North

Gentrification – This is the word of the day.  Who controls the land?  My great grandmother, raised my grandmother who was born in 1918 in North Minneapolis, as was my mother, as was I, and now I am raising my children here. People identified us through our family lineage, we were and are part of a deeply connected community.   People knew who we were because of our longevity and the relationships born out of our relationship to this place.  I grew up going to Sunset Hill (26^th and Theodore Wirth Parkway) to go sledding, riding our bikes to the river with my Dad to see the boat races, going to church, school, Kings Supermarket, all of these things in my neighborhood, I belonged here. 

The Lewis and Calhoun’s article “The Right to the Community” is an article that I would say gives a well-rounded perspective of the changes in North Minneapolis particularly the gentrifying parts of the community.  The following statement stood out to me and embodied many of the thoughts that I have about these changes. “Today, rapid urban restructuring throughout the Twin Cities ensures that a community once manufactured to contain undesirable low income Black residents, is now slowly becoming attractive to a rising population of white families”.    I am a black woman in my 40’s and I have experienced the disinvestment and lack of faith in such a relational and culturally rich community.  The quoted statement stood out because now that this community is becoming attractive to white families, I am hearing the conversation switch from service focused language to wealth building language.  The approach to my community has been what services can we provide these people?  We were viewed as a community full of deficits, violence, poverty, and always in need of help.  The idea of investing in people, structures, schools, businesses has not gone past a conversation until white families became attracted to the community once abandoned by outsiders and placed low on decision makers’ priority list. Never abandoned by the community though.  We remained steadfast, we continue to fight for education, we continue to support each other by exchanging goods and services, we are not always bound by the regulations that state how we can do business because we know those systems are not always supportive of our needs and our success.  We remained because we belonged, and that sense of belonging is often undervalued.

The historic designation of the Homewood community is a great example of conflicting interests when a community becomes desirable to those with different interests and goals. This process makes me ask the question about historic designation.  Is it only about the architecture?  Are we preserving the history of the land?  Are we ensuring our elders and families that have lived here for generations can afford to stay in a community that they have invested in, economically and emotionally? Will the drumline that used to march up Plymouth for Juneteenth still be able to celebrate here?  These conversations around land and property and who gets to live where seems to lead without people being the main focus.  Now that North Minneapolis is deemed desirable, investments that the community has needed for years is now available for the new residents and the residents they are trying to attract.  I have watched the attempt of rebranding the Northside to Nomi, near downtown to The North Loop.  How does someone else get to come here and rename our community? Did anyone ask the existing community members how they felt about that?

This article brings to light the paradox that happens in communities and why gentrification seems so scary.  Communities across the board want investment, they want good schools, businesses, a sense of belonging and a strong social network.  Communities of color have been left out of wealth building systemically for generations, and in my opinion we still have limited access to opportunities that result in generational wealth and thriving communities.  This limits if not silences the voices of community members who can’t scream loud enough or don’t have enough capital to be heard in decision making spaces. 

Gentrification is much deeper than who owns or controls the land but, who influences the culture.  Who gets to control the narrative? Who decides what to invest in? I would argue that displacement happens well before historical families move out of the community.  It begins to happen when they no longer feel as if they are part of the fabric of the community.  When their faces are no longer reflected in the art.  When the kids who used to be able to play basketball on the corner, now get the police called on them.  When construction workers of color get the police called on them because the neighbors think they are doing something undesirable. When the neighborhood mechanic can no longer fix cars because the new family doesn’t understand the economics and the wealth of having an expert on the block that can fix anything with your car.  Gentrification is about losing the historical and cultural norms of a community, it’s about someone else coming in and telling us how we can live in our communities, along with losing the choice of living in a community because we can no longer afford it.  It’s about our assets being seen by someone else as deficits and/or criminal and them having the political will and backing that reinforces that. It’s about no longer having a sense of belonging because someone else had the power to make you feel uncomfortable in your own home. The statement “…who gets to define the urban agenda in North Minneapolis is now under debate.”  I would argue this has always been under debate.  Outside influencers have always tried to define the agenda in North Minneapolis, and we have always fought for our voices to make it into the final plan.

I will end with this.  I appreciate this article capturing the diversity of voices in my community.  I hope it sparks a deeper conversation about how we can prevent this pattern of community disinvestment and investments that have long term negative consequences on particularly communities of color.  This is a deeply personal problem for me as I myself wonder if the changes in my community are for me or for my replacement.  I am concerned that historical designations don’t preserve the essence of the community.  I am concerned that if this community is displaced somewhere else, that somewhere down the line some decision maker will again see that community as desirable and once again that community will move.  I would urge everyone to always think of the people first and listen to what they have to say.  Then if you are bold enough, act on behalf of the people.

It seems like nobody can agree on what “gentrification” really is, but everyone knows it when they see it. The most common expression of the term is that people are forced to move directly due to rising costs of living, although I see it as a more slow and insidious change that rarely draws a direct line to people’s immediate housing choices. Gentrification can be a gradual change in demographics that is more like the anecdote of the frog in the cooking pot who does not realize the water is boiling around him. Likewise, neighborhood demographics and costs typically don’t change so quickly that poorer people are immediately relocated.

To the degree we do see rapid changes, that generally happens along transit corridors or in upscale neighborhoods. The controversial Orth House development in Uptown is an example of low-income renters being forced out of their homes because the land they reside upon is worth more to a developer than the existing structure. Thankfully, we have not seen that degree of displacement in north Minneapolis in recent history.

As a housing professional - both as a non-profit neighborhood worker and as a home mortgage originator - I tend to view gentrification through the lens of “who gets to live here and how much does that cost?” Given my field of work, I can best express that cost through home ownership requirements.

So when the Homewood neighborhood raised concerns over a historic designation study as a risk of gentrification, I wanted to see what the numbers tell us about affordability and that cost over time. What some data tells me is that the designation study area is already gentrified, the problem of affordability is getting worse, and designation studies may actually help contain the most extreme forms of gentrification.

I have my own affordability calculation, and it goes like this:

Purchase price minus down payment equals loan amount. At typical market rates for 30-year fixed mortgages, we get the principal/interest payment. Add in payments for taxes, insurance, and mortgage insurance, and that’s our housing cost. Usually an affordable housing payment is between 28% and 31% of a household’s monthly (pre-tax, pre-deduction) income, but in today’s rising market we’re seeing costs go much higher than that. For this calculation, I’m going with 35%. So we take the housing payment, divide by 35%, and get our monthly income needed to make a home affordable. Multiply that number by 12, and we have the annual income a household needs in order to affordably own a home in an area.

And this is where we find out if certain areas are gentrified, and if so, by how much?

For instance, the average purchase price of a single-family home in the Willard-Hay neighborhood as of October 2017 is $149,500. At 4.625% over 30 years, that’s a $745.58 principal/interest payment. Taxes for a homesteaded property would be $165.33, a decent home insurance policy would cost about $110 per month, and if you used a first-time homebuyer loan you could get mortgage insurance as low as $90.63. Put it all together and you have a payment of $1,111.54. In order for that to be 35% of your income, you’d need to earn just over $38,000 per year.

By contrast, a year ago the average property in Willard-Hay would have required an income of $31,850 to be affordable. In my Jordan neighborhood the 2017 income needed is $33,500 and a year ago that was $27,580.

For the Homewood designation area, there is a stark difference. With an average sales price this year of $217,000, the principal, interest, taxes, insurance, and mortgage insurance payment comes to just under $1,600. To keep that payment under 35% of a household’s income, we would need $54,600.

So when a household needs to earn almost 50% more just to have access to affordable ownership, then I hate to break it to you but your neighborhood is already gentrified. In that context, what does a historic designation accomplish?

One of the consequences of historic designation is that it is much more difficult - not impossible as the aforementioned Orth House saga shows, but certainly harder - to acquire properties for the sole purpose of demolition and new construction. Homewood residents may look to the south and lament the higher values in Bryn Mawr, but we are not too far off from the prospect of our land being worth enough to justify the kinds of purchases that only upper-income families or rich developers can afford.

House values are already increasing faster than the rate of inflation, meaning incomes aren’t keeping up with the cost of ownership. The added costs of a designation, perceived or real, is not a significant factor in housing affordability in such a context.

I don’t think I need to run the same set of calculations for acquisition, demolition, and new construction. Just ask yourself, how many poor people do you know who are going through that process to buy their homes in southwest Minneapolis or Edina? Large-scale development of multi-unit housing along transit corridors can certainly provide needed affordable housing units, but who benefits from ownership at that point? Some already-rich developer does.

And that is precisely what a designation could prevent; the acquisition of land for purposes that the average owner could not achieve or compete with on their own. We can create a historic designation process that waives or reduces fees. We can direct city staff to equitably support and guide owners instead of our culture of enforcement and punishment. Done right, historic designation can be a tool that prevents, not causes, gentrification.

He brings his passion for quality housing to volunteering and has served on the board of the Jordan neighborhood.  He helped create a series of housing assistance loans for the Jordan neighborhood. When Jeff isn’t working, he enjoys cheering on the North High Polars football team, cooking spicy food, and appreciating Theo Wirth Park with his dog Rayne.