Star Tribune
St. Paul announces program to help homeowners discharge racial covenants
St. Paul leaders announced Monday that they’re launching an effort to help homeowners discharge the racial covenants that are included in their property deeds.
The covenants, which state that the homeowner is prohibited from reselling the home to a person of color, were included in the deeds of many homes built in the Twin Cities from 1910 into the 1950s. Minnesota barred the creation of new racial covenants in 1953 and made them illegal in 1962, and federal law outlawed covenants in 1968.
Deeds are a legal document and so the racist covenants cannot be deleted, but for several years there has been a movement in the metro area led by a group called Just Deeds to enable homeowners to file a document repudiating covenants in their deeds.
At a news conference Monday at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, Mayor Melvin Carter announced the effort in St. Paul to discharge the covenants.
“Words can create generational harm and they have, forever, in our community and across our country,” Carter said. “This is about addressing those harms and righting those wrongs.”
The St. Paul City Council approved a plan in 2021, led by the city attorney’s office, to encourage residents to discharge the racial covenants, according to City Attorney Lyndsey Olson. A local organization called Mapping Prejudice, which found 8,233 covenants in Minneapolis, has discovered 2,492 in St. Paul so far.
St. Paul now has a website up and running where residents can go to learn if they have a racial covenant. Residents will also find a document they can fill out to discharge the covenant. Minneapolis has a website for discharging covenants at minneapolismn.gov/justdeeds, with additional information at JustDeedsProject@minneapolismn.gov/.
Lawyers in the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office will help individuals discharge the covenants at no cost. They will be aided by law students at Mitchell Hamline, according to Anthony Niedwiecki, the school’s president and dean.
“We see the roots of this damage that these racist clauses created in urban housing issues, urban violence that we face today,” Olson said. “Clearing these covenants is not an attempt to erase our history. … The work is an opportunity to raise awareness of how our past affects our present, and to work together for anti-racism in this present moment.”
Mapping Prejudice, which is based at the University of Minnesota Libraries, first documented racial covenants in Minneapolis and then extended it to Hennepin County. That work is largely completed, said Kirsten Delegard, project director at Mapping Prejudice. It then began researching St. Paul and Ramsey County.
Delegard said volunteers have started to review deed records in Dakota County and are working with the recorder offices in Anoka, Washington, Scott and Carver counties to obtain their records.
The work to discharge covenants was accelerated by Just Deeds, a coalition of numerous metro-area cities and the city of Rochester, along with the Minnesota Association of City Attorneys, the Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors, and Edina Realty Title.
“Discharging a covenant can be a very powerful act of resistance and repair,” said Maria Cisneros, city attorney for Golden Valley and a leader of the Just Deeds project. “It’s a tangible first step that any individual can take to place themselves in this history and to reclaim this space as an equitable and welcoming space, and to step into the power that each of us individually has to remedy the legacy of racially restrictive covenants.”
Leaders of Minneapolis Area Realtors attended Monday’s news conference, but not representatives of the St. Paul Area Association of Realtors (SPAAR). The organization pulled out as a Just Deeds partner in 2021, saying disagreed with some things without giving details.
The St. Paul association would have attended the news conference Monday but didn’t know it was happening, said communications director Jennifer Kovacich.
“SPAAR supports the work of Just Deeds,” she said. “We are doing other work to focus on the solution for homeownership in St. Paul.”
Kovacich said that when Just Deeds was launched, “SPAAR did not have a chance to review and put in some of the language that reflected SPAAR’s members’ voices.”
Jamar Hardy, incoming president of the Minneapolis Realtors group, said afterwards that one of his “biggest focuses” will be to get SPAAR back into the Just Deeds project.
St. Louis Park will soon require landlords to give renters more notice before they file for evictions over late payments.
The city currently requires landlords to give tenants notice seven days before they file for eviction. Starting in November, landlords will have to give 30 days notice and use a form prepared by the city.
“This is a tough ordinance,” Council Member Lynette Dumalag, the only person to vote against the change, said during a meeting this week. “At least for me, personally, I felt that it pit those that care about affordable housing against one another.”
In public hearings and other forums, city leaders heard from renters who said the current requirements didn’t give them enough time to scrape together payments if they face a sudden hardship, such as losing a job. They also heard from at least one landlord who said he might have to increase deposits because he already struggles to make ends meet when renters fall behind on payments.
The change passed 4 to 1. Council Member Tim Brausen and Mayor Nadia Mohamed were absent.
PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — Ryan Leckner has resigned as Mayor of Park Rapids and the city council has officially declared a vacancy.
City Administrator Angel Weasner said councilmembers will hold a workshop on Sept. 24 to determine how to proceed. They can fill the vacancy by appointment or hold a special election, which Leckner said seems unlikely given that the November general election is just around the corner.
Until then, Leckner said “we’re thinking that we’ll just be able to get by with just one less council member.”
He added that Councilmember Liz Stone would likely serve as acting mayor until voters hit the polls.
Former Park Rapids Mayor Pat Mikesh is running uncontested for Leckner’s now-vacant seat.
In 2018, Mikesh stepped down a month before the election and Leckner successfully ran as a write-in candidate.
Leckner first joined the council in 2015 and is ending his third, two-year term as mayor early because his family built a home outside city limits. Construction of the home in Henrietta Township, and the sale of his existing home in Park Rapids, all happened faster than expected, he said.
“My term was up in November anyways,” he said, “so I was kind of planning on just not running.”
In the 27 years since Rhode Island’s first charter school opened its doors, just one has closed. Segue Institute for Learning, a community charter in Central Falls, R.I., is among the state’s successes. It has an extraordinarily low student-to-teacher ratio of 4 to 1, even though it spends less than a typical Rhode Island school.
Part III
How Rhode Island’s charter schools succeeded where Minnesota’s failed
Each spring, Blackstone Valley Prep in Rhode Island hosts a loud, spirited and celebratory “college signing day” ceremony for its high school seniors. One by one, the teenagers step onstage to proudly announce their post-graduation plans. Many are the first in their family to seek a degree.
Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country, but it’s here — and not in Minnesota, the birthplace of the charter school movement — that this daring experiment in public school education is paying big dividends for students and their families.
Left In the 27 years since Rhode Island’s first charter school opened its doors, just one has closed. Segue Institute for Learning, a community charter in Central Falls, R.I., is among the state’s successes. It has an extraordinarily low student-to-teacher ratio of 4 to 1, even though it spends less than a typical Rhode Island school.
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