Here’s a map from a recent Star Tribune column on Minneapolis’ long-standing neighborhood engagement funding showing the “unspent funding” allocated neighborhood funding for each of the city’s neighborhoods.
Dark green = more unspent money.
The history of this program is complex, but connects to debates over civic engagement and tensions between renters and homeowners throughout the city. The article is a good read. Here’s a highlight:
Few cities in the country can boast Minneapolis’ robust network of neighborhood organizations, which now rely on about $3.8 million annually from the city. Their current funding is a fraction of what it was in the 1990s, when $184 million was doled out over 10 years as part of the now-defunct Neighborhood Revitalization Program. The money went to assist with housing projects, community engagement and other neighborhood activities.
The new program is more focused on community engagement than capital investments. Its funding comes from taxes paid by property owners in a checkerboard of special districts mostly near downtown. The districts were created more than 35 years ago to pay for nearby economic development. Those areas — the North Loop, Downtown East, Loring Park and the Hennepin-Lake area — are flourishing now and more money is projected to pour in.
That money — which previously hovered around $10 million a year — can only be divided between the two uses allowed by the Legislature: paying off Target Center debt and “neighborhood revitalization purposes.”
But neighborhood revitalization means different things to different people.
Read the rest here.
Correction: this tweet from Eric Roper clarifies what the map is actually showing.
@BillLindeke Re: Map Monday, that map is shaded by allocation. You see the unspent if you click on each neighborhood.