Editor’s note: This article first appeared in MinnPost on July 29, 2024, and is reprinted with permission. A founder of Streets.mn, Bill Lindeke writes the “Cityscape” column in MinnPost. Subscribe to his weekly “Cityscape” newsletter here.
Over the past few years, few nonprofits have been doing more interesting work than Our Streets Minneapolis, now known simply as Our Streets. Under the leadership of two different executive directors, the group has changed its name twice in the past 10 years, and the organization’s priorities seem to have changed a lot during that time to become more ambitious and nuanced.
It’s been interesting to watch. I remember when the group was born the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition back in 2009, and some of my first interviews as a journalist involved talking to some of its founders about their goals. The group formed when a group of Minneapolis bicyclists, mostly from south Minneapolis, became upset about downtown Minneapolis bike lanes, especially a notoriously dangerous affair on Hennepin Avenue featuring a two-way lane in the middle of the street. At the time, the idea was to push the city to fund and build better bike infrastructure. By that measure, it’s been a huge success.
At the same time, one of the big strengths about the original Bicycle Coalition was its discrete boundaries. They were focused on improving bicycle infrastructure and safety within the city of Minneapolis borders, and the narrow mission allowed them to focus quite successfully on changing policies and practices, zeroing in on the actors like the City Council and Hennepin County public works that held the keys to street design.
The gradual evolution of the organization has expanded those mandates. In 2017 the Bicycle Coalition officially changed its name to Our Streets Minneapolis, broadening its mandate to cover sidewalks, walkability and access for people with disabilities, what advocates have termed “bike, walk and roll.” This allowed the group to work on things like municipal snow plowing or how to improve ADA accessibility policies more generally.
Now the name is changing again, dropping the “Minneapolis” altogether and broadening the group’s scope. The move makes sense given the organization’s focus on regional transportation investments, especially highway projects.
Talking With the Executive Director
I sat down with executive director José Antonio Zayas Cabán (who is also a Streets.mn board member) via Zoom to talk about the continuing evolutions. I picked his brain about the group’s direction, its recent federal grant in Minneapolis’ Near North Side and the reason for another name change.
“This name change is in recognition of the work we’ve been doing, but also a promise to work at all levels. [It began when] we started thinking about the relationship between the county and the city of Minneapolis, the county streets for people effort, the push for the Lyndale 4-3 conversion,” Zayas Cabán said.
When he started with the organization a little over a year ago after a lengthy search process, the base of the group was mostly, as he says, “affluent or comfortable white urbanists.” Since then, Our Streets has been intentionally broadening its outreach in both Minneapolis and St. Paul to center other groups of people.
This was a natural evolution, according to Zayas Cabán, after the group began “intentionally distributing” their project work, like the popular (and seemingly in limbo) Open Streets events, to all areas of the city. The expanded geographic mandate, along with the desire to focus on county streets, meant working more often with elected officials representing suburbs and communities often left out of bicycling discussions. This was especially true on the longlasting fight over traffic calming on Lyndale Avenue, a county-owned street.
“We wanted mode-shift and safety on city streets, but because we have a unique relationship with the county, where they own and operate county corridors, we also have to make sure that the county board and the county public works were getting involved,” Zayas Cabán explained. “[But] we needed to work with the kind of nuance needed to address issues that impacted these communities disproportionately. When we’re talking about something like making an improvement to a corridor, when you go into a community that is talking about things like commercial development or investment in the infrastructure, it isn’t enough to say, if we slap on some safety improvements then we’ve done the job of addressing the infrastructure needs.”
In particular, the focus on the Twin Cities Boulevard, an ambitious call to remove and redesign all of I-94 between the downtowns, meant refocusing the organization beyond Minneapolis. In a way, that project seems to reflect the new identity, using infrastructure to think about much broader issues like structural racism or housing justice.
“We wanted to make sure we weren’t just advocating for things that would lead to more harm but instead we should start the process by spending time with community, figuring out what the needs are, and developing efforts to advocate for their vision of their neighborhood through the lens of our expertise and with our support,” Zayas Cabán said.
“It’s easy and natural for organizations that work in subject-area expert levels — like climate, transportation or housing — to come in and colonize and evangelize in communities, because there’s sort of an inherent belief that if you care about something it’s the right thing to do,” he continued. “We really wanted to make sure that, even though there’s different ways you can change the road configuration, and you can develop an area or a neighborhood, if we did the extra work of engaging with community, and we went at our advocacy work with a much more intersectional multi-issue, holistic way… internally we call it a integrated approach to community development.”
I asked Zayas Cabán about whether there was a tradeoff between being broad — covering a lot of issues and geography — and narrowly focusing on specific spaces and problems.
Here’s what he had to say: “Now as an organization, if there’s an opportunity to collaborate to host an open streets event in Rochester or Duluth, we’re going to work on the capability to be able to do that, so other parts of the state or metro or region can enjoy the quality of the work we can do,” he said.
“One of the things we’re going to be doing in 2025 is to try to better support volunteer-led efforts,” he continued. “We can’t be at every place at once, and we’re going to be little bit more intentional about selecting, say, street projects to work on in the cities, to make sure we’re still working at the very local level and hosting events that are highlighting communities that we feel like deserve investment.”
Zayas Cabán says that at some point they’re looking to open an office in St. Paul to better push for the Twin Cities Boulevard idea. In the meantime, though, the organization was awarded a prestigious federal grant from the Biden administration’s Transportation Department for engagement and planning work along North 6th Street-Olson Memorial Highway in Minneapolis. The grant is unique in that it gave money to both the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) and Our Streets at the same time to do work on rethinking that project.
I asked Zayas Cabán about the current status of that work and how it reflects the ongoing mission change:
“We feel like urban freeways should be defunded and replaced with community centers, streets, avenues and boulevards, and so we have to work to reform MnDOT and the Met Council. Those are broader, more long-term goals, even though we have a vision of what we want to do in the next three to four years, while we’re working on a specific project in a local community,” Zayas Cabán said. “The next step in the process is beginning to work with the [Federal Highway Administration] on executing the grant agreement. We have to do some work with MnDOT, [which] has asked us what we would expect from them in order for us to have some kind of collaboration and maybe even coordination around this project.”
In June, Our Streets sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg laying out its expectations for the grant. As Zayas Cabán says, “the ball is in MnDOT’s court” about how that process might move forward. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how Our Streets continues to evolve, leading conversations all across Minnesota about the future of transportation and racial justice. The group has come a long way from trumpeting the faults of the Hennepin Avenue bike lane, and it should be an interesting ride.
Our Streets Fundraiser
Streets.mn urges readers to join Our Streets supporters on Tuesday night, August 13 (primary election day), at a house party fundraiser in St. Paul. Your gift of any amount would be appreciated. Food and fun guaranteed. Click here for details and to RSVP.