A tale of one city, two centuries, and racial disparities in wealth

The city needs to reorient its housing programs, its long-range planning, and its zoning code towards producing ownership housing. Only then will we begin to close the large racial wealth gaps in the city.

By David J. Therkelsen and Carol Becker

On a 1.3 mile stretch of road between East 36^th Street and East 46^th Street there are 107 homes, almost all of them upscale, almost all of them of beautiful design. These are the homes of Edmund Boulevard, named for Edmund Walton, soon to be renamed for Lena Olive Smith.

Let’s stipulate that Ms. Smith, the first Black woman to practice law in Minnesota, deserves to be remembered with much more respect than Mr. Walton, the developer who brought the invidious practices of redlining and restrictive covenants to a high art. The effect of these practices was to keep Black people from owning homes in desirable neighborhoods where houses appreciate greatly over time and create generational wealth.

Now, a century later, with Walton’s practices long since prohibited by law and by court decisions, you would guess that in our much more enlightened times we no longer have wealth disparities. Your guess would be wrong. Minneapolis has the worst disparities among all major US cities. How can that be? The laws prevent keeping Blacks and other marginalized populations from living where they want, enjoying the appreciation in the value of their homes, and passing on that value to their descendants, don’t they?

On one level they do. But there is a new and modern way to keep Blacks from owning nice homes, which gain in value and get passed along to new generations. That way is….to not provide the houses in the first place. If the house doesn’t exist, you can’t buy it, no matter how rich or poor you are. So where are the modern-day Edmund Waltons, the evil developers who want to keep Black people from acquiring and keeping wealth? Sorry to disappoint, but those those perpetuating housing injustice are not the Big Bad Developers but our own elected officials. They are the very people who declare themselves to be the champions of Blacks, poor people, and marginalized populations of all types. But they are not.

Since the DSA members and followers took over the City Council in 2018, virtually all of the housing built has been rental housing. So when Black families want to buy a home, to get on the path to building wealth, to start having financial and housing stability, there are simply no homes for them to buy. This isn’t an accident – this is the outcome of the policies of the DSA-run City Council that values renting over owning. This City Council does the same thing that Edmund Walton did – locks Black families out of home ownership.

At a recent Planning Commission meeting the hypocritical irony was all too apparent. Two agenda items followed one after another. First, the Commission approved 34 more apartments. This was followed immediately by a few dozen people who attended cheering on Commission approval of the name change, from Edmund to Smith. But the first action perpetuated what the cheerleaders of the second wanted to prevent: locking Black families out of home ownership.

The very obsession many on the far left have for renaming things in order to signal their virtue is a real problem for mainstream Democrats, here and elsewhere. When a lake or a school or a street is renamed, the reaction of ordinary citizens and voters tends to be: “There go those crazy, leftist Democrats again, making symbolic statements instead of governing the city well.” And they have a point. Even given five years to do so, our current city council majority hasn’t managed to put the Third Precinct back in the Third Precinct. They haven’t been able to bring cop employment up to charter and consent decree requirements. They haven’t found a strategy to avoid yet another year of double-digit property tax increases for many residents as commercial property values fall. But there’s always enough time and energy to rename things, in this case substituting one name that most have never heard of for another name that most have never heard of, to pretend to fight racism.

Ideologues are attracted to actions, or more accurately, inactions like these, because they find them much more interesting than actually doing the hard work that makes the city function better. Waving around one’s pronouns advertises virtue; filling potholes is just prosaic. Mainstream Democrats, who rely on facts and evidence to guide public policy, get tarred with the same “clueless lefties” brush as the ideologues.

If we want to honor Lena Olive Smith, a fierce foe of segregated housing, the effect of renaming a street will have impact for perhaps a couple of years, and only because of the attention drawn to this action. For years and decades after that it will just be a street name, with its human namesakes unknown to nearly everyone. (Quick: without Googling, tell us who Blaisdell Avenue is named for.)

A better idea would be to build a statue to Ms. Smith, in a park within a once-redlined neighborhood – Martin Luther King Park or Elliott Park would be good choices. That would not only honor Ms. Smith, but provide a platform to educate park visitors about her, and how she and her clients stood up to those who thought Black Minneapolitans should, literally, know their place.

And if we truly want to address poverty, a good place to start would be to stop the political theater, and end the idea that any housing is good housing and that we need to build more apartments. Renting is the single greatest way of keeping people poor. Rent control, a favorite DSA idea, does nothing to help families build wealth. More apartments just perpetuate poverty.

The city needs to reorient its housing programs, its long-range planning, and its zoning code towards producing ownership housing. Only then will we begin to close the large racial wealth gaps in the city.

Only then will this City Council be any different from Edmund Walton, so vile in their view that his name must be erased.

Who knows how today’s generation of city leaders will, themselves, be remembered 50 or 70 years from now? Will the Uptown Mall be Chugtai Court? Will a Chowdhury Lane open onto West River Road? Will activists in the late 21^st century look on these long-ago officials with scorn and ask why they further perpetuated racial disparities, not by restricting where Black people could own houses, but simply declining to provide the housing stock to begin with?

David Therkelsen has been a homeowner in Minneapolis for 50 years, and attentive to city and school affairs for all of that time. Professionally, he headed two American Red Cross field units, and at one time was co-chief of staff to the President of American Red Cross in Washington, DC. Later he was executive director of Crisis Connection, a state-wide mental health counseling agency. Dave held faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and recently co-authored a book about the history of transfusion medicine and blood banking.