Redlining in Minnesota

There’s little information available online about redlining in Minnesota, and certainly none about my own community, a suburban town called Mahtomedi too small to have its own post office. But race and redlining have certainly played a large, if rarely addressed, role in the formation of my town’s community.
Mahtomedi began as a small collection of lake homes in the early 1900s. It’s claim to fame was an amusement park on the edge of White Bear Lake, accessible by a streetcar line running from the Twin Cities. Driving up and down streets by the lake, you can still tell which houses started their lives as cabins, and only later became continuously occupied.
My town is proud of its history—but only the parts that are sensational. We teach our third graders about the gangsters that used to hide out here, we speculate about the prostitutes that used to work the Elsie Inn, and we’re proud that F. Scott Fitzgerald got thrown out of the local Yacht Club (need I mention that this is a predominantly upper-class and upper middle-class community?) What we don’t talk about is the incredible homogeneity of our town. We don’t talk about the fact that we live in neighborhoods that are still essentially segregated against African Americans. We don’t talk about why our high school has few students of color, or why we have no teachers of color at all—in fact, I didn’t realize that was the case until I started writing this post. I would like to say that I wonder why we don’t talk about these things, but the truth is, I know very well why we don’t. These issues aren’t discussed, because most of my community is content with this homogeneity, if not outright pleased by it.
The only instance I could find of someone discussing redlining in Minnesota was a report of a lecture given by Professor Jeff Crump of the University of Minnesota in November of last year. Crump cited redlining as a cause of the racialized natured of the current housing foreclosure crisis in Minnesota, where the majority of vacant and foreclosed houses are located on the north side, in “racially segregation neighborhoods that were redlined a generation ago.” A little more research led me to reports of development on the north side, where private developers claim to be turning neighborhoods around. But considering what we’ve discussed so far about development in LA, I’m skeptical. The article I read made no reference to race—and that worries me even more. It seems easy for developers to use the foreclosures as an excuse to push people of color out of areas of Northside, which they can then turn into a new white space, further limiting options for already destitute Minnesotans of color.

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2008/11/09/mortgage-crisis-tainted-racism.html
http://www.minnpost.com/stories/2009/02/03/6336/are_foreclosures_helping_to_improve_minneapolis_north_side