North Minneapolis

The Minneapolis Advantage, a program to encourage home ownership in foreclosure impacted neighborhoods, will receive an infusion of cash which will triple the program’s current budget. Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Des Moines awarded the city $1.5 million to continue the program.

On Minneapolis’ north side, where I live, Election Day started out with long lines waiting to vote. At the Urban League and a block away at Northpoint Health & Wellness Center, voters had to wait as long as an hour and a half. Further north in Minnesota Independent editor Steve Perry’s neighborhhood, lines were nearly as long. We visited the lines and asked voters how their experience went and what issues brought them to the polls. Here’s what they had to say.

Outside North Minneapolis’ River of Life Church, an official polling place, a discarded copy of The Final Call newspaper this morning suggests one possible reason record numbers of voters, including many first-timers, are expected to hit the polls today. See MnIndy’s Election Day Flickr pool here.
.

It’s become a broken record of late: Home-price declines breaking records. With the economy on the skids and the subprime crisis still unfolding, home values are getting devoured first. This morning the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index was released, revealing that the trend doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The 20-city index showed year-to-year August price declines of 16.6 percent. Minneapolis saw a drop of 13.3 percent over the year period, with a 1 percent decline from July to August.

Conservative columnists, pundits, bankers, and politicians like Minnesota’s own Michele Bachmann have taken to blaming the subprime fallout and subsequent credit crisis on the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act. But housing and civil-rights experts say they’re just plain wrong. And if Minneapolis doesn’t take steps to fix the problem soon, things will get a lot worse.

There’s a term for the fear of dentists — dentophobia — but we may need a new word for the fear of dental hygienists if the Strib keeps up this week’s pace of ominous items about the teeth-cleaning profession. First an op-ed raised the specter of unqualified, unsupervised dental hygienists taking drill and pliers to [...]

Story by Molly Priesmeyer, video by Dan Haugen

You don’t have to go far into North Minneapolis to see it: Homes made dark by boards covering windows and doors. Most of the boarded homes here are festooned with gray plywood. Those boards — the ones the color of street grime or dryer lint — were hammered [...]

Minneapolis Council Member Don Samuels is sticking to comments he made calling to burn down the North High School due to its failing performance.

In a heated discussion today, Samuels said he doesn’t regret from making those comments, but apologized for using “extreme language,

Paul Schmelzer co-wrote this story

With three murders committed during the first 11 days of this year, Minneapolis is on pace to quadruple last year’s 60 homicides. The brunt of the victims