota, and I can understand why there's an issue with affordable housing - I'm probably contributing to the problem here just like the remote workforce in Grand Marais. People who can work remote are moving out of the metro to these types of towns and often have a pile of cash to buy a new house (or a second house) that would have previously been lower cost and attainable to someone from the local area who needs to finance the property.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby seanrichardryan » July 29th, 2021, 1:11 pm

The cost of construction vs the value when finished is a large problem in rural communities too. Lumber & labor costs the same in Grand Marais as it does in Minneapolis. Even with high seasonal demand, the cost of construction often can't pencil out.
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uptownbro
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby uptownbro » January 31st, 2023, 2:39 pm

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/ ... glass.html

The US HQ for global glass giant Saint-Gobain is moving from Washington state to Faribault.

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Anondson » January 31st, 2023, 5:58 pm

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/ ... glass.html

The US HQ for global glass giant Saint-Gobain is moving from Washington state to Faribault.
Remarkable! I’m just far outside these industries to know anything that insiders might be aware of but I think the concentration of window makers in Minnesota and Iowa must make this be all sorts of sensible.

alexschief
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby alexschief » February 1st, 2023, 9:45 am

So... anybody know why window makers are concentrating in this area? What's the competitive advantage for this region?

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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Silophant » February 1st, 2023, 9:52 am

There was a Curious Minnesota article on it!

Tl;dr: lots of wood from the logging industry. The glass itself could be made anywhere that there was sand.
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Ociee117
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Re: Greater Minnesota job market / employment news

Postby Ociee117 » March 1st, 2024, 11:41 am

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ ... is-county/

"According to Abraham-James, the helium concentration was measured at 12.4%, which is higher than forecasted and roughly 30 times the industry standard for commercial helium."

It's crazy how blessed North MN is in terms of resource wealth. Hopefully it can be extracted without high impact on the surrounding environment


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