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The Right Stuff: 20 Years of LISC in Duluth

An editorial in the Duluth News Tribune celebrates LISC’s history of investment and highlights CEO Maurice Jones’ vision for spreading growth and prosperity more broadly in Minnesota and all across the country. In fact, without LISC, say the paper’s editors, $300 million of economic activity, and countless jobs and projects, might never have been realized in Duluth.

The excerpt below is from:
Our View: Celebrate 20 years of improving Duluth
by News Tribune Editorial Board, Duluth News Tribune

Neighborhood-improving projects and efforts to provide more housing for low- and moderate-income Duluthians long have benefited from the tax credits, grants, and other financing the nonprofit Duluth Local Initiatives Support Corporation has been able to bring here.

As bold as it may sound, the reality is, without Duluth LISC, undertakings like the redevelopment of Clyde Iron, the Sheraton hotel downtown, the Ramsey Village rebirth in West Duluth, the Steve O’Neil Apartments in the Hillside, the transformation of Harbor Highlands, and Lutheran Social Services’ Center for Changing Lives may never have happened. Not a single one of them.

“You wouldn’t be overstating that,” LISC’s national president and CEO, Maurice Jones, said this week in an interview with the News Tribune Editorial Board.

He was in town for a luncheon at the DECC to celebrate Duluth LISC’s 20th anniversary.

“We want to make sure that the economic growth and prosperity that Duluth and other places experience can be experienced by a broad swath of the population. Our greatest problem as a country right now is you have a narrow swath benefiting from growth,” Jones said. “So we are in big, major cities. We’re in middle-sized cities. And we’re in small cities. We’re in New York City, and we’re in Jacksonville, Fla. But we’re also in Peoria, Ill., and we’re in Duluth. We desire to be in diverse sizes and regions. … It helps to show we can do this work across regions and across size and across new cities and old cities, and we learn from that. We want more of that, frankly.” Continued[+]...

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