Razing Minneapolis

           The agency has come to believe, along with GMMHC, that new home construction in "impacted" areas boosts the business climate. As Pettiford sees it, "GMMHC primes the pumps" for private contractors and investors to follow, in the end "[relieving] the city of its current burdens by turning impacted areas into lucrative markets...where private builders will start coming in the door." And remember, he adds, "that when we clear vacant and boarded houses--sometimes, yes, for GMMHC construction--we're eliminating an opportunity to use them as a harbor for criminal activity. All in all, what we're doing is shifting responsibilities. It's win-win. Everybody wins."

           Everybody, that is, except those caught on scorched earth, like many of the clients of Kirk Hill at the Minnesota Tenants Union. Hill appears to be one of the last to publicly voice the idea that the MPHA-MCDA-GMMHC alliance is bent on "altering the urban landscape in radical ways, ways that should be alarming. It means to make the ground lucrative for a slew of private home-ownership deals to come charging in--to protect the upscaled downtown against 'the black threat,' to put money in the pockets of the City's friends, and to stoke a rhetoric that gives support to gutting low-income rental housing in the city. All, I might add, under cover of a great silence among those who should find this whole deal objectionable."

           But among the most active players in city development politics--the MCDA, the developers, the neighborhood groups--the silence is understandable. What neighborhood groups in the hot zone (which are made up almost exclusively of homeowners) are hoping for is in a broad sense what the MCDA is hoping for too: more stable and affluent environs. The argument the parties are engaged in, finally, is not about whether the house at 3244 Chicago Avenue, and the dozens of others on the MPHA's dump list, should remain publicly controlled or subsidized housing for the less well-off; the argument is about who is entitled to control its privatized future. All players agree that it's not the people who once lived there. In the new Minneapolis, they figure mostly as a threat to property values.