other steps of how you spend the money effectively,”
says Stuart Ackerberg, founder of Catalyst Community Partners and principal of commercial real estate
developer the Ackerberg Group, of the fundamental
flaw in how the ever-worsening situation has been
handled. “How do you truly create leadership? How
do you create entrepreneurs? How do you empower
people? How do you get from point A to point B?
The people in [North Minneapolis] are as talented as
the people in every other community, they just haven’t
had that piece.”
THE GATHERING PEACE
By THe BeGiNNiNG of the last decade, the city
was ready to be more proactive in its approach to
North Minneapolis. They began by saturating West
Broadway with law enforcement, Christenson says,
which on its own wasn’t enough, so they turned to
a “prosecution solution” whereby they prosecuted
and locked up as many of the chronic West Broadway offenders as possible.
“Now the chronics are gone. They used to gather
there— 20, 30 of them—at Broadway and Lyndale
and harass traffic, commit nuisance crimes and deal
drugs,” says Christenson.
However, the criminal component—still an issue
to be certain—is merely an overt symptom of the larger
problem: atrophy due to perpetual lack of sustained
investment and development.
“Since 1950 it’s been a steady decline to the point
where, when the mayor and council took a stand in
2003, one of the best commercial properties on the
street was 1101 West Broadway, and that was a city-
owned property that had been mothballed for 15
years,” says Christenson in seeming disbelief. “The
city was showing up as part of the problem. We were
running a boarded and vacant property—and not
very well! And there was a lot of boarded and va-
cant properties along West Broadway. There was
no investment and no hint of an investor interested.
The city of Minneapolis doesn’t develop proper-
ties. it looks to the private sector to do that. When
there isn’t a return on investment—that is, you’re in
a commercial corridor and you can’t make a prof-
it—you turn that over to a nonprofit developer. But
there were none on West Broadway.”
Stuck, Minneapolis spent 14 months develop-
ing an over 100 page plan for the turnaround of
North Minneapolis, West Broadway Alive, and pro-
ceeded to approach one of its savvier commercial
investors for help.
“it’s not just people no longer putting bars on windows.
it’s fixing it up and investing in it, knowing it’s going to be safe.”
“So i went to Stuart Ackerberg who was then
the leading investor on Hennepin in Uptown and i
said, ‘Stu, i want to show you the market value chart
for the city of Minneapolis,’” says Christenson. “And
he said, ‘Why do i care about the market values in
Minneapolis?’ And i said, ‘Because this shows you
where market value growth occurs. Green is a lot of
growth and red is no growth at all.’ And he looked
at it and saw that Lake Street had grown all the way
down the line, against all odds. Franklin, all green.
Nicollet, all green. it was market value growth on all
corridors in the city. And i said to him, ‘The next one
is West Broadway.’”
—sUe Wollan Fan, Catalyst
CommUnity Partners
The call to action stirred Ackerberg and, as Christenson says, while he was hoping Ackerberg would
step in as a for-profit developer, instead he stepped-in
in a nonprofit to capacity, electing to give over his margins entirely to Catalyst.
“He’s one of these guys with a terrific business
mind and a deep, spiritual sense of purpose. While
he’s been very good at approaching real estate from a
business perspective, West Broadway has captured his
public spirit. We’ve benefitted from that,” says Chris-
