My home city is a microcosm of Blue America.

When reality clashes with fantasy, the ultimate outcome is inevitable. And the Blue cities and states are living in fantasy land.

The fantasy is pretty appealing for many people, which is why cities like Portland have had enduring appeal as a concept. Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago had for a long time a visceral appeal to people. A pleasant sort of diversity–lots of good food–a social laissez-faire attitude where you can be you. A vibrancy that is impossible to duplicate in what they portray as “conformist” suburbia.

Who wouldn’t want to live in a city where “young people go to retire?” Even if you don’t want to retire yet, the idea has an appeal.

It is a fantasy. It turns out that civilization requires work, and laissez-faire social norms mean culture clashes that get worse every day. Your desire to groom my kids is completely at odds. And yes, you do indeed need police to ensure that the rapacious among us don’t ruin everything. Utopias turn into hellholes pretty quickly when the people selling the dream get into power, and the utopians themselves turn out to be the worst sort of authoritarians.

That authoritarianism was on full display during the COVID pandemic. The utopians decided that they knew best and that their “let it all hang out philosophy” actually meant that everybody else must submit to their increasingly quixotic whims. Public health simultaneously required draconian lockdowns and rioting. Cop-free zones became crime-permitted zones, inevitably. And the always-welcoming public schools became ideological reeducation camps.

Minneapolis was ground zero for much of the insanity because George Floyd died here and the worst Left-wing zealots run our city. For the first time in our history, the government actually abandoned a police precinct to a mob. Our schools were closed, our playgrounds shut down, and the lockdowns persisted for what seemed like forever.

As with other Blue cities, the results were inevitable: people who could, left. Many more are thinking about doing so if they can scrape up the money to escape. Lawlessness is everywhere and everything is declining fast.

Since 2020–2 1/2 years–the number of children under 5 has declined by 17%.

“The number of children ages 5 and under living in Minneapolis fell 17% between 2020 and 2021” https://t.co/nxlJLNMg8F

— CiceroMN (@cicero_mn) June 15, 2023

That isn’t declining birthrates. That is parents leaving the city because it has become unlivable. This is happening across America.

The Minneapolis Public Schools are facing a crisis due to this simple fact: without kids, there is no way to sustain their business model.

For decades the schools have been pretty awful, of course. Minneapolis has the most expensive schools in the state and the worst performing ones as well, but some of that at least has to do with the fact that so many of the students are from out of the country. These students are far more expensive to teach, and when you combine that with other factors such as students who are more likely to be disciplinary problems and have less-than-ideal home environments, the schools have a tough job.

But the city and the schools did everything they could to advertise how little they seemed to care about children and their overall quality of life. Rather than making things easier during the pandemic, our school and city leaders took care of themselves and abandoned everybody else.

The results are a disaster, including for the schools. They simply cannot sustain their current level of spending without the students to justify the money. After all, the basic funding formula is tied to enrollment.

MPS experienced about a 17% decrease in student enrollment in the last five years. Only about a fifth of enrollment loss is to charger schools or open enrollment. The biggest reason numbers have been declining is that there are fewer children living in Minneapolis. According to American Community Survey, the number of children ages 5 and under living in Minneapolis fell 17% between 2020 and 2021. When it comes to children ages 6-15, numbers fell 6.4%.

Other cities, including Denver, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston, are also experiencing declining enrollment.

“Part of it is declining birth rates, part of it is the high cost of living in urban areas, part of it is cities weren’t great places for kids during the pandemic… the schools were closed or remote longer, so some families are moving out for those reasons,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. The research center focuses on education finance.

Roza said she believes MPS will have to close schools in order to fix its problem.

About 29,000 students are currently enrolled at MPS. The district projects enrollment will decline to just over 23,000 students in the 2027-2028 school year. Meanwhile, MPS is constructed financially to serve about 40,000 students.

Pandemic aid funding has kept the schools afloat, but the money will soon disappear. Then what?

Of course, it’s not just the schools. Lockdowns meant empty office buildings, and so far not many people have returned to the city. Not only is it very expensive and inconvenient, but it is now also unsafe and without many of the supporting businesses that made the trade-offs of working there tolerable.

The city isn’t “vibrant,” it’s closer to Robocop.

Proper governance is about balancing competing values, not creating utopias. There is no perfect balance, but trying to find a way to make competing goods work together is the art of practical governance. Managing the trade-offs is the real challenge, not fulfilling the desires of the dreamers.

MPS has also seen costs increase in recent years. This all comes at a time when the need is great.

“The kids have real needs with this money and so the money isn’t being spent right now on addressing the deep needs that kids have coming out of the pandemic with really big gaps in their learning,” Roza said. “So the next several years are going to be really tough years for Minneapolis Public Schools.”

Budget recommendations for the 2023-2024 school year will be presented in the spring. The board will vote on a final budget in June.

Making these problems worse is the fact that the students who are leaving–just as with the citizens and businesses who have exited the city–are those who are the easiest to serve with the fewest actual needs. The ESL students and the troublemakers will remain, making the cost of providing basic services much higher per student and citizen.

Fewer but more expensive. This is a horrible combination. And with declining numbers of wealthier citizens, the resources will decline in real terms.

This is the doom loop. Things get bad so people exit; resources decline as people do so; things get worse.

Rinse. Repeat.

All of this was avoidable and should have been avoided. The education establishment decided to turn its back on the students, and in return, the parents decided to leave. Now the education establishment will get devastated, along with the remaining students.

Many of us saw this coming and warned people, and we were called “haters” and viciously attacked.

I feel no vindication for being one of those people. I just feel sad that it has come to this.