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.


                                            *                          *                         *

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.

The City's Apartment Complex

Minneapolis has a serious obsessive-compulsive Apartment Complex.

As discussed in the previous post, the City of Minneapolis has been on a toot in remaking the Wedge a neighborhood of high-density, absentee-owned investment properties. Outside the Greenway, the City's favored developers are Drew Levin and Danny Perkins (a.k.a. KLP, Farkas Wagner,
D&D Reality Holdings, DDMZ Real Estate, Lotterman-Madan, 2817 Girard Avenue, Turkey Guys, Renovate to Rent). They have wrecked four older buildings and are about to wreck a fifth for new apartment buildings.
In early March, KLP reduced this house at 2424 Lyndale Avenue South:

to this (remaining leaded windows and all):

 to make way for a building looking something like this:

Even though the old house had been owned by a succession of notable people, including Ralph M Wheelock (Minneapolis Tribune political editorial writer, Secretary to Minnesota Governor Adolph Eberhart, and chairman of the state prison board), the wrecking permit sailed through City government. No historical review, no comment about scale, no notice to surrounding property owners. 

On the 2000 block of Bryant, another proposal by Levin and Perkins to wreck and redevelop also breezed through City Hall.  KLP's proposed 10-unit apartment building at 2008 Bryant was approved by Planning without comment, despite a number of departures from zoning regulations:trash containers allowed on the property line, only two on-site parking spaces, severe reduction of the green space and landscaping next to a driveway, a tight 6' turning radius in a driveway. Variances such as these have been rejected by City planners in other neighborhoods, but in the Wedge anything goes for developers. (See UPDATE at end of post..)

 Many sections of the Zoning Code say, "as determined by Zoning Administrator." If there is a question about compliance for a Wedge project, it is referred to the zoning administration manager for the neighborhood, Jason Wittenberg--and surprise! Jason Wittenberg determines that the project doesn't have to comply. Wittenberg gives projects an easy pass, no matter how far they depart from the zoning code, while in other neighborhoods, they would have been subjected to serious scrutiny and required to comply. How has it come about that in the Wedge development projects sail through City Council and Planning without comment? Let me count the ways: 1. CM Lisa Bender and 2. Jason Wittenberg.

At 2008 Bryant a single family house on a single lot is going to be replaced with a four-story ticky-tacky stucco-panel box covering the entire lot, with only two parking spaces, accessed by a driveway shared with the single-family house next door. To CM Bender and CPED (Planning), as represented by Jason Wittenberg, this box on steroids is appropriate infill development in the North Wedge--whereas in other neighborhoods such as Marcy-Holmes or Linden Hills, it wouldn't have stood a chance of being passed "as is."

Let's look at an even more flagrant departure from zoning compliance: the Graves hotel proposal for the Lake and Emerson intersection just south of the Greenway. Despite being far from complying with existing zoning, the hotel proposal was approved, per usual, with nary a second glance, by Jason Wittenberg. On March 3rd, came the second of the 1-2 developer punch. The City Zoning and Planning Committee, chaired by CM Bender, denied an appeal by a neighbor who challenged the City Planning Commission’s decision to grant the hotel developers a conditional use permit for height, as well as several variances. 

The Graves hotel proposal, as envisioned by the developer.

Ignoring the Small Area Plan for Uptown, zoning, and environmental concerns, the Z&P committee gave the go-ahead for a 6-story, 123-room hotel with no on-site parking on a block surrounded by two-story residences.  Even former Hennepin County Attorney Tom Johnson, who represented the neighbors at the hearing, could not persuade the Z&P committee from approving this Incredible Hulk development in Uptown. If it's in Uptown, if it's in the Wedge, the City wants to keep on biggering and biggering.

"Biggering" by Noot

A list of the donors from the real estate industry and real estate development sector to each Minneapolis City Council member in 2015 is informative. At the top of the list is none other than CM Lisa Bender (Ward 10) with 25 out of 36 contributors from those industries (69.4%)..Second highest percentage of contributors from real estate and development is Kevin Reich (Ward 1) with 10/21 (47.62%), followed by Andrew Johnson (Ward 12) 23/65 (35.38%) and Lisa Goodman (Ward 7) 12/34 (35.29%). Jacob Frey (Ward 3) is fifth, with 67/223 (30.03%).  Seven other council members (Gordon, B. Johnson, Yang, Warsame, Cano, Quincy, Palmisano) list under 20% of their donors from these sectors. (In her report Ward 8 CM Glidden said she took no itemizable donations.) 

A short list of developer-donors to CM Bender:
Dan Oberpriller: CPM Development ($220M development pipeline). Also a principal in Lake & Knox, LLC, which pumped groundwater into Lake Calhoun
Nick & Breana Walton: CPM Development; the other principal in Lake & Knox. (See Dan Oberpriller.)
Michael Lander: Demolished two houses for Motiv apartments on the 2300 block of Colfax.
Richard Pakonen: Per PAK Props website: "real estate investment and development focused on urban and in-fill properties"
Andrew Levin, Daniel Perkins: See above.
*For a compete list of numbers of real estate/developer donors to CMs by ward, click here. 
Perhaps even more interesting is this statistic: 17 of CM Bender's real estate/developer donors contributed to no other council member but Bender in 2015. These donors are putting all their dollars into one council member's basket, Ms. Bender's in the 10th Ward (Wedge, Uptown). Hmm.

CM Lisa Bender, promoter of high-density development in the Wedge, is fond of boasting about her support for affordable housing. The standard definition of "affordable" housing is that it take up no more than 30% of household income. According to MNCompass's most recent figures, the median income for Wedge households is $48k. That means that to be affordable for half of Wedge households, housing should cost no more than $1,200 a month. 35% of Wedge households have a household income of $35,000 or less. Affordable rent for them is $875 or less. How many units are available for family housing in the new Wedge apartment buildings at these rates? Zero.

Meanwhile, in Seattle,as in Minneapolis, the wrecking and gentrification continue.

The City government seems quite excited by the billions of dollars being invested in high-density real estate development in Minneapolis, the vast majority with "unaffordable" rents. The City aims to make way for 50,000 new residents, housing them in these new apartment complexes. In 2014-2015 around 9,000 new "market rate" housing units were added to Minneapolis. Over 20,000 more new units are in the works for the city.

Could there be too many "market rate" or above apartments being constructed in the city? Is this overbuilding going to wind up with some investors losing their shirts? The City Council and the City planning department (CPED), the banks, real estate investors and speculators don't seem to think so--or don't care.  If a development is planned for the Wedge or Uptown, the City is all for it. Anything goes. What, them worry about the billions of dollars in debt being accumulated by banks and investors in this current building boom?

Out of scale, unaffordable, noncompliant with zoning--the apartment building boom rolls through Uptown and the inner Wedge, enabled by CM Lisa Bender and Jason Wittenberg in particular and the City Council and CPED in general. Down with the old, up with the new. Round and round it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. 
 

Les jeux sont faits.

UPDATE:

The Minneapolis City Planning Commission at its March 28^th meeting approved the Land Use Application, the Site Plan Review, and the process by which the CPC reached its decision.

Minneapolis Neighbors United has filed an appeal to be heard at the Zoning & Planning Committee Meeting,  Thursday, April 21^st. Rm 317 City Hall. 9:30 a.m.

Grounds for the appeal:

 Plans for garbage and recycling storage and removal and snow removal are inadequate.

No landscape buffer at the south lot line and the inclusion of a rooftop deck potentially violate the neighbors' right to quiet enjoyment.

 Incorrect information in the Site Plan Review re: the Uptown Small Area Plan, Historic Preservation, and the Minneapolis City and Metropolitan Council Comprehensive Plans.

 Incomplete Site Plan Review. Methods of Alternative Compliance not provided and relevant public comment not included.

--T.B,