WELCOME TO WEST BROADWAY
Basketball bastion. Minneapolis mainstreet.
The idea is that if we throw out a couple gentle, alliterative monikers to start the story your impression of North
Minneapolis might be softened.
Sovereign slum. Crime capital.
Or not.
North Minneapolis is many problems. It’s a problem
for Minneapolis: a blight. It’s a problem for Twin Citians:
a shady spot of town. And, oh yeah, it’s a problem for the
60,000 souls who exist there, eat there, educate there, were
born there and, inevitably, will whither there: a prison.
Its heart pulses from West Broadway, a place thoroughly annexed from the rest of town. I-94 forms the
eastern ;ank, Plymouth Avenue traps the southern,
Penn Avenue forti;es the western wall and 26th pins
in the north. Save the 20,000 people who employ West
Broadway as their savvy, western suburbs to downtown
commuter shortcut, most wouldn’t even know where exactly North Minneapolis was.
But what did North Minneapolis do to become this
black hole of drive-by goodwill and broken promises, and
how, after 40 years of disinvestment, misinvestment [and
everything in between], is it going to become anything else?
Catalyst Community Partners think they have the answers.
But can [yet another] group of upper-middle-class—
mainly white—outsiders really be part of the solution?
« West Broadway
Avenue can be
a busy corridor,
but busy does not
necessarily mean
thriving.
