Lefko, Young: We love St. Paul, and we worry about St. Paul

We love St. Paul.

We worry about where the city stands and where it’s going, whether downtown, its neighborhoods, its schools, its businesses, its people.

There are public and private institutions talking about improvements, but no apparent inspiring vision or energized leadership pulling together the people and the resources needed to get the job of renewal done.

We fear that we too are trapped in the doom-loop cycle beleaguering once-great American cities, where the loss of businesses, jobs and services produces the lack of investment required for a rebirth of what we want as downtown.

This has become an intertwined economic, political and psychological problem to resolve.

Perhaps we are not asking the right questions as to what needs fixing, what needs to be done.

Perhaps with nat