Good day, readers,

For two years, mayors, city councilors, and community boosters have been promoting the renovation of the Ordean Building (and 30-plus new apartments) at the western end of downtown. Boosters viewed these apartments as a sign that Duluth was revitalizing downtown housing. Building owner Titanium Partners fanned the enthusiasm by promoting the apartments in interviews.

The apartments never materialized. When the Ordean Building recently opened for business, it was as Force on Fifth, the city’s newest hotel. No public figures have objected to Titanium’s unfulfilled promises—all have stayed silent.

The City of Duluth has no financial connection to the Ordean Building, which limits what they can do to compel Titanium Partners to support housing. As Mark A. Baker points out in his latest report, the time for the city to establish conditions was two years ago, before the city sold Ordean Plaza to Titanium Partners at a steep discount. The sale of the adjacent plaza was publicly tied to 30-plus new units of housing by Mayor Larson at the time, but the terms of the purchase agreement failed to establish any housing unit requirements.

This is the latest instance of the city losing housing to the more lucrative short-term lodging market. In 2023, Lincoln Park Flats, the apartment building at 2102 W. Superior Street, converted one floor of apartments (24 units) into a hotel. More recently, in March of 2025, the owners of Lakeview Tower (currently under construction in downtown Duluth) were approved by the city to convert two floors of apartments (34 units) to short-term rentals.

Girls and boys making noise

When Deb DeLuca was recently appointed to fill former City Councilor Mike Mayou’s vacated seat, the ratio of women to men on the Duluth City Council became eight to one. Commenting on this unprecedented female majority, the Monitor posted on Facebook that the women councilors had an opportunity “to only approve good legislation from now on,” adding that “The Monitor has no doubt they will do what they can.”

While plenty of readers took this post in good humor, a number of others erupted with anger at what they termed our “misogyny.” We were accused of minimizing women, of mocking women, and of not wanting women to be in positions of power. One fellow was so incensed he said he was going to spread word about us to his “network.”

The female majority isn’t new. The Duluth City Council has had a female majority for almost four years—since January of 2022. The Monitor has not observed a difference in governing styles between the genders. Such a variety of leadership types exists among both men and women that we find it impossible to generalize.

The following four City Council seats are up for grabs this November—all currently held by women.

• At-large (Azrin Awal, not running for reelection)
• At-Large (Terese Tomanek)
• 2nd District (Deb DeLuca, not running for reelection)
• 4th District (Tara Swenson)

Spare parks

On the City of Duluth’s website, the Parks Department states proudly that the city has 162 parks. In July, the Monitor decided to visit them all, from smallest to largest. We started with Fountain of the Wind, a 0.06-acre public art installation in Canal Park.

We thought we knew Duluth pretty well, but some of the “parks” on the list are things like traffic medians and alley easements, so this project has us poking around in places we never expected to find ourselves. We spend five or ten minutes at each park and post a video of each visit to Facebook.

More than any other Monitor project, the parks project has garnered the appreciation of the public. On a half-dozen occasions within the past few weeks, people have made a point, in person, to tell us how much they enjoy our park videos—an incredible amount of positive reinforcement. We are pleased our videos bring people satisfaction.

Our goal is to finish the parks before winter, but we do not know if we will be able to achieve that. We still have nearly 100 parks to go, and some of the larger parks will likely require multiple videos. We would like to post at least one video per day to Facebook.

We are working on placing an archive of our park videos on the Monitor’s website for subscribers to access. When we complete our full 162-park tour, we will publish an article on our findings.

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