On Saturday, September 21 at 2:00 p.m., the Powderhorn Park Neighborhood Association (PPNA), the Minneapolis Urban League and the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP) will host a Yes, In Our Backyard groundbreaking celebration for a new six-unit affordable housing development at E. 35th St. and Bloomington Ave. S.

The new development will contain three- and four-bedroom individual family units that will be built on a former Super America site that has been vacant and in disrepair for the past year. The development is historic as it marks the first time in the 75-year history of the Minneapolis Urban League that the agency has ventured into the business of housing development. More importantly, the six-unit development represents replacement housing under the terms of the 1995 Hollman consent decree aimed at deconcentrating family public housing in the city of Minneapolis.

"We are looking to build in non-impacted places of the city or areas that do not have a high level of poverty," said Minneapolis Urban League President and Chief Executive Officer Clarence Hightower." Those areas are hard to find. For the Urban League to succeed in this, we need to be able to develop units in north and south Minneapolis."

Powderhorn Park neighborhood residents and business owners involved in the project say that although planning for the project was not always pleasant, consensus was eventually built to welcome public housing to the neighborhood. PPNA invested $82,000 of NRP funds in the $1 million project. Construction on the housing development will begin in October. Other partners in the project include the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA), the Family Housing Fund and the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

For more information about the events surrounding the Hollman consent decree, you may want to read a report that is now available on the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs Web site at http://www.cura.umn.edu/publications/Hollman.html.

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