[Mpls] Re: Peter McLaughlin/ Peddling Nostalgia for the Home Wrecker Era/Who's buying?

[wmmarks]

PennBroKeith at cs.com wrote:

>Keith says:
>
> He [McLaughlin] has expressed a disturbing nostalgia for the period from Mayor 
>Don Frasier thru Mayor SSB. This was the era of municipally created 
>homelessness in Mpls. I was personal witness to the disregard, contempt, malice, and demolition of housing in the core neighborhoods both North and South in this 
>era. ... I watched terrific, and not so terrific 
>housing get condemned, boarded up and demolished over and over and over in the 
>hoods. Often an unpaid water bill, and hence termination of an essential utility 
>was the first incremental step down Demolition Lane. And Demolition Lane was 
>right next to Homeless Avenue. They ran parallel through all the core 
>neighborhoods. 
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>
I have to disagree with Keith that what McLaughlin is saying is 
nostalgic in nature.

I grant you that houses were coming down right and left and it was a 
crying shame for some of them and an awful necessity for others of them. 
It was a daily, stark reminder of what 30 years of red lining does to a 
city's core. However, beginning in Fraser's last term and proceeding 
into SSB's two terms, there was the creation and implementation of the 
NRP. Fraser, SSB, and McLaughlin, among others, did the heavy lifting to 
produce it. In the first go-round of the NRP the ideal was to put most 
of the allotted money to housing issues and the greatest amounts of 
money went to core city neighborhoods, Phillips (then one gigantic 
neighborhood of almost 18,000 souls) topping the list with an $18.X 
million allotment.

However, neighborhoods had to strenuously fight MCDA to save housing. It 
was MCDA's belief at the time that the core city was failing, in part, 
because its housing was so old and that without taking out housing and 
replacing it with new housing, the core city would not recover 
economically. I don't buy that entirely, and I don't know whether it is 
just developer cant or whether there is some merit to that argument.

McLaughlin gets a great deal of joy from watching people get up on their 
hind legs and take back their neighborhoods. The NRP certainly produced 
buy-in to neighborhood refurbishing for hundreds and hundreds of 
neighborhood people. So I don't think it's nostalgia, it's that seeing 
people take command of their neighborhoods really floats his boat.

>WizardMarks, Central
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