Robin Wonsley: At Glendale Townhomes, we can protect our history while investing in our future

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The histories of Black Americans, Native peoples, immigrants and the working class are too often forgotten and excluded from mainstream understandings of history. In the context of the Trump administration’s attacks and explicit goal of erasure, it’s more important than ever to protect and preserve the histories of marginalized communities in our public institutions.

Since taking office six months ago, the Trump administration has launched a campaign to “sanitize” our country’s history, deeming it “improper ideology” to be honest about historic and ongoing institutional racism and inequity. It has threatened the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and removed federal government web content about the Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo Code Talkers and the Underground Railroad. The NAACP and Human Rights Watch have decried these attacks on historic preservation, identifying them as political strategies to “deny people access to models of courage and organized resistance.”

Here in Minneapolis, residents of the city’s oldest remaining public housing, Glendale Townhomes, have worked to uplift the historic importance and intersections of racial justice and public housing in Minneapolis. Recognizing that “public housing communities nationwide hold unique histories and contributions that are undervalued, erased, or forgotten due to racism and classism,” Glendale residents worked with Minnesota Transform on the public history exhibit “We’re Still Here: Glendale Townhomes 70th Anniversary 1952 to 2022.” In 2024, this exhibit won the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums History Award.

Glendale residents have also organized for a decade to designate Glendale Townhomes as a historic district. More than 120 Glendale residents signed a petition in support of historic designation. As the Minneapolis City Council member who represents Glendale residents, I nominated Glendale for historic designation in 2024. The council will vote on the designation in early June.

During the decade that Glendale residents have been organizing for historic preservation, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA) has talked about a potential future redevelopment of Glendale’s 14-acre site to include more families. The MPHA has never made a specific proposal of how it would like to redevelop Glendale.

Historic designation would help preserve Glendale’s unique role in Minneapolis history — without preventing redevelopment and growth.

Minneapolis has a robust heritage preservation system that is designed to balance historic significance with the need to improve and renovate properties and districts.

Minneapolis has designated 20 historic districts. They include a group of 28 houses from the first private interracial housing development, a district of hundreds of residential units surrounding the Minneapolis Institute of Art ranging from grand single-family homes to apartment blocks, and a significant portion of the Stevens Square neighborhood.

Buildings in historic districts can still be considered for alteration, renovation or demolition. Proposals to alter or demolish a historic building are reviewed by the city’s historic preservation staff or the Heritage Preservation Commission. If a proposal is denied, the property owner may appeal to the City Council, which may approve the proposal. If the appeal is unsuccessful, the property owner can submit a different proposal. The city’s historic preservation staff can provide feedback on preliminary plans to facilitate this process. If the council votes to designate Glendale as a historic district, this is the process that the MPHA would use to pursue redevelopment.

Historic designation does not guarantee that any particular type of renovation will or will not occur. It simply adds a layer of review to ensure that the renovation does not erase history.

Districts with historic designation do change — sometimes significantly. Since the St. Anthony Falls area was designated as a local historic district in 1971, there have been demolitions, renovations, and the addition of multiple low-rise and high-rise residential buildings.

While some private developers may be deterred by the added review process that comes with historic designation, the MPHA has earned national recognition for its success at navigating complex bureaucracy to increase deeply affordable housing — bureaucracy far more complex than the city’s heritage preservation system. The MPHA is well-equipped to create a redevelopment plan that meets the needs of current and future residents within the historic preservation framework.

All advocates for public housing should be working together to support the MPHA to protect and expand publicly owned and deeply affordable housing at Glendale and beyond. In the last few years, the City Council has allocated millions of additional dollars to the MPHA to address the capital backlog, install fire sprinklers in high-rises, expand the Stable Homes Stable Schools program, and provide permanent housing to chronically unsheltered residents. These are ways that we invest in the future of public housing and by extension, the future of our city.

Historic designation can be a tool that allows us to protect our city’s history of public housing from being erased — without foreclosing on growth and improvement for the generations of residents to come. We don’t have to choose between preserving working-class history and investing in the working-class future. At Glendale, we can do both.

Robin Wonsley is a member of the Minneapolis City Council, representing Ward 2.