North Minneapolis residents seeing uptick in crime displaced from Merwin Liquors, Winner gas station

A blue house with white trim in north Minneapolis' Jordan neighborhood was repeatedly burglarized this summer, trashed and stripped of its porch railings. Service calls since January include reports of shootings, trespassing and fights. Plastic flowers cover the tree out front, an ad hoc memorial to an unknown person.

The house at 21st and Fremont avenues belongs to Urban Homeworks, a nonprofit affordable housing developer that had planned to sell it as a starter home. But when waves of squatters moved in and began tearing the place apart, the developer quickly lost control.

Then a 12-unit apartment building that Urban Homeworks ran next door became a drug-dealing hub, forcing it to vacate the building.

A Star Tribune analysis of Minneapolis police data found that recorded violence, gunfire, property crimes, drug use and other incidents within a quarter-mile radius of the two Urban Homeworks properties have jumped 20% after dipping last year.

AsaleSol Young, Urban Homeworks' executive director, attributes the uptick to the displacement of crime from Merwin Liquors and the Winner Gas Station, a half-mile to the east, after law enforcement cracked down on illegal activity there.

"The activity had to go somewhere," Young said. "One of the things that we're really cognizant of, in community and in conversations around safety, is that if we don't actually address the root causes, the activity does simply relocate itself."

Last fall, the Attorney General's Office launched an investigation with the Hennepin County and Minneapolis City attorney's offices into crime around Merwin and Winner, including three large-scale shootings in 2022.

By pressuring the businesses to take responsibility for people on their properties, reports of violence and drug dealing at W. Broadway and Lyndale Avenue significantly decreased by spring, the Attorney General's Office announced in May.

Even so, people who live and work near the W. Broadway business corridor say they continue to see the same people struggling with homelessness, poverty and untreated addiction — only elsewhere in the neighborhood.

Ousman Camara, owner of K's Grocery and Deli on W. Broadway, said he's seeing more of his teenage customers falling under the influence of fentanyl, a drug that seems to change young people so dramatically that they'll shoplift one day and come in to apologize the next, saying they had no control over their actions.

"Getting those kids into something like rehab ... will help, but just pushing them somewhere else, it's not fixing the problem," Camara said. "It's just sending them to other businesses."

Bill Magnuson, a crime prevention specialist for Fourth Precinct police, acknowledged that better security at Merwin Liquors pushed drug users and dealers into other parts of the neighborhood.

City officials noticed more squatting and drug use in vacant properties as well as RVs parked on 21st Avenue, Magnuson said. They condemned and boarded up the drug houses and told the RVs owners to move, offering resource sheets with information about nonprofits that could provide food and housing.

On Aug. 30, police executed search warrants on two RVs and a third vehicle at 22nd and Aldrich avenues. They arrested two women in their early 20s and Larry McGee, 41, who was charged with felony possession of cocaine and released about a week later.

Ravie Singh, a board member of the West Broadway Business and Area Coalition, said he's concerned that if the root causes of loitering, burglaries and addiction aren't addressed, essential neighborhood resources will abandon the area like Walgreens did last winter.

The West Broadway Livability Coalition — a group of business owners, law enforcement officers, city staffers and neighborhood activists — has discussed the need for more outreach.

Singh said he once spotted a young man cooking a substance on a scrap of tin foil in the Hawthorn Crossings shopping plaza, and asked if he needed help. The man said he'd gotten kicked out of the place he was staying, so he turned to drugs to desensitize himself from getting jumped and to forget his hunger.

Singh called the addiction nonprofit Twin Cities Recovery Project (TCRP) across the street, and an outreach worker collected the young man within a half-hour.

"If we have groups that are out there, that have resources and are talking to folks — you might not be able to save everyone, but you never know," said Singh.

A methadone clinic is now under construction in a largely vacant corner of the Hawthorn Crossings center. It's one of two clinics that Community Medical Services, a national network of addiction treatment centers, is opening in the Twin Cities.

Treatment director Liz Scott said her W. Broadway outreach team has begun to canvas the neighborhood three days a week with other local organizations, including TCRP and NorthPoint Health and Wellness Center.

"If there's open-air drug use that is taking place, we will go and talk to people. We will reverse overdoses; we just had one the other day," Scott said. "We do have a presence, even though we're not officially open yet."

Nearby resident Bruce Barron expressed ire with rental property owners, the police who often don't arrive in time to catch shooters and what he perceives as a complacency felt by criminals to bring stolen goods into north Minneapolis — such as what happened in August, when a Maserati lifted from a Golden Valley dealership wound up in his neighborhood.

At the same time, he said he was affected by the human tragedy amid the repeated break-ins, drug use and prostitution he witnessed on 21st Avenue this summer.

"I don't come away with believing that what I'm seeing are bad people," Barron said. "Some of them probably are ... but the resources all around don't take our dealers away, or treat those people that don't really want to get treated. It's a real circle, and it isn't just a matter of policing."

Star Tribune data reporter Jeff Hargarten contributed to this story.