Defending Community: The Struggle for Alternative Redevelopment in Cedar-Riverside

7. The Struggle Within

CHAPTER 7 The Struggle Within I think the biggest failure, and a very big one, was that we ended up with a neighborhood that was less of a community than when we started. We dIdn't sustain a political movement, and the sense of community has been fragmented . I can live with the mIstakes in the financing and construction. But we ended up dissIpating the political energy. -Tlm Mungavan intervJew, 1991 THE NEIGHBORHOOD surged into redevelopment into the mid1980s . Its membership in the governing regime intensified beyond connections to council members to include neighborhood activists hired to work with the MCDA. By December 1983, even under the burden of PAC funding cuts, plans had crystallized for other parcels acquired with the Section 8 project. The initial plans called for seven two-bedroom units, thirteen one-bedroom un.its, and two three-bedroom units, again designed by the residents. The project was another product of the CDC-Brighton Development Corporation partnership , with an estimated cost of $790,000. Financing for this stage was to come from limited-partner, or "syndication," funding and from roll-over from the Seven Corners apartments and Union Homes. It eventually became the Watchcat co-op, the most focused of all the coops , with nineteen units of housing, including eight Section 8 units, on a single block. Neighborhood activists also succeeded in getting the city to approve a plan to rehabilitate a commercial building in Seven Corners for much needed "single-room occupancy" housing for low-income individuals in mid-1984. Cedar-Riverside had historically housed some very low-income individuals who were perpetually vulnerable to homelessness. Combined with rehabilitation of the Dudley Riggs Copyrighted Material 171 comedy nightclub on the first floor, the second-floor space would be rehabilitated to preserve eight low-rent rooming units. Even this project involved more than providing low-rent housing. The impetus for the development came from the character of the residents of the building, who had lived there between five and twenty-five years and developed a community of mutual support that would be destroyed if they were forced to relocate. While the neighborhood housing was being rehabilitated, however, the social fabric began to unravel. The businesses became financially independent from neighborhood residents. And the separate tasks of the PAC and CDC brought these two organizations into conflict. The CDC developed one focus to attract funding sources to maintain affordability. The PAC developed a different, and somewhat antagonistic , focus to maintain community control of the development process. Struggles between residents and businesses, between separate resident groups, and between the PAC and the CDC broke into the open. At issue was the direction neighborhood redevelopment should take and what direction it had already taken. The capitalcommunity contradiction tore into the community with a vengeance in this period, disrupting the housing co-ops, threatening the neighborhood institutions, and expanding the disastrous impact of Cedar Square West. Sources of Internal Conflict The conflict that erupted in the late 1980s derived from pressures imposed on the neighborhood from without and from changes in the community itself. Kenneth Benson (1977, 1983) has developed an approach called "dialectical methodology" to study organizational change. Dialectical methodology is based on Marx's theory of social change, in which particular forms of social organization set into motion processes that result in contradictory outcomes, forcing new social forms to arise to solve those contradictions. Benson adapts this approach to study organizations, attempting to locate the source of contradictions between the goals of the organization and their implementation . In the case of Cedar-Riverside the contradictions between capital and community in the political opportunity structure created contradictions between the community-control goal and the housingaffordability goal of the neighborhood movement. The pressures from without came from changes in the funding opportunities for urban redevelopment in general and for community172 Copyrighted Material Chapter 7 based development in Cedar-Riverside in particular. The power of capital to disrupt all the hard work of community building made itself felt through the economic constraints imposed on community-based development. After the planning of Watchcat co-op, funds in the city began to dry up. Urban fiscal strain had settled into the Twin Cities, producing not an acute crisis but a chronic condition. In one response the city centralized the tax-increment financing and redistributed it across the city, including to downtown. The neighborhood could no longer be assured of strong city funding...