Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey calls remote workers laptop-diddling ‘losers’

“I don’t know if you saw this study the other day,” Frey told an audience of 1,000 at Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting on Wednesday. “What this study clearly showed … is that when people who have the ability to come downtown to an office don’t — when they stay home sitting on their couch, with their nasty cat blanket, diddling on their laptop — if they do that for a few months, you become a loser!”

The comment was a “complete joke” and the study was made-up, the Minneapolis Mayor’s office told Fortune, but there are serious facts to back up Frey’s worry about the impact of remote work on Minneapolis’ downtown economy.

Minneapolis ranked 64th among 66 cities in downtown recovery from the pandemic, University of Toronto’s School of Cities reported in October. Visitors to the downtown area were 56% of what they were pre-COVID, according to cell phone use data collected through the study.

Along with the collapse of large retailers in the area, the Minneapolis Foundation-commissioned “Downtown Next” report from December attributed the city’s slow recovery to remote work, which “brought tectonic shifts to the daily office population.” 

But besides pushing to convert downtown empty office buildings into retail and residential spaces and building pedestrian skyways, Minneapolis must address the lack of pull factors drawing young people into the city center, the report warned.

“Unless working, youth downtown have been relegated to ‘hanging out’ in the public realm, reinforcing fear about their presence,” it read.

This is a particularly big issue for Minneapolis, which, along with St. Paul, is the most desirable location for Gen Z. Over 23,000 Zoomers moved to the Twin Cities from another state in 2022, according to Business Journal analysis of Census Bureau data. 

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