Editor’s note: Finance & Commerce is publishing an occasional series on the Minneapolis 2040 draft land use plan, and the changes it would mean for different neighborhoods of the city.
Minneapolis city leaders say historical injustices have left some parts of the city wealthier, safer and better connected to jobs and services than others. Neighborhood leaders and housing advocates want to know what the city plans to do about it.
The city is currently accepting public comments on Minneapolis 2040, a wide-ranging proposal to update the city’s comprehensive plan, and the interactive online draft places a heavy emphasis on racial equity.
Heather Worthington, the city’s director of long-range planning, said in a series of interviews that decades of policies, including racial housing covenants and “redlining” rules restricting home loans in certain areas, have starved many of the city’s majority-minority neighborhoods of investment.
“We know certain areas of the city have a high degree of amenities — they have access to goods and services that are beneficial, they have access to transit — and other areas don’t. And that’s because of intentional policies by the city … that have created winners and losers over time,” she said.
Households in each of the neighborhoods surrounding Lowry Avenue North — Cleveland, Folwell, McKinley, Jordan and Hawthorne — make well below the city’s median household income, in some neighborhoods by $20,000 or more, according to City-Data.com. All have home prices well below the median city value as well, and all but Cleveland have been designated “Racially Concentrated Areas of Poverty” by the city.
Nonprofit leaders who work in these neighborhoods agree with Worthington about the causes of the imbalance. But the 2040 plan is short on concrete solutions, said Jeffrey Washburne, executive director of City of Lakes Community Land Trust.
“My sense of the comprehensive plan is that it doesn’t get into the how of how we’re going to achieve some of those goals,” said Washburne, whose organization provides financial assistance for homeownership. “Those goals may be good, they may be bad, but it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of how we’re going to pull any of this off.”
Washburne said homeownership remains a faint hope for many residents of the Lowry Avenue corridor, as more than half of the single-family homes in the neighborhoods are rented. At the same time, he said, housing costs are rising rapidly, squeezing some residents with rents rising in some cases by $100 a month or more each year.
“When you talk to people, you can feel that they are feeling the pressure. … I think we’re at that point now where they just can’t hold on anymore,” he said.
Although the 2040 proposal talks about the need for racial equity and affordable housing, Washburne said the actual policies coming from the city seem designed more to grow the population, increase property values and increase incomes. Those aren’t bad goals, he said, but they won’t do much to ease the affordable-housing crunch for north side residents. Nor will the 2040 plan, at least in its current form, he says.
Washburne isn’t the only advocate to note the lack of specifics in the 2040 plan. Jack Cann, a senior housing attorney at the St. Paul-based Housing Justice Center, told Finance & Commerce the current draft omits the analysis and specific action steps required by statute and Metropolitan Council rules.
“What policies are listed so far are so vague and general that they wholly fail to meet the requirement for specific actions the city will take,” he said.
One change the 2040 plan would definitely bring to north Minneapolis is a new philosophy for commercial development. The Lowry Avenue Strategic Plan, which covers the five neighborhoods on either side of the corridor, was adopted in 2010 and called for commercial development to be limited primarily to key nodes at Lowry Avenue’s intersections with Penn Avenue and Emerson and Fremont Avenues. The new plan would reverse that approach and make nearly all of Lowry Avenue North open to mixed-use development.
Washburne said that’s a good step to improve the quality of life in the neighborhood.
“I think there’s a number of corridors, if you talk to residents, that would like to have access to the same amenities that other residents in Minneapolis have,” he said.
Others were more cautious, saying it’s important to draw businesses that will add vibrancy to the area. David McGee is the executive director of Build Wealth Minnesota, a nonprofit that provides access to financial services, including home loans, in low-income neighborhoods. He said that he hasn’t reviewed the specifics of the 2040 plan, but that in general, neighborhood-focused mixed-use development could be a big boost to the area.
“I’ve seen Grand Avenue [in Minneapolis] do some things that were really unique that are close to a neighborhood, so it depends on what kinds of businesses they are,” he said. “There’s some strategies that can work very well.”
Beyond that, nonprofit leaders said they will continue pushing the city to ensure the Minneapolis 2040 plan lays out concrete steps to address blighted properties, lack of affordable housing, barriers to home ownership and other challenges they see in the Lowry Avenue neighborhoods.
“We have a huge opportunity to do good by the residents that live on the upper north side, and create opportunities for them to be more permanent residents in the communities they’ve maybe invested their lives in,” Washburne said.
The city is accepting comments on the Minneapolis 2040 draft land use plan through July 22 at www.minneapolis2040.com.
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