A Region That Sees Racism as a Threat to Its Economy [TheAtlantic.com]

For decades, Minneapolis has been heralded as an American success story: The Twin Cities area is home to one of the largestconcentrations of Fortune-500-company headquarters, and, relative to other large American cities, has low unemployment, little poverty, and plenty of affordable housing. Much of the prosperity, which has been called “The Minnesota Miracle,” has been attributed an unusual approach to sharing tax revenues between rich and poor communities in the region.

But two years ago, an uncomfortable reality came to light: The Metropolitan Council, a regional planning council, began analyzing Census data and discovered that the Twin Cities metro area is hardly a land of opportunity for everyone. The area had the largest wealth gap, employment gap, and homeownership gap between white residents and people of color among the country’s 25 largest metro areas. Two years after the council’s original report, little has improved, though the employment gap has narrowed a bit.

[For more of this story, written by Alexia Fernandez Campbell, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...-its-economy/505490/]