There’s no question construction of the 13.4-mile Blue Line light rail extension will affect property owners, businesses and renters along the route. But so far, many of them say they want more assurances from Hennepin County and Met Council planners ranging from financial support to more certainty about how the project will affect them.
Planners earlier this month unveiled ideas — but few details — of how they want to help local residents and businesses navigate construction, as a proposed $70 million package from the Legislature to help those affected is still in play. Yet even with an agenda in place, frustration about the proposal’s construction impacts and how to mitigate them remains, regardless of whether people support the project or not.
Some advocates who pushed the county and Met Council to develop anti-displacement measures say they had no opportunity to refine those recommendations. They also want more details on how county and Met Council officials plan to implement those recommendations, and how much they plan to spend on it. Meanwhile, other renters and business owners are worried about having their lives disrupted, with or without a plan in place.
Hennepin County first discussed the building of a light rail line to serve the northwest suburbs in the late 1980s. In June 2012, the Hennepin County board decided to take the existing Blue Line northwest from Target Field to a Target-owned field in Brooklyn Park, with stops on Olson Memorial Highway in Minneapolis and West Broadway in Brooklyn Park, as well along a railroad corridor in Golden Valley, Robbinsdale, and Crystal.
The route was contingent on Burlington Northern Santa Fe allowing Hennepin County and the Met Council build a light rail on their corridor; however, BNSF refused to negotiate, so planners from 2020 to 2023 decided to realign the project so it serves the North Loop, 21st Avenue and West Broadway in north Minneapolis on its way to Robbinsdale, Crystal and Brooklyn Park.
Planners anticipate breaking ground on the project between 2026 and 2027, with the route to open for service in 2030. They anticipate ridership reaching anywhere from 11,000 to 13,500 daily riders by 2045, or about the same level of ridership that a shorter streetcar line connecting the Mall of America to downtown St. Paul on West 7th would generate five years earlier.
The project is expected to cost $2.9 to $3.2 billion, and the costs include some anti-displacement measures required by federal and state law. “Things like, maintaining access to businesses during construction, right-of-way acquisition, relocation assistance … those are things that we would be doing no matter what,” said project spokesperson Kyle Mianulli at a March corridor management committee meeting. For example, if the project requires the taking of private land, government agencies in most cases must provide compensation and relocation assistance for whomever lives there. This includes paying fair market value for land they acquire as well as expenses that its residents may incur to sell and move.
A guide from the Met Council, last updated in April 2023, suggests all U.S. citizen residents, businesses, and nonprofits can be paid “reasonable” expenses or a fixed rate for moving to a place within 50 miles of — and similar to — where they are being displaced from. The Met Council may also provide long-term residents being displaced rental or down payment assistance, as well as pay the difference between a higher purchase price, rent, or mortgage rate of a home compared to where they used to live.
Federal law also stipulates residents occupying a property that a government agency plans to acquire cannot receive relocation assistance until the agency either acquires the land, starts negotiations to acquire, or provides a written notice to the occupants that they plan to acquire. Agencies cannot do this until they complete the federally-required environmental review process, which project planners don’t anticipate happening until next year. Federal law also requires agencies to provide residents at least 90 days to move, and agencies cannot force residents to move until residents have done their own due diligence.
Federal law also requires agencies to estimate how many people and businesses they plan to displace, as well as how much replacement housing and business space would be available. Hennepin County officials say they won’t know until after they complete and release a report mid-June on how the project would affect surrounding noise, traffic, parking, water, air, endangered species, and historic resources.
The law also requires agencies to understand what residents and businesses need in a replacement space in order to help them get the assistance they need to move.
What displacement support could include
The county, the Met Council, and neighborhood activists have said they want project planners to do more than what is federally required. Yet activists, community organizers, residents and business owners are getting frustrated because the county hasn’t outlined what specifically they plan to do.
Last May, the University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs released a list of what government agencies along the Blue Line Extension corridor should do for residents and businesses who would be affected by its construction. These recommendations, which CURA developed with a working group, include keeping renters in place as much as they can, provide funding and wayfinding for local businesses, as well as develop a policy to discharge land they no longer need.
Hennepin County and the Met Council responded to these recommendations, saying at an April meeting they planned to implement much of what CURA recommended. They include universal basic income, workforce programs, and forgivable loans for businesses to cover basic expenses during construction.
It’s unclear how much all of this would cost both agencies, or how both would go about doing this. This has some corridor residents, organizers, and business owners upset. “We don’t want to hear any more pretty talking. We want to see actual, actionable steps,” said KB Brown, a native Northsider who owns Wolfpack Promotionals on West Broadway.
The Blue Line Coalition, a coalition of transportation, housing, neighborhood, and social service organizations convened by the Alliance Twin Cities, along with the anti-displacement working group, have accused county planners of not working with them to develop a plan to implement the anti-displacement recommendations. Each submitted letters on April 11 to corridor management committee members demanding the county and Met Council develop steps they plan to achieve to implement each of the recommendations before, during, and after construction, who will work on the steps, how it will be funded, how they plan to evaluate and achieve success, and measures they will take to mitigate any negative impacts.
Some members of the anti-displacement working group also want committee members to be paid as much as project consultants for their participation in developing the recommendations, including back pay. The Blue Line Coalition believes all the anti-displacement efforts for the entire corridor would cost around $1 billion.
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The anti-displacement working group is also requesting the county relinquish vacant land and buildings along the corridor to “community control,” so businesses can have a place to go before, during, and after construction. “We don’t want to sign a five-year lease and then end up going through a whole bunch of rigmarole to break the lease if the Blue Line comes down here and we have to move. If I could build a building on Freedom Square, before the Blue Line is built, we can actually provide places for people to move when they have to move. Right now, if we have to move, we have to move completely off the Northside,” Brown said.
Brown, along with some West Broadway merchants, are also asking for parking. Brown particularly wants to be able to accommodate loading and unloading to and from his shop. “When I have deliveries and stuff, where are they gonna stop at? Because if they stop in front of my shop to deliver, they’re stopping all traffic,” Brown said. Though the current design plans don’t appear to make provisions for parking, planners at an April 15 open house unveiled a concept plan to make some on-street parking available around West Broadway and Penn.
Next steps
Hennepin County and the Met Council plan to release a report detailing their anti-displacement recommendations later this month. The report will then be available for a two-month public comment period. The county and the Met Council anticipate including concrete implementation steps and cost estimates in a plan to be released in August. “We want to first make sure that the intervention and the strategies that we’re going to be pursuing are meeting the needs,” Mianulli said.
Meanwhile, representatives from Hennepin County, the Blue Line Coalition, and cities along the corridor spoke earlier this month at a Senate Transportation Committee hearing in favor of Senate File 4719, which would allocate $10 million annually over the next seven years to support anti-displacement efforts. The money could be used to fund affordable housing, keep renters and businesses in place along the extension corridor, as well as ensure the project and the surrounding neighborhood honors the heritage of local residents. The bill proposes a 16-member board chaired by the Met Council chair and composed of seven local elected officials and eight community representatives to determine how the money is allocated.
The Met Council also applied for, but didn’t get, a $1.9 million federal grant to fund cities and the Met Council’s research into implementing some anti-displacement strategies not just for the Blue Line Extension, but for three additional rapid bus routes serving the East Side of St. Paul over the next three years. They also planned to use the grant to fund 15 organizations to further refine the recommendations, as well as to hire someone to oversee the process.
Trying to stay put
Even with the anti-displacement ideas, some residents and businesses don’t want to be moved. One of them is the J&J Furniture Outlet on West Broadway. The proprietors of J&J Furniture Outlet, along with some of their affected neighbors, learned about the potential for demolition through a community member, even though project planners identified their properties for demolition as early as 2022 and Hennepin County says they sent letters to the impacted properties.
“I think that’s just disrespectful for the community and the hard work my grandfather had put in, especially coming from the adversity that he faced being a Black man and coming up to Minnesota to create opportunity and create generational wealth and equity for his future grandchildren, his children,” says Jarron Williams, a third-generation owner of J&J Furniture, located at West Broadway, Sheridan, and 26th Avenues in north Minneapolis.
In the Harrison neighborhood, residents are still reeling from the impacts of a proposed light rail line, even though it left. As planners decided how to build light rail on Olson Memorial Highway, residents and research done by CURA found property values, property taxes, and rents in the neighborhood increased.
The Harrison Neighborhood Association asked residents about what investments they wanted to see. Residents want Olson Highway to be removed, as well as $1 million to fund assistance for renters, $2 million plus tax forgiveness to help low-income residents buy and maintain their homes in the Harrison neighborhood, 300 public housing units, a grocery store on a Met Council-owned property, as well as to preserve four existing lots used to grow produce.
As anti-displacement work is underway, cities along the corridor this summer will have the opportunity to vote on whether they want the Met Council to build the Blue Line through their communities. The full Met Council will vote to set the process in motion on July 24.
