Star Tribune
Minneapolis neighbors want to determine the Third Precinct’s second act
The Third Precinct’s neighbors had no say in what happened three years ago.
They want a say in what happens next.
The charred wreck of the police station has stood at the corner of Lake and Minnehaha for three and a half years, wrapped in razor wire and bad memories.
“People tell me that when they drive by there, their stomachs sink. They have a horrible feeling,” said Fred Brathwaite, who lived two blocks from the precinct on the night of May 28, 2020, when he saw the red glow of fire through his windows.
The precinct was burning. Along with neighborhood grocery stores, restaurants and mom and pop shops, as grief over George Floyd’s murder turned to rage.
Many ruined businesses rebuilt or are rebuilding. The precinct remained unchanged. A daily reminder of the sting of tear gas, the crunch of broken glass underfoot and the terror of the neighbors who stayed up all night with their garden hoses aimed at their roofs.
Brathwaite thinks this neighborhood deserves better.
Just before Thanksgiving, neighbors along Lake Street gathered at the Hook and Ladder Theater, next door to the precinct ruins, to talk about the Third Precinct’s second act.
A Black cultural center. That’s Brathwaite’s dream for the site.
Brathwaite, who owns Mama Sheila’s House of Soul restaurant with his wife, Sheila, has lined up support for the idea and the pro bono services of DJR Architecture. As he talked in the Hook and Ladder, a projection screen behind him lit up with images of uses the neighborhood could make of a center like that. Museum exhibits. Classrooms. A wellness center with exercise equipment and basketball courts. Retail space for small businesses and restaurants. Event space for concerts and art shows and celebrations.
“We have a historic moment, we have a historic opportunity. We can’t let it slip by,” he said. If you have an idea of your own for the site, send them to Brathwaite at mplsblackculturalcenter@gmail.com.
It was nice to hear people talking about the site’s future, not just its past. The Longfellow Community Council has been working on it for years. Local artists turned the ruined precinct into a canvas earlier this year, projecting a better future on its walls. Flames and pain, slowly shifting to images of flowers and smiling children and a community knitting back together.
That’s what Brathwaite remembers most about those days. Not the people who tore Minneapolis apart after George Floyd’s murder. He remembers the ones who came to help.
“These protesters, they walked, they marched right in front of my business,” said Brathwaite, who remembers marveling at how many white people were marching to protest the murder of a Black man by a white police officer. “Ninety-five percent of the people marching were white … Instead of pulling us apart, it’s drawing us together.”
Minneapolis is moving forward with plans to build a new Third Precinct and safety center less than a mile away, at 2633 Minnehaha Av. The city still owns the former site and will have the final say on what happens there.
Now that the Third Precinct has a new home, the city can make plans for a new use for the old site at 3000 Minnehaha. City staff could approach the council, possibly as soon as next month, to begin planning a public engagement process.
A small crowd came out to listen to Brathwaite’s pitch before the holiday and even with those numbers, it was easy to see how complicated it will be to turn the page on the Third Precinct.
Some think the building should be preserved as a piece of history. Others can’t bear the sight of it.
Brathwaite is just happy the community is talking about it now. Someday, he hopes his neighbors feel good when they round the corner of Lake and Minnehaha.
“We can then walk by and look at this edifice, glimmering in Minnesota sunshine. Shimmering in Minnesota moonlight,” he said, voice soaring to the theater rafters in his excitement. “We can walk by — not with our heads bowed down in shame, but we can lift our heads up high.”
“DHS and our state and federal partners have seen evidence that kickbacks are happening in Minnesota,” Inspector General Kulani Moti said in a statement. “That’s why we brought an anti-kickback proposal to the Minnesota Legislature last session. We will continue to work with the Legislature next session on ways to strengthen the integrity of our public programs.”
Nuway Alliance, one of the state’s largest nonprofit substance use disorder treatment providers, pays up to $700 a month for someone’s housing while they are in intensive outpatient treatment, the organization’s website states. The site lists dozens of sober housing programs clients can choose from.
Nuway leaders said they got an inquiry from the government about two and a half years ago indicating they are conducting a civil investigation into the housing model.
But officials with the nonprofit said in an email they believe what they are doing is legal and clients need it. More than 600 people are using their assistance to stay in recovery residences, Nuway officials stated. They said having a safe, supportive place to stay is particularly important for the vulnerable people they serve, more than half of whom reported being homeless in the six months before they started treatment.
Health plans knew about, approved and even lauded their program, Nuway leaders said, noting that health insurer UCare even gave it an award.
“The state of Minnesota has been fully aware of our program for a decade,” the organization said. “Since payors are fully aware of, and support the program, we struggle to see how anyone could argue it is improper, let alone fraudulent.”
Mounds View, the first Minnesota city to require homeowners to discharge racist language buried in deeds before they sell their homes, is celebrating a milestone: at least 100 homeowners have completed the process.
Officials say discharging the language is a symbolic step, but an important one.
“How could we call ourselves an inclusive community with the words ‘This home shall not be sold to a non-white person’ buried in the deeds?” Mayor Zach Lindstrom said at the state of the city address Monday.
Racially restrictive covenants, found in deeds around the Twin Cities and Minnesota, were legally enforceable tools of racial segregation for the first half of the 20th century. They barred homes’ sale to, and sometimes even occupancy by, anyone who wasn’t white until 1948, when they became unenforceable. Mapping Prejudice, a University of Minnesota research project uncovering these covenants, has found more than 33,000 of them in Minnesota, including more than 500 in Mounds View.
Many local cities have partnered with Just Deeds, a coalition that helps cities and their residents learn about and discharge covenants. In 2019, the Legislature passed a law allowing homeowners to add language to their deeds that discharges racist covenants but doesn’t erase them from the record. Earlier this year, Mounds View was the first to pass an ordinance requiring it. The city is also helping residents navigate the process.
Just because these covenants are no longer enforceable doesn’t mean they haven’t had long-lasting consequences, Kirsten Delegard, Mapping Prejudice project director, said at a Mounds View City Council meeting this summer: Minneapolis homes with racial covenants are worth 15% more than those without, she said. And neighborhoods with covenants remain the whitest parts of the Twin Cities.
Mounds View residents Rene and Steven Johnson were troubled to learn from Mapping Prejudice that their house, and many homes in their neighborhood, had racially restrictive covenants on them. It took some effort, including a trip to the Ramsey County Recorder’s Office, to find the document, which not only contained race restrictions but barred unmarried couples from owning the home.
The couple got their covenant discharged, and educated the city about the process, Rene Johnson said. That helped lead to the ordinance requiring covenants to be discharged before sale.
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
