Howie Hanson is an independent journalist based in Duluth. He publishes a daily column at HowieHanson.com, covering sports, media, and civic life with a long memory, a short tolerance for nonsense, and no interest in press-release journalism. Howie's column is powered by Lyric Kitchen · Bar.
I'VE BEEN AROUND LONG enough to know when a place isn’t collapsing — it’s stalling.
That’s the mistake people make about Duluth. They keep waiting for a dramatic failure. A bankruptcy headline. A mass exodus. A moment so obvious it gives everyone permission to finally speak honestly.
That moment rarely comes.
Cities like this don’t blow up. They calcify.
The lake still looks the same. The hill still tilts toward it. Friday nights still fill gyms. People still defend the place fiercely to outsiders who don’t get it. From the outside, Duluth looks steady. Familiar. Enduring.
Inside, the math has turned quietly hostile.
This isn’t a column about one mayor, one council, one school board, or one referendum. It’s about something more uncomfortable than that. It’s about a long-running habit of postponement — postponing hard choices, postponing trade-offs, postponing the adult conversation — until delay itself became the most expensive policy we have.
I’m not writing this as a drive-by critic. I’ve sat at the table. I’ve voted on the spreadsheets. I’ve heard the reassurances. I’ve repeated a few of them myself. That’s part of the problem. Duluth is filled with smart, well-intentioned people who can explain why something can’t be done faster, cheaper, or differently — but struggle to explain how this ends.
Because here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: Duluth is not growing in any meaningful way that matches its obligations.
We are attempting to run a full-service, high-touch, progressive city on a tax base that isn’t keeping up — and hasn’t been for a long time. We talk about growth like it’s just around the corner. We budget like it already arrived. And we tax like it never left.
The result is predictable. Homeowners feel trapped. Renters feel the squeeze passed down quietly. Small businesses stop expanding, then stop replacing equipment, then stop dreaming. Commercial property owners run the numbers and stop arguing — because the numbers don’t argue back.
Everyone feels it. Nobody wants to own it.
We’ve convinced ourselves that if we just hold on long enough, something external will save us. A new program. A new consultant report. A new vision plan. A new funding stream. A new buzzword. A new ribbon.
But plans don’t pay bills. And studies don’t stabilize tax levies.
What we have instead is a city that has learned to confuse compassion with avoidance. Every cut is framed as cruelty. Every reform is framed as betrayal. Every question about sustainability is treated like an insult to Duluth’s character.
That’s how you end up governed by tone instead of truth.
This isn’t about whether people care. They do. Deeply. That’s what makes this harder. Duluth is full of good people doing earnest work inside systems that no longer pencil out. You can care and still be wrong. You can be sincere and still be unsustainable.
The cruelest outcome isn’t austerity. It’s drift.
Drift is what traps people in houses they can’t afford to leave. Drift is what tells young families to do the math quietly and look elsewhere. Drift is what hollows out a downtown one cautious decision at a time while everyone insists progress is “coming.”
Drift is expensive. And it compounds.
At some point, every city has to decide what it actually is — not what it wishes to be, not what it was in its best memory, not what sounds good in a mission statement.
We haven’t made that decision. We’ve postponed it. Over and over. With nicer language each time.
Here’s the line nobody in authority wants to write down: we cannot keep promising Scandinavian outcomes on a shrinking Midwestern balance sheet and pretend grit will cover the gap.
That doesn’t make Duluth a failure. It makes it human. But adulthood comes with trade-offs. You either choose them deliberately, or they choose you later — harsher, faster, and without public comment periods.
The most honest thing we could do right now would be to stop pretending everyone else is the problem. Not the state. Not the feds. Not tourists. Not developers. Not outsiders who “don’t understand Duluth.”
This is our city. These are our numbers. This is our tab.
And the bill is due.
Not all at once. Not with sirens. But steadily. Relentlessly. In levy statements and quiet departures and decisions not to invest.
Cities don’t go broke in a single vote. They go broke convincing themselves tomorrow will feel like yesterday.
The choice in front of Duluth isn’t between optimism and pessimism. It’s between honesty and delay.
We can be smaller and honest. Or larger on paper and desperate in practice. What we can’t be anymore is comfortable and confused at the same time.
That era is over — whether we’re ready to admit it or not.
