Minnesota and private partners need to support rebuilding inner-city commercial corridors

K.B. and Katie Brown, who have owned Wolfpack Promotionals in north Minneapolis for six years, are back in business on W. Broadway.

The commercial printer and provider of branded apparel and business gifts replaced broken windows and other damage incurred during the riots on W. Broadway and E. Lake Street that followed the police killing of George Floyd.

Wolfpack was one of 130 small businesses on the North Side that benefited from a $1.1 million fund, administered by the Northside Economic Opportunity Network, the business-development agency. That's about $8,500 apiece. Wolfpack, with minimal damage, reopened quickly, though the Browns had to let go some of their employees and are running it themselves.

Many shops have shuttered indefinitely amid the one-two punch of COVID-19 and riot damage. But not enough to get things going has happened in the 10 weeks since wreckage in late May and early June. Now, it's reinvestment hour for the good of the city and the region.

Hundreds of businesses were damaged in the Broadway corridor, on Lake Street in Minneapolis and on University Avenue in St. Paul. Rebuilding cost estimates run as high as $500 million. The state Department of Commerce estimates that private insurance will cover only half.

Neither the Legislature nor the cities have stepped up with meaningful aid to businesses yet. Something over $10 million in donations has been collected by local business-support groups from mostly private donors so far.

Shauen Pearce, Mayor Jacob Frey's economic-development officer, has joined with neighborhood business organizations, such as the African American Leadership Forum, Latino Economic Development Center, Neighborhood Development Center, Native American Community Development Institute, as well as small-business financier Community Reinvestment Fund and the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce to form Minneapolis Forward: Community Now Coalition.

This diverse-but-focused group has designed the structure to rebuild stronger commercial and cultural corridors, led disproportionately by minority and immigrant owners. They have names such as Taqueria Los Ocampo, Seward Pharmacy, Wendy's House of Soul, Pineda Tacos and Eastlake Craft Brewery. The owners, around for a few years to a century, hail from Minnesota, as well as Mexico to Mogadishu.

They enrich our culture and our economy with their auto-repair shops, restaurants, art galleries, coffee shops and more that often occupy what had been vacant spaces in old buildings on frayed-edge inner-city avenues.

The city has a case to make for state investment.

Many visitors to Midtown Global Market and E. Lake shops and ethnic restaurants hail from outside Minneapolis. And folks from the suburbs will drive to W. Broadway to eat at Breaking Bread Café or Sammy's Avenue Eatery, or take in a production at the restored Capri Theater.

The state collects about $620 million from Minneapolis in sales taxes annually and returns about $80 million in "local government aid." The city, also the financial, economic and cultural hub of the region, with 100,000-plus workers alone downtown (before COVID-19), on balance gets back about 40 cents for every dollar in taxes it contributes to the state for suburban roads and rural schools.

Minneapolis also hosts the disproportionate share of nonprofits, social-service agencies, treatment centers, immigrant-settlement agencies, affordable housing for the working poor and disabled, and other outfits who work with those for whom we are called to serve.

We need to assist small-business and cultural entrepreneurs recover in the commercial corridors they helped revive.

'With exception, these people want to stay in the community," Pearce said. "Many of them were not building owners. We're finding some of them temporary space [at the Global Market] and elsewhere."

The city has committed $3 million to a growing fund that will help some small proprietors eventually become their own building owners and landlords to other entrepreneurs, Frey noted last week. It's going to take much more.

Pearce is gathering numbers to make a renewed case that should aim at $150 million in vital loan and grant funds through the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development and its community-lending partners. Private partners should match at least $50 million

As a city kid who has lived most of my life between E. Franklin and E. 54th streets, I'm eager to see the rebuilding begin. And it's only fair for government to help small businesses since examples of largesse to big ones, even some run by billionaires, are easy to find.