Minneapolis, MN
Getting to the Big Picture on Rideshare | Twin Cities Business
If we think about the stare down between Uber/Lyft and the Minneapolis City Council as a recent problem, we’re failing to grasp the economic forces and governance lapses that brought it about. If you’re too young to remember the era before Uber/Lyft or think of them merely as transportation resources for weekend partiers and airport trips, you’re missing important perspective. After a deluge of media coverage lacking such perspective, perhaps it’s valuable to start with a 10,000-foot view:
Uber debuted in the Twin Cities in 2012. (The company was formed in 2010.) Back then, the options for private transportation were taxis and pricey limos. The Twin Cities were a notoriously bad cab town.
Unlike Chicago, New York, and other large cities, you could not “hail” a cab on the street. One either had to find a “cab stand” where cabbies waited for rides (primarily in downtowns near hotels or other major sources of people without cars) or call a taxi company (there were several) and order a cab to come to you. Depending on the time of day and day of week, the wait for a cab ranged from a modest 15 minutes to hours (late at night, during bad weather, on certain holidays).
The taxi business was heavily regulated. Cab companies were licensed to cities and only could accept rides in those cities. Some had geographic constraints on where they would take you. The number of licensed cabs and their rates were regulated as well. The goal was to provide enough taxis to meet demand while limiting supply so there were enough riders to justify the number of cabs on the street. The cab business was seasonal, peaking in winter.
Cab drivers paid a daily or weekly fee to lease their vehicle from cab companies and then kept all earnings and tips. It was uncommon for drivers to own their vehicle, though the occasional owner-operator existed. Taxi drivers commonly complained the business was volatile, rates were too low, and lease costs too high to make a decent living, but most cab drivers did it as their primary job, not a sidelight for a couple hours a day. Drivers who drove at night and in the inner city also faced significant safety challenges as rides could not be vetted in advance. A primarily cash business, cabbies were often robbed at gunpoint.
Uber, like many tech companies of the era, exploited an industry deep in archaic practices that was broadly disliked by consumers in places like Minneapolis. (This was not the case New York and Chicago, where many don’t own cars, cabs were plentiful and easy to find and part of the transportation culture of the city.).
Like some tech companies of the era, Uber was funded with billions in venture capital to allow it a path to viability. And like other tech stars of the era, that glide path lasted over a decade and allowed Uber to price its service below cost and pay drivers more than it could profitably afford.
This practice is expressly forbidden under American antitrust laws, but regulators typically overlook it in early stage companies that lack monopoly power. Even though most of Uber’s formative years were under the Obama administration, its Justice Department had a blind spot for Silicon Valley’s darlings.
And to be fair, Uber built a better mousetrap. It veritably destroyed the cab business in most of America for good reason. But Uber and Lyft own no cars and provided no transportation; they are software platforms. Before the pandemic, local Uber and Lyft drivers were much more likely to be supplementing an income, the so-called gig worker. The workforce model was similar to restaurants. It was a low-barrier way to earn some extra cash on a flexible schedule. But locally, the Uber/Lyft driver cohort has evolved to one trying to derive a full-time living from a service for which that was never intended.
When the pandemic hit, Uber was still not profitable. It used the pandemic to reset its business model, adding food delivery, raising prices, and cutting driver compensation. Uber finally turned a profit last year.
It’s important to understand Uber and Lyft’s rise, because it can be argued if the government had exercised proper antitrust oversight, Uber would never have been allowed to build a monopolistic business. That Uber/Lyft were an unsustainable mirage.
What’s left of the taxi business
Fast forward to today. Uber upended the cab business in Minneapolis. My colleague Dan Niepow spoke to Blue & White Taxi earlier this month. It and Airport Taxi are the primary companies remaining in town. Blue & White told us it has 250 cabs, some company owned. But the bulk of its drivers are licensed for medical transport, not general taxi service. Medical transport is paid for by health insurers or Medicaid and involves taking often-indigent patients to appointments or tests.
KSTP reported last week that only 39 general purpose taxis are licensed in Minneapolis. They are the only option for the unbanked and their drivers endure significant safety risks in a cash business where police are difficult to summon. Blue & White’s basic rates are $2.50 per ride plus $2.50 per mile, significantly higher than Uber and even the highest rate proposed by the city council. (There is no surge pricing.) But cabbies pay several hundred dollars each week to lease their cabs, in excess of cost of ownership for rideshare drivers.
A recent pricing check from my home in south Minneapolis to the airport showed Blue & White at $40, Lyft at $39, and Uber at $30. Taxi pricing has not risen in a very long time. I remember paying $40 or more to go to the airport over a decade ago.
The idea that the city would regulate rates is not some Communistic outlier. Minneapolis and many other cities regulated cab rates for decades. Some cities had special boards designed solely to monitor and adjust rates and the number of licensed vehicles. It was not a free-market experience. (And cab drivers of yore were primarily self-employed, just like Uber drivers. The business model was just different.)
An exhaustive state study of 18,000 rideshare rides in the metro area, released earlier in March, showed drivers earn just below Minneapolis’s $15+ minimum wage—factoring in direct and indirect costs (like vehicle insurance and maintenance).
The rate debate
The question in Minneapolis is how rideshare minimums should be set. Whether rideshare drivers should be guaranteed the city minimum wage (sufficient to cover their costs of doing business according to the state) or more, and who should make that decision. The debate itself is a testament to the growing power of the region’s Somali immigrant population, who make up a large proportion of rideshare drivers. How many other self-employed professions have successfully goaded the Legislature and City Council to regulate their income?
If Uber and Lyft raise rates 40%-50% by government mandate, it will not just be weekend partiers, snowbird suburbanites, and business travelers who will pay. It will be the working poor who cannot find decent (or safe) public transport to their jobs. It will be the elderly and infirm living on fixed government assistance who cannot drive. It will be the developmentally disabled for whom taxpayers provide transport to day programs. The penchant for the leftist cohort of the DFL to oversimplify every such debate as between exploiters and the exploited is readily evident here.
And if Uber and Lyft leave, their drivers will suffer as well. The fantasy that there is another company ready to scale in Minneapolis that will accept regulated rates of the kind the City Council is mandating strains credulity. At minimum, drivers will be thrown out of work for a period of time.
The sad thing here is Uber is a textbook definition of a crappy company. Read your press clippings to learn its history and culture. But the reason we have no alternatives today is the Obama, Trump, and Biden administration’s dereliction of antitrust. Consider all the retail businesses Amazon put into bankruptcy by pricing below cost for so long. Government’s love affair with tech and its capacity to innovate at any cost, plus the Millennial and Gen-Z population’s willingness to sign on to anything with an app, whatever the social cost, are the culprits.
What’s past is past, and the question today is how Minneapolis or Minnesota propose to guarantee the wage for one subset of self-employed workers but not others. (Historically the self-employed were not guaranteed any wage. The feds are considering trying to reclassify many self-employed workers as employees to guarantee them certain benefits and protections, but this is opposed by as many subsets of the self-employed as support it.) Just as in restaurants, labor activists are trying to turn a gig business into one designed to support full-time careers and it’s fair to ask whether that’s overreach.
It’s also fair to ask whether it’s reasonable to guarantee rideshare drivers a wage guaranteed to no other class of worker in the state or city. In America, the game has always been if you don’t like your earning power, acquire some skills and boost your social class. We all can get behind the goal of everyone earning a decent living. But the portents of the rideshare pricing mess are complex and unsustainable.
It’s great that a new immigrant community has acquired the political clout as a voting bloc to get the attention of government. We should applaud that. But it’s another thing entirely to upend the American economic system for one specific class of self-employed workers, and we should think very carefully about that indeed.
Minneapolis, MN
Federal lawsuit raises questions about culture at prior job of Minneapolis mayor’s nominee for fire chief
A federal lawsuit raises questions about the culture at a prior job of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s nominee for fire chief.
In those court documents, there are allegations of harassment and discrimination in an East Coast fire department during Reginald Freeman’s time there as chief.
The city is not commenting on this lawsuit, saying it was filed several years ago, doesn’t mention Freeman and concerns allegations involving a different city and state.
Mayor Frey had high praise for Freeman as he announced him as his choice for the chief’s position in May.
Frey nominates Reginald Freeman to be next Minneapolis fire chief
“The kind of leadership that he brings to the table is second to none,” the mayor declared at the time.
But a 2022 lawsuit raises questions about Freeman’s time as fire chief in Hartford, Connecticut.
“It should always be an open process,” says Paul Ostrow, a former Minneapolis City Council president. “It should always be one where the legislative body has the information they need to properly vet the executive’s appointment.”
Two female firefighters filed that federal lawsuit against the City of Hartford, saying they were “harassed and discriminated against by their employer because of their sex and/or race.”
The document also says, “nearly every female who rose to the ranks of lieutenant or higher either filed an internal complaint of harassment and discrimination — or tragically, surrendered their promotion in order to avoid the hostility of the executive-level fire chiefs.”
It doesn’t mention Freeman specifically or accuse him of any wrongdoing.
But the lawsuit includes allegations of mistreatment while he was leading the department between 2016 and 2021.
We asked Ostrow: “Is it reasonable to say that the chief, the fire chief, would have known about this?”
“I think it’s reasonable to conclude that as chief, he would know about these things,” he says. “Certainly, that he should have known about these things.”
Ostrow calls the allegations “troubling.”
The nomination is now set for a public hearing next week.
We wondered if all of this should be part of the discussion.
“It should be,” Ostrow says. “The most important question I would ask, number one: ‘Was this disclosed to the mayor or the search team?’”
5 EYEWITNESS NEWS spoke with the mayor’s office late Wednesday night.
They told us again they’re not commenting on the lawsuit.
We’re still working to get a comment from Freeman himself.
Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published July 4, 2026.
The Northeast Park neighborhood is arguably the northeasternmost in Minneapolis. Those that extend somewhat further east are nowhere near as far north, and those that are further north don’t extend as far to the east. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. I’m not trying to pick a fight with Waite Park, for example.
What’s inarguable is that the neighborhood divides into two quite distinct areas. West of Johnson Street, there’s a nearly square portion, bounded on its other three sides by Broadway Street, Central Avenue, and 18th Avenue. (I’ll omit the direction indicator NE, which applies to all streets and avenues in this area.) This western portion was the focus for this first walk in the neighborhood. Unlike the irregularly shaped area east of Johnson, it has a grid-based layout, albeit with substantial gaps.
The main loop of my walk began and ended at the southwest corner, the intersection of Broadway and Central. The building on that corner, The Broadway, presents a low-profile facade toward Broadway, which is the uphill side of a sloping lot. The main tenant on this side is Spyhouse Coffee, which makes the most of the timber and brick interior. I chose to wait until the end of the walk to see other parts of the building.
Heading east on Broadway, the next building I passed was the National Guard armory, described more fully by the sign out front as the “Minnesota Army National Guard N.E. Minneapolis Training and Community Center.” A sprawling one-story structure built in 1992, it has none of the romance of the earlier castle-like armories or the vaulted art deco structure in downtown Minneapolis. Together with its parking lot, it occupies the entire triple-sized block from Tyler to Fillmore, with Polk and Taylor being absent in this area.
East of Fillmore, I continued in a forward-and-back spur two blocks to Buchanan, with a side spur north on Pierce. This reflects the fact that Pierce doesn’t cross the diagonal railroad tracks, one of the many ways in which the street grid of this area gives way to the realities of land use.
I rather like how commercial, residential and recreational uses are mixed together, leading to buildings of widely varying age, style, and size. Some of them have also gained a new look and new purpose over time. For example, a concrete-block building on the corner of Broadway and Pierce, which looks like it started life as an automotive business in the 1970s, now has a sharp paint job and signage announcing its repurposing as Abra Kadabra Environmental Services: “When nature creeps in, call us.”
An even more striking example lies in the first block north of Broadway on Fillmore, a house now prominently exhibiting mural art by Yuya Negishi, but upon closer examination showing signs of its origins as the Samuel Moyer Gospel Lighthouse.
Take another look again at that mural-adorned former chapel, this time with an eye toward how its form fits that of its neighbors. To its right and further to its left, there are houses with similarly pitched roofs. But this appearance of consistency is somewhat illusory. The neighbor immediately to the left (or north) only came into view as I walked a bit further.
That immediate neighbor, a flat-roofed two-story structure, was built in 1901 as an apartment building. Today its four rental units are guarded by three metal roosters.
All of these residence are directly across Fillmore from the United States Postal Service’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, just north of the armory. At the time of my walk, its lot was packed full of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which I assume were being readied for their initial deployment.
I walked 13th Avenue east from Fillmore to its dead end just beyond Lincoln Street, where Interstate 35W cuts through. So far as getting anywhere goes, I was wasting my time to go that extra half block beyond Lincoln. But the whole point of this project isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to see what there is to see. And you never know when you’re going to see a giraffe in someone’s back yard.
A few roosters or a giraffe are nothing compared to the lawn ornaments on one of the Lincoln Street houses just south of 12th Avenue. The horizontal lines of flower boxes and whatnot balance out the vertical totem-pole-like collection of cartoon characters (Minnie Mouse, a pig chef, baby Yoda, a cow and I don’t know what else).
With that behind me, you’ll understand why, after wrapping around to Buchanan Street, I was unsure about the turkey resting on a loading dock. Was it like the metal roosters, the giraffe, the pig? I waited. Eventually it swiveled its head, answering my question in the negative.
The very presence of a loading dock amidst residences is not something one would see in more rigidly zoned neighborhoods. The residences vary in age, with my eye particularly drawn to one a couple blocks further north that turns out to be from 1902.
The street grid is interrupted again at 14th Avenue, this time by Northeast Athletic Field Park, the defining feature of the neighborhood. I walked a spur east along 14th Avenue as far as Johnson Street, then turned west to continue my main loop. The athletic fields themselves are just athletic fields, nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary. (I’m notably non-athletic.) But the restroom building in the block between Buchanan and Pierce is a standout for its Creatives after Curfew mural celebrating “the heart of Northeast Park.” It was painted in 2021 by Leslie Barlow, Maiya Lea Hartman, Thomasina Topbear, Maria Robinson and Claudia Valentino, sponsored by the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association.
Once I was headed back northbound on Fillmore, I detoured off to the west on the entrance driveway leading to Sociable Cider Werks. For a pedestrian, it’s actually easier to access this business from the north, but I wasn’t sure yet whether that was blocked off or not, so I took the driveway. I enjoyed a brief rest stop on their patio, consuming a Freewheeler cider and an oil-stained paper bag of seasoned french fries from the resident food trailer, Smashed Patty’s.
The All of Minneapolis project has been an on-and-off part of my life for a decade now, and though there has been change over that time, there have also been constants. One of those constants has been my struggle with how to balance the interesting and the beautiful in my choice of photo subjects.
North of the park on Fillmore, there are two quite similar buildings, each built in the late 19th century by Aaron Carlson as a duplex and then extended by him in the 1920s and subdivided. I decided to photograph the slightly older of the two (1897 versus 1899), even though I can’t count the obscuring of the original facade in the category of beauties. It simply is too interesting a glimpse into the evolution of this Minneapolis housing to be ignored. And that’s even before the name “Aaron Carlson” meant anything to me. (Later in the walk I saw the name on a smokestack and looked it up.)
As I walked by other residential properties, mostly from varying decades of the 20th century, I was frequently as interested by the flowering bushes and trees as by the buildings. Likewise, when I came around to the Johnson Street side of the park, I was as drawn to the daffodils planted around the sign as I was by the water park visible in the background.
After following 16th Avenue along the northern border of the park, I turned north on Buchanan Street and found myself walking alongside a school building for which the playground equipment already signaled that it wasn’t just any school. Yinghua Academy is a Mandarin Chinese immersion school.
Before I turned onto 17th Avenue and saw the front of the school (complete with a fitting Little Free Library), I paused to consider the white duplex at 1709 Buchanan. The horizontal lines and white color made me think of one of the less common styles of modernist architecture, loosely inspired by the Secession Building in Vienna. I don’t know whether that was intentional; the history of the building’s construction and expansion is complex.
Once I was back to 18th Avenue, I headed west from Pierce Street to Central Avenue, with southward spurs down Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets. This is a rhododendron-enhanced residential area dead ending at the railroad-adjacent industrial zone that now contains Sociable Cider Werks and the former Industrial Machinery Company building, fancifully called “The Alamo.” I saw the front of that building once I turned onto Central Avenue.
To access the part of this industrial area that is south of the tracks, I turned east on 14th Avenue. Extending south of there on Tyler Street is the former Crown Iron Works, redeveloped by Hillcrest Development. Today it is the Crown-Arts Center, billed as a “Creative Office Campus.” Sadly, one of the tenants I visited, Bauhaus Brew Labs, has closed in the interval between my walk and completing this writeup.
Tyler Street also brought me back to The Broadway building, where I had begun my walk. Across the parking lot from it is a 2023 apartment building featuring a mural by Chuck U. The parking lot also provides a good view of the historical signage (“The Land-O-Nod Co., Bedding Manufacturers”) and is the site for a sculpture by Zoran Mojsilov.)
The parking lot also provides access to the side of the building opposite Tyler Street, where there is a sheltered area between the building itself and the retaining wall of Central Avenue, which ascends to Broadway. That area contains a stone amphitheater and a patio served by Padraigs Brewing. There I capped my walk off with an N.E. Porter and a Potter’s Pasty.
All photos by Max Hailperin
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