I was asked the other day why I love Dayton’s Bluff so much…and I didn’t know what to say.
I do love this neighborhood–deep in my gut. I have the kind of love for it like I do for my family and the landscape of my youth. I try to get my friends and colleagues to move here all the time. I know it as well as anyone who’s lived here nine years can. I know it better on paper than most statisticians. I get jealous every time another neighborhood gets yet another perk or service.
…So why can’t I explain why?
I used to say this kind of “cookie-cutter” phrase: “Well, we’ve got the best housing stock in the city, and it’s so diverse,” or more occasionally, “Our elementary school has won awards; it’s a hidden jewel.”
But the more I live here, the more I realize the flaws in my earlier naivete’.
When it comes to housing, I now know that Dayton’s Bluff may well be in the midst of a quiet but serious housing and land-ownership war. We’ve got the challenges other neighborhoods do: an increasing number of renter-occupied households with few gathering spaces to build community; absentee landlords; abandoned and vacant properties; and absentee landowners who lost their shirts in the real estate crisis, but refuse to sell their properties at a reasonable price for redevelopment. But here in our neighborhood, there’s more fuel for that fire. All of St. Paul has the classic problem of gentrification versus affordability, but here, it’s all complicated by an historic district designation across a large swath of the neighborhood. We’ve got a system that not only pits neighbor against neighbor on code enforcement, but also on historic accuracy of their exterior projects.
So post-housing crisis, here’s what you might experience in a small area of Dayton’s Bluff:
- One neighbor puts up his house on a short sale for $40k on what, even in this market, should be a $100k home.
- Across the street, another neighbor spends nearly $20k on a required redesign and rebuild of their unsafe and dilapidated historic porch
- Nearby, an absentee landlord from Chicago does a quick weekend tear-off of an unsafe and dilapidated historic porch, incurring modest fines
- Down a block, renters looking for quality affordable housing can’t find a ready-to-occupy, well-kept, and reasonably priced property worth raising their kids in–despite over 8 units sitting empty.
- The remaining homeowners with conventional loans grow angrier and angrier at their inability to refinance on their underwater mortgages, unable and unwilling to improve their properties.
- On the corner sits the abandoned shell of a once-beautiful historic home for which no one will take responsibility.
Is that a pretty good summation? Anything I missed?
So whom can we expect to help us? Nonprofits fight quietly over the dwindling funds that shift focus with what’s hot every year. State and federal governments can’t seem to get anything done. The city–in desperate need of funding after horrible disinvestment by the state–is desperate for fines and fees, and is unable to make the purchases they once did to buy and rehab properties. Banks are hoarding their monies waiting for the other shoe to drop, biding their time and doing as little as legally possible to upkeep their reclaimed properties.
Who’s left?
Us.
After nine years in this neighborhood, I think I finally know what I love: the type of person who chooses to live here. In general, they want a low-crime lifestyle without the expense of an upscale strip mall nearby. They’re rugged. They think on their feet. They generally come from working-class, immigrant, or union roots–or are at least attached deeply to them. They love at least the idea of diversity (more on that later). And these old houses and their potential is what makes a lot of them sing. Even if they’ve never touched a saw, new homeowners around here take passion in learning how to care for these old places. And all the renters I’ve talked to love the historic character of their apartments and want to be a part of shepherding them on.
I want to know what is already here–in the gifts, talents, passions, and purses of my people–that could help us to help ourselves. Another reason I’m so crazy about asset-mapping.
What are your ideas? How could we mobilize what we already have to improve this housing mess?
Coming: Part II, Diversity
A Thread of Connection 