Small business lending supports entrepreneurship, innovation and commercial vibrancy that lifts the quality of life in our communities. For organizations like LISC, it can also help transform the nature of property ownership, building wealth in underserved communities, especially communities of color.
Small business lending supports entrepreneurship, innovation and commercial vibrancy that lifts the quality of life in our communities. For organizations like LISC, it can also help transform the nature of property ownership, building wealth in underserved communities, especially communities of color.
For example, take walk down Minnehaha Avenue in South Minneapolis, near the Third District Police Station that was an epicenter of civil unrest last summer. There, LISC is working with a local nonprofit on a plan to not only restore a site damaged during the violence but to fuel locally owned development activity that adds significant value to the surrounding community.
Financing is flowing through LISC Twin Cities Community Asset Transition Fund (CAT Fund). The fund is a public-private collaboration to revitalize businesses hurt by looting and the pandemic—and also meant to forestall the kind of real estate speculation that could displace neighborhood-based owners and residents.
The $30 million fund is managed by LISC and includes support from Hennepin County, JPMorgan Chase, the Minneapolis Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation. The goal is to preserve community assets for the benefit of the people who live, work and do business in those communities.
Back on Minnehaha Avenue that includes a corner commercial site that is home to Elite Cleaners, an immigrant-owned dry cleaning and laundry business that has operated in the community for decades, along with a duplex that over the years has fallen into significant disrepair.
The site is being redeveloped into two parcels: a multi-tenant commercial space that will include space for the existing cleaners and new construction of a 20-unit apartment building with rents affordable to people earning 50-80 percent of the area median income.
The effort is being led by Seward Redesign, a nonprofit local development organization, which will acquire the site, revitalize the commercial portion, demolish the duplex and, in the next few years, build affordable rental housing on the excess land. Seward will sell the commercial portion of the site to the current owner of Elite, with whom the firm has been working closely on the redevelopment plan.
This strategy has a number of benefits that illustrate the priorities of LISC and the CAT Fund. It will enhance local ownership—even as gentrifying capital comes into the community—and improve an existing structure so that other small businesses in the neighborhood can find affordable space to operate. It will build new affordable rental housing near public transit and other neighborhood amenities. And it will boost the appeal of a commercial stretch that includes a range of businesses, arts organizations and services providers (and is also part of a LISC creative placemaking initiative.)
“This isn’t just about financing that benefits any single site or business, though it is surely that as well,” said Kate Speed, LISC Twin Cities program officer for lending. “It is part of a concerted effort to protect local entrepreneurship, expand economic activity and build wealth in a community that has been scarred by a history of discrimination and damaged by recent civil unrest. It is an investment in the future.”
All told, LISC has invested more than $734 million in grants, loans and equity in Twin Cities communities, including South Minneapolis. For more, visit https://www.lisc.org/twin-cities/