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.
The Lynx are in the hot seat.
The team lost Game 3 of the WNBA Finals series against the New York Liberty on Wednesday night 77-80, setting the stage for a decisive match at Target Center on Friday night. Fans in the arena reacted with resounding disappointment after Sabrina Ionescu sunk a three-pointer to break away from the tie game and dashed the Lynx’s chance at forcing overtime.
Before we get to the reactions, first things first: The Lynx set an attendance record, filling Target Center with 19,521 spectators for the first time in franchise history. That’s nearly 500 more than when Caitlin Clark was in town with the Indiana Fever earlier this year.
Despite leading by double digits for much of the game, the Lynx began the fourth quarter with a one-point lead over the Liberty and struggled to stay more than two or three points ahead throughout.
The Liberty took the lead with minutes to go in the fourth quarter and folks were practically despondent.
Of course, there were people who were in it solely for the spectacle. Nothing more.
The Lynx took a commanding lead early in the first quarter and ended the first half in winning position, setting a particularly jovial mood among the fanbase to start the game.
Inside Target Center, arena announcers spent a few minutes before the game harassing Lynx fans — and Liberty fans — who had not yet donned the complementary T-shirts draped over every seat.
DULUTH – The Minnesota and Wisconsin transportation departments will make upgrades to the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge in the summer of 2025, in preparation for the structure to become the premiere route between this city and Superior during reconstruction of the Blatnik Bridge.
Built in 1961, the Blatnik Bridge carries 33,000 vehicles per day along Interstate 535 and Hwy. 53. It will be entirely rebuilt, starting in 2027, with the help of $1 billion in federal funding announced earlier this year. MnDOT and WisDOT are splitting the remaining costs of the project, about $4 million each.
According to MnDOT, projects on the Bong Bridge will include spot painting, concrete surface repairs to the bridge abutments, concrete sealer on the deck, replacing rubber strip seal membranes on the main span’s joints and replacing light poles on the bridge and its points of entry. It’s expected to take two months, transportation officials said during a recent meeting at the Superior Public Library.
During this time there will be occasional lane closures, detours at the off-ramps, and for about three weeks the sidewalk path alongside the bridge will be closed.
The Bong Bridge, which crosses the St. Louis River, opened to traffic in 1985 and is the lesser-used of the two bridges. Officials said they want to keep maintenance to a minimum on the span during the Blatnik project, which is expected to take four years.
Red Wing will celebrate the grand opening of its first permanent set of pickleball courts next week with an “inaugural play” on the six courts at Colvill Park on the banks of the Mississippi, between a couple of marinas and next to the aquatic center.
Among the first to get to play on the new courts will be David Anderson, who brought pickleball to the local YMCA in 2008, before the nationwide pickleball craze took hold, and Denny Yecke, at 92 the oldest pickleball player in Red Wing.
The inaugural play begins at 11 a.m. Tuesday, with a rain date of the next day. Afterward will be food and celebration at the Colvill Park Courtyard building.
Tim Sletten, the city’s former police chief, discovered America’s fastest-growing sport a decade ago after he retired. With fellow members of the Red Wing Pickleball Group, he’d play indoors at the local YMCA or outdoors at a local school, on courts made for other sports. But they didn’t have a permanent place, so they approached the city about building one.
When a city feasibility study came up with a high cost, about $350,000, Sletten’s group got together to raise money.
The courts are even opening ahead of schedule, originally set for 2025.
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