Minneapolis hopes a tougher vacancy policy will clean up its most stubborn nuisance properties

The condemned buildings along W. Broadway have for years vexed and depressed the mom-and-pop shops trying to earn a living on north Minneapolis’ Black business corridor. Even when major investments were made to redevelop the Capri Theater, Juxtaposition Arts and the 927 Building, W. Broadway remained afflicted with boarded and graffitied storefronts that undercut hope for its resurgence.

Myriad factors contribute to the blight: absentee property owners, uncertainty about the proposed route of the Blue Line light-rail extension, and the city’s historically passive regulation. But with the rollout this summer of a tougher policy that could triple fines, the neighbors of chronically vacant properties hope tangible change won’t be too far behind.

“Some of those buildings have been empty for years, even for decades and were dilapidated with no signal to the community of when they would be active again,” City Council Member Robin Wonsley, who sponsored the new ordinance, said at a news conference last month in front of the shuttered Burger King at 818 W. Broadway.

The old burger palace is owned by 818 Partners LLC, which shares an address with Engelsma Construction of New Hope, and was leased to the Burger King corporation. The divided responsibility has created a “perfect storm” of finger-pointing that has frustrated the city’s attempts to get either party to shape the place up, said Erik Hansen, the city’s director of community planning and economic development.

With the new ordinance, vacant properties owners would have two years to work with the city to rehab, sell or demolish sites, with a one-year extension available to those demonstrating progress. Afterward, the city will fine every code violation up to $2,000 a month.

In the past, a property owner had to pay a vacancy fee of $7,000 a year. Now, they can be charged up to $24,000.

The city’s registry of 300 vacant buildings shows a heavy concentration of condemned buildings in north Minneapolis. They include nine commercial properties along W. Broadway between the former BJ’s Liquor Lounge, the last neighborhood strip joint, and Charles El-Amin’s Fish House.

Two of the buildings — 1400 and 1408 — were forfeited to Hennepin County, which is holding them in stasis pending discussions on the Blue Line route. The city has owned 1001 W. Broadway, a building wrapped in photographs of community members with the faces slashed out, since its previous owner died about 15 years ago. It’s damaged beyond repair and slated for demolition next year.

“When you’ve got a lot of vacant buildings, the inability to be able to capture foot traffic is a big issue,” said Kristel Porter, executive director of the West Broadway Business and Area Coalition. “We’ve had a lot of businesses that were actually doing very well and have relied on a lot of pop-up activities that happen in our community ... but we’ve lost them to Midtown Global Market, Central Avenue, Lake Street.”

Several owners of vacant buildings on W. Broadway did not respond to questions from the Minnesota Star Tribune. But over the years the city has interacted with owners overwhelmed by financial distress, those who inherited properties they never wanted, and those who won’t spend money on keeping up buildings from which they’ve squeezed all economic value. Some W. Broadway boosters suspect these owners are holding out for eminent domain to make way for the light rail.

Council Member Jeremiah Ellison has heard a mix of excuses, none of which justifies perpetual neglect, he said.

“Look, if you’re a landlord who just got in over your head, city staff is willing to engage with you in order to activate your building,” he said. “If it’s, ‘I’m sitting on this because I think I can land a huge windfall down the line,’ well, we’re going to make that a lot tougher for you.”

Some of the loudest advocates for a stronger response to vacant homes are the people who live near the apartments of C. David George, Minneapolis’ most mysterious landlord.

In 2022, George’s 40-unit apartment in Loring Park caught fire after being condemned, boarded up and repeatedly broken into by squatters. Within a few months, another George building in the Wedge caught fire and was reduced to a giant pile of rubble that wasn’t cleared for a year.

Loring Park resident Taylor Dahlin began posting threads about George’s properties and their fire risk to other nearby buildings.

“Multiple people have been injured in these incidents at George’s buildings ... but miraculously no one has lost their life,” Dahlin said.

The city has charged George tens of thousands of dollars in special assessments to board up one building, but the octogenarian landlord would not communicate with city staffers to clean up the fire debris at another building, instead relying on lawyer Jon Breyer to convey his wishes. George could not be reached for comment, and Breyer did not respond.

As of 2022, there were 76,500 fewer housing units than needed in the Twin Cities metro area, according to the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs.

“Considering the housing crisis that we’re in, when we have literal units that are fallow while people are struggling to get off on the streets, it’s ridiculous,” said Forrester Pack of Fill Empty Homes Minneapolis, a Prospect Park resident who has organized tours of vacant homes and lobbied for state bills to go after chronic vacancies.

George’s Lagoon Terrace apartment complex in Uptown represents dozens of underutilized units. Of the cluster’s five old brownstones, three are vacant. They’re occasionally vandalized and broken into by squatters but otherwise structurally sound. A handful of tenants still live quietly in the remaining two, doing what they can to forestall the slow decay of a complex located in what once had been the epicenter of Minneapolis culture, just behind the Uptown Theater.

Not listed in the city registry are W. Broadway’s vacant lots, grassy remnants of previously demolished buildings.

A city-owned lot next to KB Brown’s print shop Wolfpack Promotionals, dubbed Freedom Square, used to be marked by hypostyle poles draped with a silvery fabric with no obvious purpose. When an errant driver crashed into the lot, the city took the poles down, leaving the ground pockmarked with ankle-twisting holes.

Brown wants to expand his shop onto Freedom Square and build a mixed-use building with housing for youth in his criminal diversion mentoring program. He said he shared the design with city staffers, with whom he’s negotiating the price of Freedom Square.

“Getting them to actually put it in community hands so we can activate the spaces, pulling teeth is easier,” said Brown, who believes the government owners of distressed properties along W. Broadway bear responsibility for its image.

Hansen acknowledges the city has been “party” to the practices of historical redlining and relying on a complaint-based system of monitoring vacant properties that favors groups of people who feel empowered to complain because their complaints have been taken seriously.

“If we know it’s vacant, and they pay us a fee to monitor it but it doesn’t get back into service, it creates this expectation that we’re not going to do anything,” he said. “This new ordinance that’s in place basically takes away that shield for people with vacant properties, hopefully opening up more communication.”

Government ownership is a last resort, Hansen said. The city wants to identify vacant buildings before they’ve had a chance to become so run down as to have lost all value, jolt property owners into action and avoid tax forfeiture. And they’ll assess water use to flag vacancies that haven’t been reported.

The buildings that have been in the vacant building registry the longest will present the greatest challenges, even under the new policy, because some of them will cost more to renovate than they’re worth, Hansen said.