Cities 07

Midtown Makeover: The Effect of Condoization On Business Owners
Kaitlin Wiedeman, April 30, 2007

INTRODUCTION AND THESIS

As you walk through the city of Minneapolis many different neighborhoods and communities surround you. Downtown, Uptown, Marcy Parks, Como, South Minneapolis, North Minneapolis, Dinkytown, and the recently added Midtown are some examples of the places you might encounter as you make your way through the city. Race and class help determine who populate each area, and these social constructions can be detrimental to the city when hierarchal relationships are created. I have decided to research that the effects of condoization on storeowners and businesses in Minneapolis’s Midtown area. Theorists Manual Castells contends that the increase in technology creates a hierarchal relationship between the classes, theorist Jane Jacobs believes that sidewalks are the key in a working and efficient city, and theorist Sharon Zukin marks that large attraction sites lessen the diversity and culture heterogeneity of a city. Reading the works of Castells, Jacobs, and Zukin helped me form a prediction that the effects of condoization on storeowners and business in Minneapolis’s Midtown area have been damaging. For example, the process of renewing Midtown’s Lake Street has neglected an entire Latino population. As condominiums are being built in mass amounts new populations inhabit cities. The heterogeneity of the city is giving way a homogenous field of middle to upper class citizens that care little for community. Low-income families have been pushed out of their city homes into less than favorable suburban streets. Immigrants who have spent their life savings establishing homes and businesses in the city are now being booted out with no place or money to restart. Corporations are replacing family owned businesses, and taxes are being raised so that family-owned businesses that have lasted thus far are doomed to be out competed.

METHODS

I started my research by contacting The City Pages, locating a front-page article all about condoization in Minneapolis. I furthered my research by contacting three different sales centers of condos to set up appointments to speak with both owners and sales staff. I was trying to locate both the basic demographics of and also the motives for living in such housing structures. Unfortunately I was transferred from person to machine and no one called back to answer my questions. On Sunday April 5, I located several open houses in the paper and tried to enter into the condos this way. I had surveys to set out for residents to fill out and get back to me. I was only successful in getting into the Steele Flats on Chicago Ave S and 45th, but it was only through residents themselves that I was allowed access. Since it was Easter Sunday, I think the open houses were limited to appointment only. Three people filled out my survey at the Steele Flats location, and one resident gave me a tour of her condo. I also was able to catch two tenants as they walked in and out of the Chicago condos in the newly renovated Sears building. Getting information from business owners proved to be another task. On Monday April 6, I interviewed two local businesses along Lake Street: Ingebretsen Scandinavian Gifts located at 1601 E Lake St in Minneapolis, and Las Petacas located at 1509 E Lake St. I interviewed Julie at Ingebretsen and Maria at Las Petacas.

RESULTS

“Central cities are still shaped by their history. Thus traditional working class neighborhoods, increasingly populated by service workers rather than by industrial workers, constitute a distinctive space, a space that because it is the most vulnerable, becomes the battleground between the redeveloped efforts of business and the upper middle class, and the invasion attempts of the countercultures trying to reappropriate the value of the city. They often become defensive spaces for workers who have only their home to fight for, while at the same time meaningful popular neighborhoods and likely bastions of xenophobia and localisms” (Castells 481). Minneapolis has had a boom of condominium additions in the last several years. “Over the past two years, more than 2,000 rental tenants of all sorts have been booted out of their apartments, the latest victims in a Minneapolis condo-conversion wave that has displaced young and old, poor and middle-class, healthy and disabled alike. The end result is that while downtown Minneapolis is seeing an unprecedented residential development boom—most of it in high-end properties—neighborhoods in other parts of the city are seeing radical transformations that by many accounts are unwelcome.” (Anderson 1). Renters in low-income areas are being booted out of their apartments because the buildings are being converted into condominiums. The condominiums have to be cleared so that renovation may occur. The pushing out of low-income populations correlates to the fact that they are not able to earn enough money to stay in their buildings. The article explains that the answer to this boom seems to stem from a drop in rental vacancy rates beginning in the 1990’s, and property owners took advantage of this scarcity by increasing rent rates. This in turn switched the low vacancy rates to much higher ones and the real estate market realized that it could profit in large quantities by providing a new type of housing option. Condos were just the match, and the condo business exploded. In 2000, 14 rental units were turned into condominiums and in 2004 that number was over 1,000. In 2005 the number of units was more than 1300. (Anderson 1). Castells argues that local residents strive to find meaning in the history of their neighborhoods and oppose gentrification processes that dominate and ultimately dismiss any of the familiarity and community that once existed. He says, “business corporations trying to appropriate the beauty and tradition for their noble quarters, and urban countercultures making a stand on the use value of the city, while local residents try to get on with their living, refusing to be bent by the alien wind of the new history (Castells 480).

My first interview with Julie at Ingebretsen was very thorough. I walked into Ingebretsen with my tape recorder and a clipboard with several questions. I browsed through the store before making my way to the front to call for Julie. The store, I learned later, was built in 1921. The shelves were filled with trinkets of all sorts, and organized by themes. Finally, I made my way to the counter and the sales associate called Julie up from the basement. A woman appeared shortly and from the moment she introduced herself I felt calm. Her soft voice and peaceful demeanor helped emphasize the contrast between the corporate world and nightmares of automated voicemail and family owned business. She led me downstairs to her office where the interview took place. I told her that I had several questions and she seemed to want to help in every way. Firstly I asked about her for her general thoughts on the renovation and condoization of Lake Street. “The whole big general picture is that it has brought more people to the street. Unfortunately that doesn’t translate directly into more people in the store, but an increase sense of safety is felt. That part’s easy enough to see.” She explained that her customers tend to come from further away, that her shop is more of a destination shop than a drop by one, and so her customer base has not changed very much. The customers in the shop at the time of the interview were one hundred percent white and were primarily women, although the women were often accompanied by men. The shop, being a destination shop, caters to middle to upper class citizens—those who have money to spend on items other than necessities. Interestingly though, the new owners of the condos do not seem to be directly interested with her shop. This may be because many of the new stores that are replacing the local businesses are larger chain and corporation businesses. The corporations gear toward the new population through advertising and promotion. They, as the condos do, promote safety, financial ease, and reliability. The irony in this is that the local and independent businesses are much more reliable in both the community and quality sense.

When an area is gentrified, money and resources are used and this has to be paid for. In addition, the restoration increases the property value of the particular site and so taxes are increased. When talking about how the increase of taxes has affected the small business owners her first response was: “That’s definitely a big issue.” She offered her sympathy to several Latino business owners who she explained came here with everything they had and built up these tiny businesses and have either already been forced out of their areas or are facing the reality now. “We’ll survive it. Some wont.” She said that she had not experienced first hand the affects of the condos pushing residents out of their homes into the suburbs but attributed her lack of knowledge in this area to the fact that her store focused primarily on customers outside the Midtown area. She did mention, however, that she had seen neighboring tenants forced out their shops. She didn’t seem at ease with the fact that the Latino tenants in particular were disappearing from their shops frequently. She talked about how the frequent changes in store owners created less community in the area because the stability and the “unity” was never certain. Her emotions were dynamic throughout the interview and she seem to have had invested a lot of thought into this subject already. It was as though she felt somewhat guilty that her business would stay around while others who worked just as hard were not able to. She couldn’t quite grasp the difference between her business and the Latino ones but any ideas were linked to the amount of time her store had been there.

The Midtown Global Market is a recently added addition to the city. Here you can find vendors selling items from various cultures and locations around the world. When asked about the Global Market’s effect on her business, she once again claimed that it was less punishing for her because her shop brought in regular customers. She realized that she was “lucky because her competition was far less than some of the other businesses along Lake Street”, and attributed her maintenance of customer count to the fact that she was a “one of a kind’ business.

Further down Lake Street, and closer to the Global Marker, resides Las Petacas. The store is tiny in relation to Ingebretsen, but things are in order and various items are available for purchase. When I initially came into the shop I thought it was a boutique but after talking to Maria, I found out that it was technically a luggage shop that sold a variety of items. The interview was carried out in Spanish and was brief due to a language barrier, but it was heart wrenching and as it started I knew that Maria was going to have some good information. I began by asking her how the effects of the condoization had affected her. “It has been very hard for us. Everyday it is a struggle to pay the bills.” She explained later that the taxes have risen over double what they used to be. She also explained that the population that moved and continues to move into the area is not Latino and her business thrives almost exclusively on Latino customers.

Later through an emotional bout she exclaimed that the Global Market has been quite destructive to the businesses along Lake Street. She told me that many of her work friends that owned businesses along the street have had to move. When I asked her where they moved to she answered “Many places. To other cities, back to Mexico, some are on the streets or living with their friends and other family.” She explained that she misses the comradery of her friends and the community that they once used to dominate. This juxtaposition of community in a “bad” area is interesting to contrast with the lack true community in the uprising condos. U.S. society tends to think that gentrification will bring community, but what they fail to see is that there is a lot of community already. The populations going in now are superficial and lack the strong community of those who initially resided in these areas. As the City Pages writes, “It's the people who can least afford to be displaced who are losing their homes in the process” (Anderson 1). Maria explained that all of her family resides in a small house near her shop and the house caps out at around 16.

Maria explains that it would be helpful for the incoming population to be more aware of what they were doing to the city. She wonders if they even think about the businesses that they are ruining. Maria is a thoughtful woman and I wished I spoke better Spanish so that I might be able to fully capture her thoughts and opinions. Initially she seems a little timid but when I see her in action later I find that she is a very hard-working person who does not settle for much. I stick around a few minutes after the interview and a woman enters the store to buy several items. Each time she tries to barter her way to the lowest possible price. Maria lowers her price down once but will not go any further. She explained this situation earlier by saying that she “sometimes feels that (she is) losing business by not lowering the prices more”, but she ultimately cannot afford to do this. It seems like such a bittersweet predicament. She is trying so hard to build relationships with her customers but she has to think of the well being of her family and in the end herself and the business. If she cannot keep herself healthy and her business thriving then there is less of a reason to keep working so hard, and Maria is a hard worker.

As I leave I feel that we have bonded and I feel a great responsibility to change her circumstances. I know that being informed about the situation is most helpful in the process and so I feel somewhat better about spending the time to research this issue, but I also feel like I want to fix it now. From the moment I was born I had so much privilege, and that privilege continues with me. White-middle class privilege is what I have inherited, and I realize that I have to use this to better the conditions of those who do not have these advantages handed to them.

DISCUSSION

It seems appropriate to assume that gentrification and condoization help create and maintain social hierarchies. The urban communities and neighborhoods that make up a city play a role in the way the community interacts and operates. Manual Castells helps deepen this argument even more by explaining, “Cities are socially determined in their forms and in their processes. Some of their determinants are structural, linked to deep trends of social evolution that transcend geographic or social singularity. Others are historically and culturally specific. And all are played out, and twisted, by social actors that impose their interests and their values, to project the city of their dreams and to fight the space of their nightmares” (Castells 476). The Lake Street/Midtown gentrification has taken about 5 years to complete and this relatively sudden change has taken a prior population of predominately Latino citizens and is seemingly converting it into dominance in white-middle class Americans. In a white dominant society, it seems appropriate to assume that the change of ethnic populations is emphasized by a power relationship where white citizens are unfairly winning based on their general status in the United States. The contrast between Maria and Julie shows this.

Castells argues that the trend is increasing towards an increase in technology and this IT age encourages a capitalistic society where corporations help create an apparent contrast between the classes. The IT age creates competitiveness and ‘allows for the simultaneous process of centralization of messages and decentralization of their reception, creating a new communication world made up at the same time of the global village and the incommunicability of those communities that are switched off from the global network. (Castells 477). He argues that the “major functions of the economic system” are becoming completely dependent on the exchanges of information between structures of institutions and that the community and cooperation of society is being reestablished in a segmented way. He claims, “the filing of downgraded jobs by immigrant workers tends to reinforce the dualization of the urban social structure (Castells 483)” and continues his argument by explaining that ‘the global economy embraces the whole planet, but not all regions and all people on the planet.” (Castells 478). In all actuality, only a small portion of people are truly integrated into the global economy, mostly being large corporate bodies. It seems safe to assume that Minneapolis will follow a similar set of rules. As the gentrification and condoization of the Midtown area increases due to the switch from an Energy Age to an Information Age, there has been an outpouring of homogeny and a switch of power. Suburban dwellers are migrating into the city and negating any efficient communication/receptor mechanism, and instead are concentrating their power to create unfair relations of power.

Those who cannot keep up with the technology advances will not survive. This puts Latino storeowners who cannot speak English well at a disadvantage. When storeowners are trying to keep up with communicating in a different language their time to spend learning how to use the computer, Internet, cell phone etc. may be affected. In addition to the education of the technology, the cost of this technology is limiting. Money that could be spent towards direct purchasing may be hard to set aside to pay for technology that one doesn’t even know how to use. In addition, the fact that technology becomes obsolete so quickly due to new advances created financial hardship as well as storeowners compete to be up to date. Maria explained to me that she felt responsibility to communicate with all of her customers but many times she wished that she had a translator. Interestingly, while I was in her shop she had a customer come in that had a translator with her. The woman who spoke English was demanding a lower price and the woman speaking Spanish was mimicking her tone and words frantically. Maria seemed to take in this way of communicating with ease. I think it was important for her to know that her messages were getting across to the woman and that she was seriously sticking to her ground. It appeared that it was easier for Maria to stick to her ground when she was familiar with her language and the translator helped ease the stress of the language barrier.

The boom of condos has brought more people to the street. Julie of Ingebretsen’s explains that the increased amount of people create an increased surveillance and an increased sense of safety. Jane Jacobs would surely agree with this. She says, “To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks” (Jacobs115). She continues her argument by claiming stores help give people reasons for using the sidewalks, and in her words they ‘draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use in themselves, but which become traveled and peopled as routes to somewhere else,” they help create and maintain peace, and lastly stores attract people who attract other people (Jacobs 117). Jacobs might argue that the addition of condominiums to the city is ultimately a good thing because it leads to an increase in people. With that increase of people two things happen. One is that the sidewalks are used more and secondly is that the demand for consumerism increases and thus the amount stores and restaurants will increase. This however, does not account for the fact that with the addition of people comes the subtraction of cultural homogeneity. The Latino businesses that initially dominated the Midtown area added culture and diversity to the area. As condos are being built and white middle class citizens are being added, the racial homogeneity is decreasing but more importantly, the cultural heterogeneity is being destroyed.

With the addition of people, there has come a need for the addition of attractions. The Global Market is one of these attractions. People that live in the condos near there can find all of their “cultural needs” within blocks of their sleeping quarters. This new attraction however has led to a false sense of holistic culture. The idea of being able to go in and experience culture in a big very ordinary corporate-feel building is asinine. The Midtown Global Market can be made a good business as long as it does not hurt the other businesses around it and as long as culture extends beyond one building. Sharon Zukin explains this idea in her “Whose culture? Whose city? article. “By accepting these spaces without questioning their representations of urban life, we risk succumbing to a visually seductive, privatized public culture” (Zukin 138). When the Midtown Global Market was built it was supposed to gear toward the public, but the problem is that it really was gearing toward the new population that was flooding in. The once Latino area is now an attraction site where the Latino and small businesses along Lake Street that have existed for a long time are overlooked completely. Zukin explains, “The prominence of culture industries also inspires a new language dealing with difference. It offers a coded means of discrimination, an undertone to the dominant discourse of democratization” (Zukin 139). There is a hidden message and a not so hidden feeling of exclusion/inclusion when you walk into the Global Market. The creators of this area encouraged the superficial engagement. The message is that low-income families do not belong.

Both Maria and Julie are hard-working business owners and yet their race and class status segregate them in the working world. Julie is a middle-class Caucasian woman while Maria is a working-class Mexican woman. We as a colorblind society could put a higher emphasis on the success (or lack there of) of the two businesses with an explanation of destination versus non-destination stores, but the truth is that even if Julie’s store depended more on walk by traffic she would have more success than Maria. White privilege as defined by sociologist Peggy McIntosh is like “an invisible package of unearned assets which I (as a white person) can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” (McIntosh 188). She outlines, in list form, just a few of the ways that white people are advantaged every day. From choosing a supposing simple flesh colored bandage to more complex acts of buying a house, getting a job, and assuring the safety of family, white people are advantaged every day. White people are taught to think that these advantages are normal and do not realize that these advantages, these privileges, aid in their protection of hostility, distress, and violence. She continues this argument and warns that some of these privileges are better defined as dominance because they aid in gaining power. “Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate” (McIntosh191). Business owner Maria has to go up against this white privilege on a weekly basis through white customer interaction, but on a different level, she had to struggle with this problem when she started her business. Working with banks and having to take out loans, as a woman of color is one of the ways that white privilege and discrimination affected Maria. Contrastingly, when Julie started her business, the mere fact that she was white may have helped her obtain lower interest rates and less hassle in general. How our society perceives one another and the stereotypes that we hold about each other help maintain these power relationships. Because US society is middle to upper class, white male dominant, those who do not fit this mold suffer. The way we determine success in this society is through money and so those who do not fit this mold often suffer financially.

CONCLUSION

The effect of condoization on businesses is prominent. The prominence scales from a low-moderate effect to a detrimental-high push out of owners. The difference depends mostly on what kind of business you own, more specifically what population of people you gear towards. It also depends on your social status in relation to United States norms. Social constructions of race, class, and gender all affect the condo owners and the populations they gear to. Taxes are being raised too much, new populations are bringing in people that are disinterested in local business, and the creation of ‘featured attractions’ such as the Midtown Global Market are allowing people to believe they can experience culture in a one shop stop.

Word count: 4031

Works Cited

G.R. Anderson Jr. “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Broke By Now.” In City Pages, Volume 27, Issue 1316, Cover Story: February 22, 2006.
Jane Jacobs: “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety.” In City Reader, edited by Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 114-118. London: Routledge, 1996.
Manual Castells: “Cities, Information, Global Economy.” In City Reader, edited by Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 473-485. London: Routledge, 1996.
Patty McIntosh. “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Race, Class, and Gender In the United States. ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 6th ed. New York: Worth Publishers 2004: Chapter 20.
Sharon Zukin: “Whose Culture? Whose City?” In City Reader, edited by Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 136-147. London: Routledge, 1996.