SOUTHSIDE COMMUNITY BUILDER

The decade of the 1960s, with its anti-war protests, urban unrest and tumultuous politics, was coming to end. Now, in South Minneapolis, some young activists had turned their attention to a cause closer to home – the campaign to save the city’s Seward West neighborhood from the urban renewal bulldozers.
While the struggle to shape the future of this historic blue-collar district was underway, two groups of community activists with very different operating styles joined forces to promote community-based redevelopment in Seward.
One of the of the groups, calling itself Neighborhood Research and Development(NRD), was based at a local church, Trinity Lutheran. NRD’s aim was to provide housing for low and moderate income people, some of whom would be displaced by the city’s Seward West urban renewal project. Later NRD would partner with an advisory body, known as the Seward West Project Area Committee (PAC), established by the city of Minneapolis to oversee the Seward project. The PAC may have been set up by the city but its members had their own ideas about urban renewal and its implementation in their neighborhood.
The NRD-PAC partnership created a new organization with long-term staying power. Over the span of 50 years, this grass roots group would change its name several times and reinvent itself to take on new challenges and opportunities. Today, known as Redesign Inc, this unique community organization has helped to reshape a broad swath of South Minneapolis.

Origins
The NRP-PAC alliance took a while to jell. The Trinity group took the initiative, reaching out to the PAC, but the Seward activists were not at all sure they wanted to link up with these “do gooders” from outside the neighborhood.
Trinity Church, itself, had succumbed to the bulldozers in 1962, but those bulldozers were not making way for urban renewal. Instead, they were clearing a path for Interstate 94, the freeway that would connect downtown Minneapolis with downtown St. Paul. The congregation may have lacked a building but it had money in the bank from the sale of its property to the Minnesota Highway Department. With a strong commitment to social justice, congregation members decided they would use some of the church funds to purchase run-down houses in the neighborhood and sell them to low- and moderate-income home buyers.
While Trinity was making plans for a housing initiative in the early 1970s, the PAC was taking on an increasingly dominate role in Seward West, prodding city’s Housing and Redevelopment Authority to change its focus from clearance to rehabilitation.
The PAC was composed of young activists, members of the counter culture, some of whom proudly identified themselves as hippies. In the 1960s, they had started moving into the aging blue-collar neighborhood around Milwaukee Avenue, the narrow two-block long street lined with modest workers cottages built in the 1880s. One local humorously quipped that Milwaukee Avenue was a place where “the houses were close together but the people were spaced out!”
The PAC leaders included a vociferous, hard charging young school teacher named Tony Scallon. The renewal battles in Seward helped launch Scallon’s political career, culminating with his chairmanship of the city council’s powerful Community Development Committee. (More than 40 years later, Tony Scallon would retain close ties to Redesign, serving as a member of the group’s Board of Directors.)
On the PAC, Scallon teamed up with a young architect named Bob Roscoe, who helped bring the historic preservation movement to Seward. Roscoe oversaw Milwaukee Avenue’s revitalization. Later, he chaired the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.
The PAC activists imbued with an anti-establishment ideology, took an aggressive stance in dealing with the HRA. In one of its campaign flyers, the activists warned Seward West residents not to “let the Mpls Housing Authority cast a shadow over our neighborhood…. REMEMBER once the ‘man’ downtown mutilates our neighborhood it can never be replaced.”
Scallon, Roscoe and their followers opposed the HRA clearance plan, but they wanted to replace it with a community-led effort to rehab the houses in Seward West and make them available to current neighborhood residents. In that way, they shared a common cause with the people from Trinity Church
Dave Raymond, a leader of Trinity group, remembers those early efforts to connect with the PAC. “They viewed us as outsiders and they rebuffed our early efforts to partner with them. We thought they were pretty scruffy and a little crazy but we knew they were doing some interesting things. After meeting with them for a couple of months, we decided to join them. We basically gave away our money and our corporation to them.”
“I guess it was our Norwegian background coming into play,” Raymond went on to explain. “There is this dictum against boasting. You are not supposed to flaunt yourself. You go out and do good things but you are not supposed to talk about it. That’s why we let Trinity take a back seat and let the people from the PAC take control.”
As its first project, SWR wanted to purchase six houses from the HRA, rehab them and sell them to neighborhood residents. But almost immediately, Redesign ran into a roadblock when the local HUD office refused to approve the plan. Then, “arm wrestling” HUD with muscle provided by the PAC, SWR was finally able to persuade the local housing officials to let their organization move ahead with its first project.
HUD’s green light launched Redesign’s long-term effort to promote community development in and around Seward. During its first few years, the non-profit group rehabbed several dozen single family homes, and developed a series of low income and market rate housing projects in its South Minneapolis neighborhood.
By the early 1980s, Redesign was at a cross roads. Many of its early housing objectives had been achieved, and some in the neighborhood wondered if there was a future for this unique organization born through the marriage of two unlikely partners.
But soon, Redesign rejuvenated itself, moved in a new direction and took on a monumental housing stabilization effort that would define its community building legacy.
Watch for part two of Redesign’s Early Years an upcoming issue of the Longfellow Nokomis Messenger.