The two-story red brick home dates to the early 20th century, and like many in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, it’s showing its age. It could use tender loving care: paint, lawn care and surface maintenance. If the announcement from Mayor Carter’s team was any indication, it’s about to get it. The house was sold to Anthony Bradford, the first recipient of the city’s Inheritance Fund, and he and his cat were excited to move in.
The program is a good example of the Carter administration approach to policy, a small-scale closely targeted effort aimed at specific historical injustices. In this case, it mitigates one of the city’s most notorious decisions: the routing of the central I-94 freeway through the then-thriving Rondo neighborhood, home to the vast majority of St. Paul’s African Americans. Thousands of people were displaced, families uprooted, and generational wealth lost due to political and automobile expediency.
With the Inheritance Fund program, there’s some small measure of justice as descendants of “old Rondo” can apply for targeted home ownership and renovation funding. Bradford is the first to receive city assistance for a down payment, and hopefully not the last.
Very specific reparations around housing
The Inheritance Fund program is one of a few “pilot projects” that Mayor Melvin Carter has prioritized during his second term. Along with a small city-funded guaranteed income program and the city’s nascent Office of Financial Empowerment, the idea is to make a priority of devoting admittedly scarce city dollars to what could one day be transformative ideas.
In this case, it’s a fund aimed at very specific reparations around housing. With a budget allocation passed earlier this year, St. Paul is using about $2.5 million from previously existing programs, like the affordable housing trust fund, to subsidize home equity for descendants of those displaced during the 1960s. The funding comes in the form of a forgivable loan that amortizes after a 15-year period, up to $110,000 for a first-time home purchase or $80,000 for renovations of an existing St. Paul home.
It’s an important symbol because, these days, the racial gulf in wealth stemming from housing inequality overwhelms nearly every aspect of American life. It’s particularly wide in the Twin Cities, where the black-white gap in homeownership is higher than anywhere else in the country. Nowhere is this history felt more keenly than in St. Paul, where the Rondo story is well documented and has become a national case study of the damage of freeway construction.
“We can’t right those historical wrongs,” the mayor told the audience gathered in front of the Frogtown home. “But what we can do is to provide descendants of old Rondo, like Mr. Bradford, the opportunity to reclaim that lost value to rebuild those family inheritances that were gutted to build the freeway that we stand not far from today.”
The 22-year-old Anthony Bradford is a particularly compelling candidate for the application. As he explained to the small crowd gathered on the Edmund Avenue sidewalk, his great-grandfather owned both a duplex and business in St. Paul, and the former was destroyed during freeway construction.
Unique Rondo history
During the press conference, both Mayor Carter and Mikeya Griffin, executive director of the Rondo Community Land Trust, referred to themselves as “children of Rondo.” It’s an all-too-common moniker in St. Paul, referring to anyone whose family was displaced during the construction. In St. Paul’s political and cultural leadership, there are many of these connections.
Partly, that’s due to the strong legacy of the old neighborhood. It’s forever a credit to the city’s African-American community that Rondo lives on so strongly today. There are dozens of neighborhoods all over the country that were similarly demolished by freeway construction in U.S. cities, but few of them are as well remembered. The work to bring attention to the losses in Rondo, including a dozen books and decades of events, is something special.
“When at 18, I was homeless,” said Anthony Bradford, who works today for both U.S. Bank Corporation and Domino’s Pizza, “[I was] coming from a place of knowing that I need something, to working hard for it now, and being in an environment where I know I can do it, and I know I have support to do this.”
Conclusion: scope and scale and a trial
In the U.S., most talk around reparations for past injustices have taken place firmly in the realm of utopian abstraction. By contrast, this moment in St. Paul is refreshingly specific. More than anything, the funding offers an example of a way forward. Rondo Land Trust’s Mikeya Griffin cited a study that suggested $157 million dollars in home equity were lost to Rondo residents in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s easy to imagine what that level of investment would translate to today, with compounded interest over generations.
This funding, and this home, represent a concrete step in the opposite direction.
On the other hand, one caveat comes from the reality of St. Paul’s housing market. Anthony Bradford’s Frogtown house sold for $229,000, so that his portion of the montage still amounts to around $140,000. That’s a sum that, not too long ago, would be large for the area. Given the housing shortage in St. Paul and the entire Twin Cities metro, neighborhoods like Frogtown have seen sharp increases in value for the kinds of “starter homes” that Bradford is purchasing.
With St. Paul’s limited fiscal capacity, it’s easy to see how $90K in assistance would go farther if housing prices stopped escalating. The more the city can keep housing costs down, particularly through encouraging new housing construction, the more these kinds of programs can help people most in need.
The other lesson is that this program is just a signpost, not a solution. Because the fund is so small — it has already stopped accepting applications — the main outcome is to illustrate the scope of the problem and outline a solution. The existing money is a drop in the bucket of what’s needed for restorative justice.
That said, every drop matters. The fund is making a difference for Anthony Broadford and, hopefully, many others.
“Let’s all make sure this is worth it,” said Bradford, just before joining the mayor to cut the red ribbon barring his front door. “There is so much more that I can do in order to pay it back.”
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