Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
April 7, 2002
Where the Heart Is
This afternoon at 3:00, Mayor RT Rybak of Minneapolis has called for the second affordable housing summit of his administration, bringing together many of the organizations created to address the issue of affordable housing in our city, as well as representatives of the mayor's office and concerned citizens of our community. I know that representatives of the UU Affordable Housing Partnership will be in attendance, but I want to make an appeal for even broader interest and participation on the part of this congregation and its members. I want to suggest this morning that this issue of housing is a kind of model for the ways in which social responsibility and our collective concern for the less privileged are going to be challenged to express themselves in the new millennium. I want to suggest that if we can avoid blowing this generation's so called 'peace dividend' on a constructed war - a proviso of which I am not at all confident at present - we might actually have, for perhaps the first time in human history, the resources to figure out how to make the minimal benefits of material prosperity available to all people, or at the very least to all children.
In many ways, this sermon is a work in progress, for the more I learn about the problem of affordable housing, the more complex it becomes, and the more questions I have - far more questions at this point than answers. Nevertheless, it seems to me that part of the religious community's role in such matters - at least the liberal religious and humanist community's role - is precisely to ask questions, and to reason together so that we may over time figure out what the right questions are that need to be asked. So I want to tell you a bit of my own story, and some of what I have learned about our city's story, because it is out of these experiences that my present questions arise.
I should point out first of all that I have been both a tenant and a landlord myself. Throughout the early years of our marriage, Mark and I were college and graduate students and young professionals launching our careers. We knew that home ownership was a goal we shared, and that real estate was generally a smart investment, and from time to time we considered it, but we really didn't have either the geographical stability or the money. It was not until just after our 12th wedding anniversary that we became home owners. It was, we found, a significant responsibility to care for a single family house and yard, to maintain the value, security and function of a sixty-some year old dwelling on a day to day basis. It was a lovely place, and we enjoyed it for four years. Then the opportunity arose to share a grand old Victorian mansion with our good friends and their children, and we decided to try it. As a bit of a hedge against total relational disaster, we chose not to sell our first house, but to cover the mortgage cost by renting it. In the course of the ensuing nine years until we moved to Minneapolis, we had as I recall leases with five different tenants; some of them good, some of them unfortunate. Some of them paid the rent promptly, some of them were chronically hard to collect from. Some of them took great care of the place, one of them departed unexpectedly, leaving a dreadful mess. We had a couple of extended periods with no tenants and no rent. Living just down the block, we were able to keep an eye on the place, and to interact with the tenants. But even so, I would not have said that the anxiety and the headaches were sufficiently compensated by the amount we could reasonably charge, even at an open market rate. When I was called here, it was clear to both of us that we were not prepared to undertake the risks and responsibilities of trying to be long-distance landlords, and we sold the house at a modest profit. Since that venture, I have a private fantasy that just as everyone ought to have to work as a waiter or waitress at some point in their lives, so everyone ought to have an investment in rental property, and have to function as a landlord at some time. It's a unique perspective.
One of the unforeseen joys for me as my ministry here with FUS has unfolded has been the opportunity to participate in the monthly meetings of the senior clergy of the downtown Minneapolis congregations. This group, though significantly diverse in many ways, has a spirit of cooperation and mutual support that is all the more remarkable when you consider how easy it would be for us to perceive each other as competitors. Instead, we work together to offer community tours of our buildings at the biennial Sunday on the Avenue event; to sponsor annual Interfaith Thanksgiving services, and to offer every fall a five week series of Interfaith Dialogues to bring together members of our congregations and the community. In addition to our monthly breakfast meetings, we go on an overnight retreat together every year, and in the wake of the September 11 tragedies, we worked together to address the collective needs of the city for comfort, reflection, and remembering. We also seek to support each other's social justice work, particularly when it involves showing up at city council meetings to reflect the interests of the religious community, signing petitions, or otherwise helping each other to do effective outreach among the needy people of this city. I am constantly in awe of what our neighbor congregations are doing in the form of hands-on service. More than two years ago now, the group of us realized as we were sharing details about some of our programming, that every congregation represented in our group - every one without exception, from the Basilica to Temple Israel, from the staunch conservatives of Westminster Presbyterian and Central Lutheran to the flaming liberals at Plymouth Congregational and FUS - had affordable housing as a significant concern and priority of our social justice ministries. It was almost a moment of revelation; here we were, each of our congregations separately worrying about the thousands of our neighbors without homes or adequate shelter; was there some way in which we could be more effective and more faithful to our missions if we worked together? Out of that epiphany arose several visioning meetings and a significant cooperative initiative to raise $3 million, and to build fifty-five Habitat for Humanity houses in the very needy north side neighborhoods of the city. It is to this effort that our own congregation has pledged ten percent of the proceeds of our Housing Humanism anniversary stewardship fund, a contribution that should amount to $30,000. An outcome to be celebrated, wouldn't you say?
Ah, but not so fast. It might behoove us to remember that the dictum Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it has local as well as global application. And this would not be the first time that the well-intentioned white folks from downtown have descended on the north side, haloed with privilege, and trailing disaster for those they propose to help. Now, some of you who have been around this town a lot more years than I have probably saw some of this history unfold, and you may know some of the players and some of the ins and outs a great deal better than I do. But let me tell you the story as I have been able to piece it together, and you can help me fill in the blanks.
Once upon a time at the turn of the last century, Bassett Creek meandered through an area of ponds, marshes, floodplain forests and meadows in a valley formed by glacial meltwaters and filled with unstable soils including sand, silt, clay, and organic matter. In the early decades of the 1900s, this area became the Near Northside of Minneapolis. The creek was routed underground and Oak Lake was drained and filled for industrial use. First and second generation immigrants who owned businesses along Plymouth, Broadway, and Washington avenues built large Victorian and classical revival style homes in the Old Highland neighborhood, attracted by the public transportation of the street cars. Development spread westward between the world wars, with Prairie School and small Craftsman style bungalows. By the 1930s, much of the early construction had deteriorated significantly because of its placement on the unstable soils of the filled lake bed and floodplain. A number of these houses and buildings were demolished, and in 1935 the Sumner Field Homes were built, one of the first public housing developments in Minneapolis. The Olsen, Lyndale, and Glenwood developments followed after the second world war in the late 1950s - all on the same unstable substrate.
In the 1960s, two pivotal events significantly changed the character of the area. Interstate Highway 94, linking downtown to the northern suburbs, divided the existing neighborhoods and contributed to a westward migration of families into developing suburbs such as St. Louis Park and Golden Valley. And in 1969, long brewing racial, economic, and social tensions erupted in what were referred to as the Plymouth Avenue riots. Charlie Nelson of the State Historic Preservation office and past president of the Old Highland Neighborhood Association says that the conflict was the culmination of long standing animosities. "It didn't just happen like you fire a shot," he says; "it was a long time coming." Following the violence, in which several Plymouth Avenue stores were burned or trashed, many store owners chose not to rebuild. Community dis-investment increased as people began to associate the entire Near Northside with the tensions along Plymouth, and it didn't help that the Sumner and Glenwood projects were beginning to succumb not only to the deterioration inevitable to public housing projects, but also to the stress of the shifting soils. Those larger houses which remained from earlier decades were not in demand as single family homes in the 1970s, and often were divided into multi-family rental properties so that what had once been predominantly owner-occupied neighborhoods became heavily renter-occupied. By the end of the decade, many of the old houses were abandoned by their owners and boarded up. Because such blighted structures challenged the property values of the neighborhoods, the political philosophy of the time was to get rid of them, and public funding was provided to have many of them demolished. In the same decade of the 1980s, red-lining on the part of both government agencies and mortgage lenders was steering new investment away from the whole area.
In 1992, a lawsuit was brought by the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis in the name of Lucy Mae Hollman and sixteen other tenants of the Northside Public Housing projects, as well as the NAACP, against the city of Minneapolis, its housing agencies, the Metropolitan Council, and the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. The suit charged that federal, state and local housing authorities had a long history of segregating poor and black residents into 73 acres of dilapidated public housing in the Northside developments. Hollman vs. Cisneros was settled in 1995 with a consent decree which included an agreement by HUD to pay $117 million to be used by the city to place residents of the projects in affordable housing units spread out across the metro area in an effort to 'de-concentrate poverty.' 770 housing units were to be replaced, among them the 350 units of the Sumner Field projects, which were to be demolished so that what the Near Northside Action Plan approved in 1998 by the City Council described as "an attractive and sustainable urban neighborhood; a mixed-income, mixed-density, culturally diverse, amenity-rich neighborhood based on some of the best Minneapolis neighborhood traditions" could be built. No one seems to have disagreed that Sumner Fields needed to come down, and by 1999 the city had razed 464 units, plus the 192 units of the nearby Bryant Avenue Apartments. As part of the settlement, HUD provided 900 section 8 vouchers to enable displaced residents of these units to rent other housing for no more than 30% of their income. However, in an extraordinarily tight rental market such as Minneapolis has experienced in the past several years, rental housing is difficult to find at any price, and landlords can easily choose not to accept such government vouchers. Only a handful of those provided by HUD have actually been used. As the city prepared to begin demolition of the somewhat newer Glenwood and Lyndale projects in the spring of 1999, a coalition of residents, neighbors, affordable housing activists and eight pastors of Northside churches began to protest the destruction of yet more units of increasingly scarce affordable housing, and to insist that the city preserve and rehabilitate the remaining 306 units at Glenwood-Lyndale, at least until such time as replacements for the units already destroyed had actually been built, a process which in the case of the majority of units, expected to be located in the suburbs, is estimated to take ten to twelve years. Of the 900 apartments, townhouses, and single-family homes proposed for the Near Northside site itself in a plan presented by the development firm of McCormack Baron and approved by the City Council in March of 2000, only 200 would represent affordable units. This plan also proposes to raise Bassett creek once again to surface level, and create a wetlands and greenway at the border of the Kenwood neighborhood.
Several times during the spring and summer of 1999, City Hall ordered a halt to the demolition work in the face of local protests. After a flurry of court challenges and jockeying among various groups, including the NAACP, the Northside Neighbors for Justice coalition, the Minneapolis Housing Authority, the city's Hollman redevelopment advisory board, the City Council and then-Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, the demolition resumed without fanfare late in October. Little more than a year later, in December of 2000, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority was in correspondence with HUD, seeking an additional $36 million that it says it needs in order to fund the $198 million dollar project proposed by McCormack Baron in order to build the 200 replacement units slated for the site of the former projects. The MPHA would also like to exchange the unused section 8 vouchers intended for the relocating residents of those projects for cash to invest in the development. And here's the thing that really dumbfounds me; nobody knows who those displaced tenants were, or what became of them. Of all the organizations and all the countless hours consumed by this process, none of them went to track the people who were actually affected by these decisions; we will never know whether they benefited in the end, or more likely, how their lives were more deeply disrupted in the service of other peoples' visions of how they ought to be lived.
So that's my first question: who were those people, and where are they now? Did they find better housing, or are they reduced to trekking from shelter to shelter in the network of homelessness? I wish that someone would track them down; I think it's important to know. My second question echoes one by Ron Edwards of the city's Hollman Implementation Committee, who claims, "The city knew that this project was belly-up in 1999 before they had built a single replacement unit. So the question is, Why are they broke? Where did the millions intended for that housing go?" That's what I want to know, too. Where is that $100 million today? And if it was spent, what was it spent for, and who is accountable for it?
There's one question I don't have to ask. I don't have to ask why it is that the black ministers of the Northside Pastors group regard me and my colleagues with our $3 million and our Habitat for Humanity houses with a certain degree of resignation, suspicion, and exasperation. They are painfully polite to us, but you can see the long patience in their eyes; "Here they come again," it says, "descending on our community for the sake of assuaging their own guilt. What are they going to mess with this time?" And so I think that there are questions I do need to ask, and then listen carefully and humbly to the answers; questions like What do you think your community needs? What do you think our city needs? and How might we and our resources be able to help with those needs, if indeed we can? How might we work together in mutual respect to achieve our common good?
I have the beginnings of hope that Mayor Rybak may be asking these same kinds of questions this afternoon; if he is not, I want to suggest that he should. I suggest that we all should. I suggest that for us, as humanists, what matters is not how good our intentions are, but rather what the real impact is of our privilege and our actions upon our most vulnerable sisters and brothers and neighbors. I suggest that Bassett Creek and Oak Lake have something to teach us, something about an interdependent web of things that we seek to bury at our peril, and the peril of our neighbors; something about what is built upon the shifting sands of unjust power and the coercion of other people's lives tending to crumble in our hands.
So many questions, but in the end, the one question that really matters. How can I be at home - how can any of us be truly at home - in a city where we send school busses to fetch our children from sleeping in church basements? How can any of us be truly safe, or warm, or glad, while another human soul goes without a roof over his or her head? How can we build the city of our dreams, the city of righteousness and peace, unless we have the compassion to shelter one another? And so long as any of us is, are not we all, a long way from home?