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| Preservation is an international issue. Desregarding public outrage, in 2007 the City of Panama wrecked dozens of exquisite old houses like this one, the Castillo El Millon, in a frenzy of high-density redevelopment. |
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| Despite losses and setbacks, Panamanian preservationists repeatedly took to the streets to protest demolitions for redevelopment. |
The question I’m asked most about my comments on this blog is, “What can I do?” When one sees the power of the government (City officials and planners) and the wealth of the financial institutions lined up to promote and support developers, it’s easy to get spun around. Most of us, myself included, do not like to spend our valuable evenings attending hearings and meetings, especially when it seems few on the board or commission care about anyone else’s opinion.
However, our doing nothing means that the City and the developers will proceed with their plans to redevelop inner-city neighborhoods into high-density residential, historical buildings and community opposition be damned. The City has made this agenda clear in the Wedge, where R6 (high density) zoning remains in place, even though over the decades LHENA has made repeated attempts to downzone the affected areas to R2B.
A common misconception is that preservation is a top-down process. Those who expect organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation to swoop in and save the day will be sorely disappointed. The people who care about a building or a community are the ones who must defend it. The National Trust and other preservation organizations provide communities with resources to help them articulate their positions and fight their local battles; they don’t fight the battles for them.
But there’s a lot individuals can do for preservation, based on their interests and priorities. Here are some general things you can do in the current struggle between Big and Small:
1) Acknowledge that this will be a long-term process. Historic preservation action is political. The machinery of government from planning departments to heritage preservation commissions is oiled for development. The City has a whole stable of paid professionals standing by with their studies, plans, and regulations. In addition, the moneyed interests that are driving high density residential redevelopment will not give up without a fight. If they’re stymied with a project in one neighborhood, they’ll seek another place for it.
2) Keep informed and get constant updates through the Healy Facebook page, this blog and other preservation blogs (such as that of the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota) and by reading local newspapers.
3) Spread the word to friends, colleagues, and neighbors about what’s going on.
4) Speak out by attending meetings and/or communicating with city officials by e-mail, letters, or phone calls.
5) Network. Make alliances with like-minded people and groups regarding preservation issues important to you. Recruit people with special skills (organizers, attorneys, architects, business leaders) to join the alliance.
6) Concentrate on the task at hand: slowing the high-density juggernaut. Set aside political differences with allies on unrelated issues.
7) Accentuate the positive. Ignore the voices that keep saying we can’t win.
8) Enjoy what we have now. Celebrate community in our Minneapolis neighborhoods.
More specifically:
9) Serve on committees dealing with zoning and planning, or, if this is not your thing, go to important hearings that affect your neighborhood. On January 30th, the LHENA Z&P Committee has scheduled the first of a number of meetings revisiting R6 zoning in the Wedge. This is a good opportunity to speak out on the issue.
10) Volunteer as an on-the-ground soldier. The best way to combat the half-truths and false allegations by City officials and developers is to have command of the facts. For example, the North Wedge Historic District group (on Facebook) needs people to research its architectural and social history, photograph the buildings, and collect stories from residents.
11) Work to elect officials that support their communities, not moneyed interests. Mayor R.T. Rybak, a booster of high density residential development, is not running for office again. This is an excellent opportunity to elect someone who will listen to neighborhood concerns. Also, we need City Council members who support the people who live in their wards. Go to candidates’ forums and ask what they think about these issues. Of course, they can misrepresent their positions or change their minds (as Rybak apparently has done), but at least we have them on record.
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| The “emergency” demolition of the historic Fjelde House on Christmas Eve, 2009, is one example of the City’s stealth attacks on sites it wants to redevelop. |
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Another example is the middle-of-the-night demolition in 1975 of Calhoun Elementary School (built 1887) on what was to become the parking ramp for Calhoun Square.
–T.B. |
Last week I had the pleasure to be at a lecture-discussion on development and urban planning. Featured speaker was Philip Space, internationally renowned architect from Gopher City, Minnesota, who was here to promote his new book, “Highrises for Huddled Masses.” Accompanying him was Gopher City mayor, Justin Theory. When Space concluded his lecture on “Architecture of the Last 30 Seconds,” he and Theory treated the audience to extemporaneous comments about developments in Minneapolis.
PHILIP SPACE: There sure is a lot going on in Minneapolis—architecturally speaking, that is—and I’m proud to see my density dreams starting to be realized. So many of the city’s new highrise buildings are perfect examples of what I’ve been trying to achieve in Gopher City: the eradication of individual style and disturbing references to the past. What better way to help bring urban residents into this great 21st century than cramming them into apartment blocks containing nearly identical units? When I look at the dozens of new highrise apartments and condos going up all over South Minneapolis, it just about takes my breath away. With all these shiny new units to choose from, why would anyone choose to mess around trying to keep up an old house and garden requiring constant maintenance?
I hear that some slum-lovers are making a stink about the planned demolition of a broken-down 1890’s house by some long-dead builder in a Minneapolis neighborhood with the silly name of The Wedge. The house would be replaced by a fantastic “green” four-story multifamily apartment building. No one but these zealots cares about this old flophouse–except maybe the tenants–and no one cares about them, either.
These outdated wrecks need to be cleared away to make room for the dense, cosmopolitan city of the future. As Gopher City developer Bill Demhigh likes to quip, “I never saw an old house that didn’t look like a building site to me.” Demhigh, by the way, recently won Gopher City’s Cue Ball Award for the developer who knocks the most buildings down to put his in.
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| SPACE: There’s no place for monstrosities such as the house at right in the dense, competitive city. Down they go for clean, lean highrises like the one at left. |
JUSTIN THEORY: What a card that Bill is! But seriously, as I’ve said many times, cramming all the neighborhoods around the urban core with high density apartments and highrise commercial buildings is the path to making our city into the competitive global city of the future. All this clutter of old houses, small businesses, and low-rise apartment buildings needs to be cleared away, as they only remind citizens of past glories that are long gone.
Some members of the Gopher City Council and I understand that economic development is the only hope for the future of our great city. In effect, as city officials, we sit on the board of directors of a big development corporation. As such, we need to be ever-mindful of the needs of moneyed interests. Besides, after we leave office, there may well be a lucrative job awaiting us in the private sector.
Phil hit on a real sore point with us when he mentioned these melodramatic nostalgia buffs who cry over the destruction of some ramshackle old dumps that they think are “historic” What a joke! These dewy-eyed sentimentalists with their emotional attachments to some crummy old buildings make me sick. Don’t they understand that what we’re doing is building a competitive global urban city designed by experts like Phil here, on the finest modern principles?
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| THEORY: With our planning and vision, this is what the new Gopher City will look like in ten years. |
Another bunch of cranks are these citizens’ groups, always harping about their petty problems. Their selfish concern with public education, safe streets, and affordable housing is the worst sort of parochialism. If they’d just shut up for once and let us, the city officials, run the show, we’d have a competitive city rebuilt in no time.
Why should we listen to all this provincial carping when we obviously must think about the future—especially our future when we leave office?
We in Gopher City government know that these slum-loving lowlanders with their crazy prejudices and rugged individualism could easily destroy the global city we’re working so hard to remake in our image. It’s very important to get this intransigent bunch into big high-rise apartment complexes and these small independent business people under the single roof of an urban shopping mall so we can control them better. Consolidation is our primary goal.
Those that don’t like being consolidated can be run out of town or out of business, or both. The poor, for example, don’t contribute much, if anything, to the city economy. I think the City of Minneapolis should be commended for its foresight in promoting the construction of luxury condominiums and apartments, for these will attract rich people from all over the state and nation. Rich people pay more taxes and higher rents, and consume much more than poor people, so their presence is an enormous boon to the economy.
Rich people are hurt by inflation, too. A million just doesn’t go as far as it used to. By helping the rich, we help ourselves. But the poor give us nothing but headaches. Poor people, you know, have been bellyaching about heating bills. Well, if they can’t afford to pay for fuel, they should move south.
SPACE: I’d like to go a few steps further and suggest, as I did in my article “Instant Obsolescence,” that we build to tear down. Every new building should be as cold, impersonal, and ugly as possible so that sappy citizens don’t develop any maudlin attachments to them. Classical architecture aimed for beauty, solidity, and performance, but this thinking is clearly out of line with modern economics. We should construct buildings that can and should be torn down as soon as they go up.
Fixed cranes scattered throughout the city would aid in the ongoing demolition and continuous building boom which will eternally produce revenue for city government, banks, and developers —while keeping the building trades, contractors, and us architects happily busy.
Modern architecture reflects the vast superiority of the present to the past. What the modern global city must demonstrate is its consolidated power and wealth. What better way to show this than through the serene, faceless skyscraper that reflects in its mirrored purity the egotistical past atrocities of individuals (like the Foshay Tower, for example)—or through the monolithic high-rise which dwarfs all the untidy clutter of history in its titanic shadow? (Enthusiastic applause.)
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| SPACE: This is an example of a real, competitive global city, Hong Kong. What an inspiration! |
Well, time’s running out, so let me say in conclusion that you and your city planners are to be congratulated for the amazing job you’re doing with economic development and urban planning for the competitive global city.
Take care…and keep thinking high and dense!
–T.B., with thanks to Sinclair Lewis and Stephen Colbert
On December 17th, an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Minneapolis Sees High Density Future,” proclaimed in its opening sentence, “Minneapolis, the city of the single-family home on a tree-lined boulevard, sees its future in the apartment towers rising 20 stories above busy downtown streets.” The article quotes the city’s director of community planning and economic development, Jeremy Hanson Willis: “If we’re going to compete in the 21st century as a competitive global city, we have to attract people who want to live in cities. And cities are dense, urban environments.” (Has Willis ever seen a city with a rural environment? I hope not.)
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| High-density housing: great places to live? |
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Much of the article is devoted to developers’ comments about zoning. The gist is that they don’t like being hindered by having to get variances to build lucrative (for them) so-called “multifamily apartment complexes.” The message is that the City and developers can’t wait to nearly double Minneapolis’s population by cramming citizens into high-rise housing in the neighborhoods north of Lake Street. Higher density benefits City government by bringing in more tax revenue, while the developers will be raking in enormous profits. Architects, construction companies and trade unions will benefit, too, from the frenzy of new buildings going up.
Who won’t benefit? The residents of neighborhoods redeveloped into this high-density Utopia. The planned Lander development at 2320 Colfax S. is a harbinger of the changes the City anticipates bringing to the Wedge, Whittier, and other Minneapolis neighborhoods. If the City’s vision is realized, as in the bad old Urban Removal days of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, hundreds of houses, duplexes, and smaller residential buildings will fall, replaced by 5- to 20-story apartment buildings.
Contemporary urban planning theory justifies, indeed lauds this kind of redevelopment as necessary, to borrow a phrase, for the “competitive global city.” The informative word here is of course “competitive.” The focus is squarely on big business. Planners and city officials alike love to see the $$$ rolling in from these new projects, and eagerly anticipate the revenue generated from it in the future.
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| Nicollet-Lake in 2015? Minneapolis, “competitive” city of the future, cow town no longer. |
The City and its planners have long touted the wonders of collaborative planning between neighborhoods and proposed developments. This collaboration, however, is purely theoretical. At the first hearing about the Lander proposal before LHENA’s Planning and Zoning Committee, a sizable majority of residents at the meeting spoke out against it. The 2004 LHENA study calling for the downzoning of the Wedge north of 24th Street was cited as what the neighborhood envisioned for its own future. But we all were wasting our breath. The assumption by the City and the developer is that, thanks to R-6 zoning, the new four-story apartment complex is as good as built. So what if an historic house is wrecked and low-income tenants are displaced? This is a necessary evil to achieve the new “competitive global city” of Minneapolis.
The term “dark side of planning” was coined by Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg to describe this kind of disconnect between planning theory and practice. . In keeping their eyes on the starry skies of economic development for the City, planners and officials turn away from looking at the malevolent consequences of redevelopment on the people who live in the affected areas. For this reason, Flyvbjerg contends that actual urban planning practices frequently violate accepted norms of efficiency, equity, democracy, and hence, of planning ethics.
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| Too bad we can’t lift our houses out of encroaching high density development, as did Carl Fredricksen in the film “Up” (made by Minneapolis native Pete Docter). |
One need only to look at the past disasters of City planning to see what can go wrong: Cedar-Riverside, St. Anthony Main, Nicollet-Lake. I have no confidence in the assertions of R.T. Ryberg and Jeremy Hanson Willis that they know better than Minneapolis citizens what kind of city we want to live in. They are speaking for moneyed interests, not for the ordinary people who live here.
Last week I was talking to my Wedge neighbor Don, who, since buying it in 1972, has lovingly restored an 1890’s Queen Anne. He remarked that when he saw the proposal to wreck 2320 Colfax and build an apartment building in its place, his heart sank. For him, for me, and for the many other long-term Wedge residents who fought the development and zoning battles of forty years ago, this new thrust of City planning is like a nightmare come to life. After decades of quiet, neighborhood residents are going to have to organize against high density development, or accept the consequences. If you want to save the old houses of the Wedge, speak now or forever hold your peace–for once they’re gone, they’re gone.
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| Wow, am I glad that the developer took down that nasty old house made from Minnesota virgin timber so it can be replaced with a new, clean, “green” apartment building made of concrete, particle board, and sheet rock. |
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Next: An interview with visiting officials, city planners, and architects from Gopher City, MN (with a nod to Sinclair Lewis)
–T.B.
