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There are cities that grow, cities that decline, and cities that hover in a kind of suspended animation — too resilient to collapse, too constrained to take off, and too proud to admit either.
Duluth is one of those cities, and yet today it finds itself in the middle of a political rebranding campaign built on a claim that does not comfortably line up with its documented history: the insistence that Duluth is a growing city experiencing a housing crisis because of population demand.
This assertion — repeated by elected officials, echoed in press releases, and canonized in a consultant's report — is being used to justify a scale of public intervention, public borrowing, and public subsidization that would normally set off alarm bells.
But it hasn’t. Because the repetition has worked. Say something often enough, and the burden of proof shifts — not onto the claim, but onto anyone who questions it.
The centerpiece of the story is the number: 8,713 new housing units needed in the next decade to keep pace with demand and demographics. The specificity is the power. Not “8,000-ish.” Not a range. A sharp-edged number that looks more like an engineering blueprint than a rolling projection.
We are told that if we do not build these units, opportunity will slip away, rents will skyrocket further, and Duluth will fall behind booming peer cities.
Boiling any city’s future to a single forecast is a neat trick. It is also a dangerous one. To understand why, you must understand Duluth’s trajectory.
In 1960, the U.S. Census recorded nearly 107,000 residents in the city — the high-water mark of the industrial era, when the ore docks were loading full, shipyards were roaring, and blue-collar wages powered sturdy neighborhoods.
By 1990, Duluth had fallen to 85,500 — a loss of more than 21,000 people in a single generation. The last steel plant closed. Railroads consolidated. Timber no longer fed the pulp mills at scale. Those jobs — and the families that depended on them — did not transition into tech, finance, biotech, logistics, or aerospace. They left.
From 1990 to 2023, Duluth’s population has stabilized at around 86,000. That stabilization matters; Duluth did not become Flint. But stability is not growth, and it certainly is not expansion.
In the same period:
. Sioux Falls, once smaller than Duluth, grew from 100,000 to over 210,000.
. Fargo-Moorhead surged past 260,000 metro-wide.
. Bismarck, barely on the national radar in 1980, now pushes 135,000 metro.
These cities share one thing Duluth lacks: expanding private-sector anchors with scalable wages — not tourism, not seasonal employment, not health care consolidation, but true economic expansion born of exports, logistics, and professional cluster development.
Duluth’s most significant population story of the last 60 years is not growth — it is survival. That alone deserves credit. But it does not justify the current narrative.
The city’s own housing-permit numbers — nearly 1,900 units approved since 2018, minus demolitions — show a modest but respectable pace of construction for a stable population. Yet even with building activity, population flatlined. That alone should caution against rosy forecasts: construction does not create population any more than a spare bedroom creates a child.
Yet now, Duluth is being asked to build housing for residents who do not yet exist, using projections anchored less in demographic inevitability and more in policy preference.
Ask yourself: why this number, and why now?
Because big numbers unlock big projects. Big projects unlock big financing. And big financing creates big legacies for political leadership, even if the payoff timeline stretches far beyond their term — and their accountability.
Consider what hangs in the balance:
The former Lester Park golf course — one of the largest undeveloped tracts in the city — has been whispered, pitched, reimagined, and teased as a new residential district. The public pushes back. Environmental questions arise. Infrastructure costs scare people. But attach the words housing shortage and growth pressure, and resistance becomes obstruction. Build a narrative of need, and a neighborhood becomes not a debate, but a responsibility.
Then there is downtown — a historic core wounded by retail collapse and remote work. Converting commercial buildings into residential units is a strategy with merit, but also with cost — tens of millions in subsidies, tax-increment districts that stretch to 2045 or longer, and parking structures that will require public support.
Explain that Duluth is flat and cautious, and the appetite for public financing evaporates. Explain that Duluth is growing — and time is the enemy — and suddenly debt looks like investment.
This is not cynicism. This is politics.
Growth rhetoric is leverage. Mayors who speak of expansion get punchier headlines, better grant positioning, and more polished national profiles. “Stabilization” is not a TED Talk. “Transformation” is.
But the stakes are real. If Duluth builds to the top of its forecast, and the population fails to materialize — which history suggests is entirely possible — the city will absorb the cost. Taxpayers will maintain infrastructure for residents who never moved in.
Subsidies will sustain buildings that didn’t pencil out. Developers will not reimburse the city. Consultants will not return their fees. Foundations will not rewrite their press releases. But residents will pay. Every year. Quietly. Invisibly. Through mills, fees, special taxing districts, water rates, and levy creep.
This does not mean Duluth should not build. It means Duluth should not build on fiction.
There is a mature, honest version of this conversation that Duluth’s leadership seems unwilling to have: that the city deserves better housing options because the people who are already here deserve them — not because imaginary families are turning off I-35 looking for space.
If the administration wants to build a neighborhood at Lester Park, it should make the case transparently — with data, with costs, with risks. If downtown needs a billion-dollar, 20-year reconversion plan, lay it out — clearly, soberly, without the lodestone of destiny storytelling.
Cities get into trouble not when they dream, but when they dream without math.
If Duluth grows substantially — truly grows — that will be a triumph worth celebrating. But growth is earned, not declared. A consultant report won’t bring people. A slogan won't recruit employers. Population is not conjured. It is built, slowly, job by job, wage by wage.
Say something enough, and it becomes the narrative. Repeat it enough, and it becomes the truth. But truth is not a collaborative imagination exercise — and outcomes that rely on belief alone are called something else entirely.
I’ve read the homework. And I’ll take the under — not because Duluth shouldn’t try to write a bigger future, but because a city deserves leadership willing to tell the truth on page one before asking residents to underwrite the footnotes on page fifteen.
Howie, 71, is a veteran Duluth print journalist and publisher of HowieHanson.com, which he has operated for 21 years. He is the region’s first and only full-time online daily columnist, covering local news, politics, business, healthcare, education and sports with an independent, community-centered voice. Hanson has spent more than five decades reporting on issues that shape the Northland.
