Leadership Quote by Jacob Frey

Prosperity is the sweet-sounding noun politicians reach for when they want to talk about money without sounding like they’re talking about money. Jacob Frey’s line is a textbook example of municipal optimism with a clear intent: to make “growth” feel both inevitable and moral, while preemptively conceding that it hasn’t been. The phrase “must build” frames inequality as a design problem, not a fight over power or policy. It suggests the city can be engineered into fairness, like zoning maps and street grids, rather than contested through redistribution, labor leverage, or hard tradeoffs.

“Shared” does heavy rhetorical lifting. It reassures voters uneasy about gentrification and displacement that development won’t be a zero-sum game, while staying vague enough not to spook business interests. Likewise, “every neighborhood” is a soothing universal that quietly acknowledges Minneapolis’s geographic fault lines: stark racial wealth gaps, a history of redlining, and a post-George Floyd political climate in which city leaders have been pressured to prove they can deliver material change, not just statements.

The subtext is coalition management. Frey is signaling to multiple audiences at once: to homeowners and developers, that growth will continue; to renters and working-class communities, that they won’t be sacrificed to it; to activists, that the administration recognizes uneven outcomes. The line works because it offers a vision of unity without naming the mechanisms that would make unity real. It’s a promise designed to travel well across campaign mailers, budget speeches, and crisis moments, precisely because it avoids the part where someone has to lose.