Downtown's Next Renovation?

Over time, Elliot Park’s well-heeled residents moved farther and farther out of downtown. After World War II, blocks were cleared for parking needed by suburban commuters. The old housing stock was no longer in demand by a postwar middle class hungry for detached housing and lots of private green space.

Elliot Park became poorer and poorer. The building of the interstates in the ’60s and ’70s isolated the neighborhood from the rest of south and southeast Minneapolis. And in the late 1970s, construction of the Metrodome clear-cut yet more blocks. The Dome’s boosters imagined that development would sprout up naturally around the stadium. But outside of a couple of bars that never happened.

Elliot Park’s business district lingered on into the 1970s. Then one by one, the storefronts turned out their lights. Like inner-urban neighborhoods across the country, Elliot Park slid into permanent decline.

Or not.

Luring Wallets

In the mid–1970s, perhaps Elliot Park’s lowest ebb, residents formed EPNI to address crime and blight. In the 1990s, they set up the Neighborhood Improvement Company to redevelop some of the area’s worse-for-wear structures.

Its first project was turning a historic set of row houses on 16th Street into the Old-Town-In-Town cooperative. At the same time,

Elliot Park actively embraced its status as a low-income neighborhood.

Several social-service agencies and facilities operate here—chemical dependency treatment programs, transitional housing for various groups, assisted living for seniors. Perhaps the largest of these entities is Aeon, founded in 1986 and now one of the largest affordable-housing developers in the metro area.

“Aeon purchased a lot of old apartment buildings that otherwise would have been demolished,” preserving the historic structures and turning them into affordable housing, says EPNI Executive Director Susan Braun. It now has 836 units in 12 buildings in the neighborhood, including the St. Barnabas Apartments for homeless youth and the Alliance Apartments for recovering alcoholics.