In the early days of the George Floyd riots, while the police were overwhelmed, someone smashed a car into Thurston Jewelers on Lake Street in Minneapolis. The store was overrun by looters. The display cases were smashed. Lloyd Drilling says he was lucky that the most expensive jewelry was in the safe. Anything that could be carried out the door was stolen. 'So, that basically put us out of business for a few months, and we had to rebuild the store and fix it back up,' says Drilling.
The jewelry store bounced back, but the customers did not. In the town that pioneered the movement to defund the police, the homeless population is present on most city blocks. Open-air drug use is so common it doesn’t attract attention and petty crime plagues the businesses who were able to re-open. As a result, Drilling says, the suburban population which used to push his business from surviving to thriving does not come downtown anymore.
Criminals make every aspect of business difficult in downtown Minneapolis. Koby Rich opened a cosmetic store. He keeps a painted rectangle of plywood on the front door of Rich Girl’s Cosmetics because vandals keep breaking the glass on his front door. He’s tired of spending money to fix it. 'It makes it tough because vandalism it causes, you know, when your windows get busted out, when you get your doors kicked in when you get your whole store tore up,' says Rich.
Kent Bergman opened the Campanelle restaurant in Lino Lakes, a suburb of Minneapolis. He endured the covid lockdowns. But burdened with taxes and regulations, he’s still living off his own savings, unable to take home a profit. 'With all the mandates and everything coming down on us as a restaurant a small business we are in, the state's making it almost impossible for a small business or a restaurant to make it,' says Bergman.