Affordable Housing, Gentrification, and Bendrification

Minneapolis is undergoing an affordable housing crisis, a crisis that affected residents feel all too painfully, but is virtually ignored or plastered over with lies by the City government. The City has been busy implementing its scheme for the construction of 25,000 new housing units, attracting investors and developments by pointing to the low vacancy rates. New condos and apartments keep going up. Older units are rehabbed, with "sizzle" added. Old apartment buildings are converted to condos. And as these new units go into the housing market, the rents go up and up. The new luxury housing units fill up, while those who can no long afford "market rate" or higher rents, are forced into other neighborhoods or third-ring suburbs.

A study by The Economist last year found that Minneapolis has the third highest cost of living of all North American cities. Much of the cost is related to high utility bills from heating and cooling. Housing costs are far lower than in cities like New York and San Francisco. However, since the cost of living here is already so high due to other factors, even a modest increase in rent can send it over the top.

You tell 'em. John. True in 1690, true today.

Over the past decade in the Wedge, thousands of "market rate" and luxury housing units have been built. Many other previously affordable units have been redone--often with more jazz than substance--and rented out at top dollar. Seven old houses have been torn down and replaced with upscale multi-unit rental buildings.

It's obvious that the City has facilitated wholesale gentrification in the neighborhood and in adjacent Uptown. Yet the faux-urbanist proponents of these thousands of new luxury condos and apartments don't like the word. Don't say the "g" word! We wouldn't want the new tenants to feel guilty about shoving out those of lesser means. We wouldn't want to tar these shiny new luxury pads with the brush of social irresponsibility. We wouldn't want to spotlight the fact that the City itself is the prime mover in the affordable housing crisis.

The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.

But that's what it is: gentrification, in basic terms, the process of an influx of wealthier people displacing people of more limited means. What is happening in the Wedge is different in significant ways from the gentrification that displaced thousands of residents in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Harlem. First, the Wedge never had a significant cultural or racial minority population. Second, the Wedge is not a blighted area (as are indeed a number of Minneapolis neighborhoods that the City doesn't give a hoot about.) But it is gentrification nonetheless.


The first wave of gentrification took place in the 1970s, when the Wedge was on the skids, the Haight-Ashbury of the Twin Cities. Young people (myself included) bought old, often ramshackle houses and started to fix them up. LHENA was formed, and Wedge activists re-routed commuter traffic, put in a neighborhood park, started Minnesota's first food co-op, called in housing violations by slumlords--and in so doing, made the neighborhood a safer, more attractive place to live. Of course, housing values and rents went up. You can call this "revitalization", but it fills the definition of gentrification in that by closing down hippie pads, party houses, and drug-infested rooming houses, property became more valuable, and some residents were inevitably forced out.

Wedge housing prices and rents remained stable for three decades, going up in step with the Twin Cities real estate market. And then came the Great Upscale Development Boom described above. In the three and a half years since Lisa Bender became City Council representative for the Tenth Ward, the process of displacement and skyrocketing rents has accelerated to a fever pitch. 

Editorial commentary added to a sign at a new development in Brooklyn.

While the rest of us have been busy going to work, maintaining our homes, feeding our families, paying our taxes, a coalition of City Council members led by CM Bender and supported by City Planning has been busy delivering big parcels of neighborhood real estate to developers. The usual justification for this is "Density!". Using their perverted version of Urbanist theory, the apologists for gentrification keep repeating the rubric that to be great, urban Minneapolis must increase density, access to public transportation, walkability, green living, and above all, density. (Did I already say that?) To them, the New Minneapolis belongs to people like themselves: young, white, privileged, ex-suburbanites who are doing the City a favor by driving out the old NIMBYs and embarrassingly unhip segments of the population like the poor, people of color, and pensioners.

An arnarchist meme. I wonder why a bicycle is included. Hahaha. By Anarchomemes

Last November, I wrote about the City's plan to implement the so-called "Pedestrian Overlay" on Wedge commercial streets ("Pedestrian Overlay Blues"), making the point that this deceptively named plan in reality will primarily benefit the Big Cheeses--the developers who are building the  Density Paradise engineered by CM Bender and pals. Since then, it's become obvious that the City's elimination of street parking in favor of bike lanes and up-against-the-pavement multi-story commercial buildings will be wiping out scores of small businesses. Up and down Lyndale and Hennepin, down Nicollet and across 38th Street, the City is preparing to erase hundreds of parking spaces, spaces that are the commercial life blood of established neighborhood small businesses. Add to that the City's press to implement a $15 minimum wage, and you can kiss dozens of neighborhood restaurants and service businesses goodbye. It's maddening that the City claims to want to help the poor, struggling workers, yet in reality forces them out of the area into inferior housing and puts their employers out of business. Lose, lose. Except, of course, for the developers, the corporate landlords, the investors , the bankers, and the City, which seals its image as the Hip Capital of the Midwest.

Here today, GROM tomorrow/ Gentrification at work in Greenwich Village, NYC: A neighborhood greengrocer and pizza shop replaced by a hip GROM, which will be replaced by something hipper in a year or so.

Yet CM Bender has the gall to get up in public and claim repeatedly that she's the champion of renters and affordable housing. This kind of bald-faced hypocrisy (doing just the opposite of what you're bragging about doing) led one former resident driven out of town by the City's bullshit to coin the term Bendrification. The Bendrificators don't like that term any more than they like the term "gentrification." Both are nevertheless real, and apt.

You don't have to just take my word for it. When you eat at local neighborhood cafes, ask the proprietors what they think of the Bendificators' plans for the commercial streets of South Minneapolis. Ask the small business owners on Lyndale Avenue in the Wedge what they think about the City's plans for biggering (or should the "i" be a "u"?) the streetscape. Ask business owners and residents of Hennepin south of Lake Street what they think of the City's plans to redo the street at their expense. Talk to former Wedge residents displaced by tenants who can--at least for a year or two--pay the "market rate" rent. And you'll find out the cost of Bendrification to renters, businesses, and property owners in the 10th Ward.

Anti-gentrification sign in San Francisco.

Daredevil, Gentrification, NIMBYs and the Neighborhood

NIMBY: "not in my backyard: used to express opposition by local citizens to the locating in their neighborhood of a civic project, as a jail, garbage dump, or drug rehabilitation center, that, though needed by the larger community, is considered unsightly, dangerous, or likely to lead to decreased property values."--Dictionary.com. 

Please note that the dictionary definition of NIMBY does not include people who resist the displacement of neighbors by luxury real estate development.


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Last year, Marvel's "Daredevil" leaped out of the small screen via Netflix to millions of viewers worldwide. The story of a blind New York native fighting to save his neighborhood, "Daredevil" was heralded as "TV's first gentrification-fighting superhero."

By day, the title figure is Matt Murdock, a young attorney. Murdock and his partner Foggy Nelson use their newly-formed practice to defend Hell's Kitchen residents of limited means who are being forced out of their homes by a big-time developer and his associates. Unlike billionaire superhero Bruce Wayne (Batman), Murdock operates frequently in the red (pun intended). He lives in a dingy warehouse walk-up flat. He and Foggy struggle to pay their bills and their assistant Karen's wages. Their clients are the poor, the down-on-their-luck, the marginalized.

Murdock is blind, but he can hear and smell exceptionally well.

Murdock's adversary is heavyweight real estate developer Wilson Fisk. A native of Hell's Kitchen, too, Fisk had a disadvantaged and dysfunctional childhood. His collaborators are heads of crime syndicates, bankers, and corrupt police and city officials. What he can't acquire through money, Fisk acquires through violence.

Unlike many superheroes, Daredevil frequently gets the crap beat out of him. One wonders how he can even walk the day after a fight--and sometimes, he can't. He's laid up for days recuperating from being battered, sliced and diced by criminals and those hired by uber-criminals  like Fisk. The human persona, Murdock, fights these same elements as a lawyer, and finds the violence spilling over into the daylight neighborhood as well.

Both Murdock and Fisk like to talk about "my city,"as if each feels he somehow owns it. Murdock doesn't like the old neighbors being replaced by affluent newcomers. He hates to see affordable, rent-controlled old apartment buildings replaced by luxury condos and lofts. He wants to save his city from the corrupting influence of big money and power. On the other hand, Fisk thinks he's doing "his city" a service by removing those who can't afford the fine dining, upscale living, and cultivated tastes of the upwardly mobile.

Fisk: Are you there? Can you hear me?
Daredevil: Who is this?
Fisk: I think you know. You've been asking about me. I thought it was time we spoke.
Daredevil: Say your name.
Fisk: You first. That's what I thought. You and I have a lot in common.
Daredevil: We're nothing alike.
Fisk: That's what you'll tell yourself.
Daredevil: You're feeding off this city like a cancer.
Fisk: I want to save this city, like you... only on a scale that matters.

Boom! There goes the neighborhood. Fisk blows up parts of Hell's Kitchen to seize it for development.

If Daredevil/Murdock lived in the Wedge, his attempts to stop the wrecking of old buildings and the building of thousands of high-rent units would be met with a cry of "NIMBY!" from local development supporters. NIMBY is a term accurately applied to hypocrites like the pro-fracking Exxon oil CEO who sued to stop fracking near his multi-million dollar home. NIMBYs want to stop half-way houses, Section 8 housing construction, thrift shops, but they aren't against luxury condos and trendy new apartments. The relentless cry of development boosters is a kind of NIMBY-Tourette's, the accusation hurled again and again at those who don't like the escalating wrecking and building of high-density high-rent units in the neighborhood. It's an egregious misuse of the term, designed to shut up complainants. And so far, that's what it's done.

Unlike NIMBYs, Wedge residents want more affordable housing for both renters and homeowners. But thanks to the City, the banks, the corporate media, and local developers, the Wedge is being crammed with high-priced units, units that are proving slow to fill up, with the more expensive places having the highest vacancy rates.

In a breathtaking display of hypocrisy, 10th Ward CM Lisa Bender and her supporters spout oral formulaic about "affordable housing" and "green living" while methodically destroying affordable housing and replacing it with unaffordable housing, raising rents and taxes--and sending thousands of tons of reusable buildings to the landfill. The City Planning Commission, City Council, CPED (Planning), and CM Bender have their chosen developers, Drew Levine and Danny Perkins (a.k.a. KLP Realty Holdings, D&D Realty Holdings, DDMZ REal Estate, Lotterman-Madan, 2817 Girard), whose projects are rubber-stamped without comment, no matter how far they stray from City zoning and other regulations. Yet CM Bender and her acolytes have the gall to call their detractors NIMBYs--which is the exact opposite of what those opposing her pet development projects are.

If you're going to call names, at least use an appropriate epithet, DIMBYs.

Case in point: 2008 Bryant Ave. S. The existing house was sold to KLP (Levin and Perkins) immediately after being listed, before any other interested parties could react. KLP quickly came up with plans for demolishing the house and replacing it with a four-story, ten-unit apartment box. The proposal--despite its requiring significant variances from the City zoning code--breezed easily through the first steps for approval by the City, through CPED and through the Planning Commission. No notices were sent to surrounding property owners, the City's new stealth policy about neighborhood development. Last Friday, March 28th,Wedge neighbors went to the Planning Commission hearing to see what would be said about KLP's 2008 Bryant proposal, #3 on the agenda.  They got there at 4:38 to find a note on the door advising them that items #1 and #3 had already been approved. When they went in, the commission members were discussing item #2.  The commission gave the reason that no one was there to testify, so why not just skip over #2, and approve #3 out of order? Right.

Daredevil looks down on the mean streets of Marvel's Hell's Kitchen

Wedge residents who are trying to stem the tide of luxury condos and high-rent apartments think of Minneapolis as "our city." We hate seeing a battalion of real estate speculators and developers bulldozing their way through our neighborhood. We hate it when many Wedge residents can no longer afford the rents or taxes on their homes. We hate it when our streetscapes are being littered with ticky-tacky architectural monstrosities. We hate it when our streets are becoming packed with vehicles. We hate it when Levin and Perkins acquire the homes of  resistant sellers by making offers that they can't refuse, premiums of tens of thousands of dollars that no other buyers can match. We don't want these things in our back yards for good reason.

But most of all, we hate it when we feel that the City is not listening to us, that citizens' voices are being methodically silenced in public discourse, that local government has gotten out of the control of City voters and into the control of moneyed interests. Sound familiar? This sense that government representatives on all levels are becoming increasingly disconnected from the people they allegedly represent is a loud complaint coming from both left and right wings in the current presidential campaigns. The ones that understandably don't want this situation to change are the ones who brought us to this sad pass in the first place--the political establishment. Both parties have a lot to answer for, but in Minneapolis, the one-party town, the party that needs to start listening to the electorate is the DFL. From where I sit, the only representative who is making an effort to listen to his constituents is Keith Ellison. For City officials, especially CM Bender, there's only self-righteous, self-serving political theater.

But--returning to Hell's Kitchen--don't kid yourself. The kind of gentrification we're seeing in the Wedge has been going on in New York neighborhoods for decades. The real Hell's Kitchen--not the Marvel one--has already been given over to the gentrifiers--the luxury developments, the upscale restaurants, the fitness centers. And that's what makes "Daredevil" so poignant, yet terrifying.

What is satisfying about the Netflix "Daredevil" narrative is that we can clearly identify who's fighting whom. Fisk is a larger-than-life figure, a powerful man who talks directly with those fighting him. He reminds the officials he's bought who's boss and what will happen to them if they don't perform. He does not hide behind a corporate veil. He doesn't play a real estate shell game using a dozen LLCs and multiple surrogates. He doesn't have private meetings with city officials to hide what he's really up to. Fisk stands up for what he believes in, no matter how twisted it may seem to others.

Fisk in his office. Prominently visible behind him is a copy of Robert Caro's 1974 biography of NYC urban planner Robert Moses.

Fisk may be a ruthless real estate developer, but his motives are pure. He loves Hell's Kitchen, his home since birth, and wants to improve it.  But the road to Hell is paved with good intentions--in his case, megalomaniacal good intentions. Venal Minneapolis city officials, armed with their corrupted version of current urban planning theory (a la Fisk and Robert Moses), have turned over the Wedge to rapacious developers. Who's going to stop them? Does anyone know Daredevil's phone number?

At the end of the second season, Daredevil is farther than ever from his goal of saving his neighborhood. He's nearly been killed, he's lost friends, he is battered and unsure of what to do next. But the satisfying thing about him is that though he may lose his way, he never doubts his goal of protecting his neighbors and neighborhood he loves from the ravages of greed and corruption.
 

                                      Whose city is it? Ours? Or the developers'?
 --T.B.