Invest St Paul

Yesterday the budget for the City of St Paul was announced. Mayor Coleman is working up a program called Invest St Paul, and it looks as if he is targeting the city's toughest neighborhoods to do a little clean-up. From the Strib:
If the mayor's plan, called Invest St. Paul, is approved, the city will put those funds into beautification, demolition and rehab projects in four neighborhoods -- Dayton's Bluff, Lower East Side, Frogtown and North End. Those neighborhoods would receive most of the funding connected to the initiative.

Strib says a special half cent tax will generate up to $25 million. Sounds like the heart of the plan is to buy up vacant buildings, beautify streets and sidewalks, and create more neighborhood programs.

For the sake of those neighborhoods, I hope the program works.

My first condo was at Laurel and Dale ... when we first moved in, Selby and Dale was a really cool place to sell rugs featuring tigers, lions and Tupac as well as off-brand athletic shoes. Pretty likely it was a place to pick up your favorite flavor of illegal substance, as well. The city started pouring money into Selby between Dale and the Cathedral. Then Mississippi Market came in, and suddenly it wasn't so fun to sell crack in front of the organic food store.

Do I think the North End is the next Selby Dale? No. I don't. Selby had been a city project and community project since the mid to late 70's. It takes a LOOONG time. And, the Historic District (the neighborhood East of Dale) is a very wealthy neighborhood that attracted business.

But I do think City investment in these communities is important.

But I also have another angle on all of this. I do know that it's not the buildings or the sidewalks or the businesses that make a neighborhood, it's the people. And if there are people in those neighborhoods that are not good neighbors (criminals, drug dealers, gang members) all of the money in the City budget won't change that. So it is possible we will spend a lot of money on some neighborhoods that could be great (Dayton't Bluff, I'm talking about you) but until the absentee landlords and criminals are driven out, the place won't change.

Another phenomenon I have been interested is something the St Paul Police told one of my neighbors. I mentioned the development of Selby ... some call it "gentrification" but I prefer development. As the area improves, housing costs increase. Most of the riff-raff has been moved from the area east of Dale, but we still get some riff-raff north of Selby between Dale and Lexington. The St Paul Police told a neighbor that neighborhood is improving and the worst of the tenants are being removed, and are finding housing in new neighborhoods (like mine).

The bad tenants are having a hard time fitting in here in my neighborhood, and have a very short time left before the eviction is final. But -- it leads to the bigger question --- where do the bad people go when a neighborhood improves and they are pushed out due to higher costs, sale of buildings to landlords that care, etc.?

You could house the bad tenants in a perfectly designed house, with perfect sidewalks and perfect streetlights. But that won't change the behavior.

The Twin Cities experiences a migration of these bad seeds every once in a while. From Selby to the East Side. From the East Side to Brooklyn Center. You never really know which neighborhood will succeed in getting rid of the bad landlords that keep bad tenants and which neighborhoods will suddenly get an influx of the bad tenants.

Criminals, drug dealers, gang members, and the sociopaths do live somewhere. They're in every neighborhood, really, just to different levels. I think absentee landlords have a lot to do with accepting renters that no one else would want living near them (the criminals, gang members, drug dealers). I don't think this $25 million from the City will change that.
Every neighborhood crosses its fingers -- "Maybe this is the program that will shove all of our bad seeds to the other side of the freeway!"

We just move them around....