Alice Hausman is seen in district 66B in daylight.

And Nick Coleman writes a good column.

No, I’m being catty.  Every year, Nick Coleman – this blog’s guest of fisking honor, a person against whom I’ve pulled very few punches – writes one or two columns that make you sit back and go “this is what a metro columnist should be doing”.

And it is:

“It seems crazy,” she says, looking up at her paint job. “We don’t just have to fight drug dealers and gangbangers. We have to fight the city, too.”

Damn.  It’s a quote I’d love to have found.  It’s at the end of today’s bit, about a retired, MS-riven woman in a crime-sodden, lethal neighborhood in North Minneapolis who  is being fined into poverty by a city that can’t and won’t deal with  the crime that has destroyed the neighborhood that her family has lived in since 1941.

Slyter, 57, owns a home in the Hawthorne neighborhood of north Minneapolis. She has been a bulwark of decency as the block she lives on has been invaded by hoodlums and drug dealers. But in the eyes of the city, there is a bigger problem than criminals: Peeling paint.

Slyter was slapped with a $200 fine in July (it has doubled to $400) because her house trim needed painting, and she wasn’t able to reach to the peak of her roof, where the trim is 25 feet above street level. Get a ladder or hire a professional painter, a city inspector told her. But a ladder is a tough climb for a woman in a leg brace, and a professional painter is expensive and hard to come by in a neighborhood where workers can get shot.

Slyter’s peeling trim was going nuclear: Unless she got it painted, city fines could escalate quickly to $2,000 or more.

“They could fine me out of my home,” she says. “They just keep doubling until the fine is more than the house is worth.”

Of course, this ties into a bigger problem, one that is crying for some investigation – Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s imperious, gratingly arrogant-yet-comically ineffective code enforcement departments.  (Although someone is trying).

So this week, Slyter climbed atop a scaffold she built in the back of her pickup truck. With the aid of a 15-foot painting pole, she stood on tiptoes to paint the chocolate-brown trim and get the city off her back.

Her home, built in 1887, has been in Slyter’s family since 1941.

Context?

Slyter has tried to be a good citizen while the neighborhood has suffered through waves of criminal activity.

“Drug dealing, robberies, shootings,” Slyter says, reciting a litany of troubles. “Any direction you go within three blocks, you can point to a murder that has happened. If you want to live here, you have to turn your home into a fortress.”

Slyter built a fence to secure her back yard, and nailed planks across her storm windows to keep them from being pried open by burglars. These are not crazy measures in a part of the city where law-abiding residents cover windows with shatter-proof plastic and valuable belongings are chained to garage ceiling beams.

“We’ve all had to build fortresses,” says Joan Thom, chair of the neighborhood safety committee. “It’s not the cops’ fault. We love our cops. But when they arrest dealers, the judges let ’em loose and say they don’t have enough courtrooms to deal with every drug dealer. Then they haul people into court for stupid stuff like this. Hello!?! Which part of this picture are you missing?”

But at least the boat has perfectly-ordered deck chairs.

Question:  Does Minneapolis code enforcement go after homes stuffed full of gang-banging thugs?

I’m going to take a step back for a moment.  Yes, it’s important to keep neighborhoods up.  The “Broken Windows” policies of Rudy Giuliani in NYC and Brett Schundler in Jersey City were part of the plan that brought both cities back from decades of blight and – when combined with aggressive (some might say heavy-handed) police response – crime.

Minneapolis has got half the formula down:

If you are thinking it doesn’t make sense to police the paint while criminals control the corners, well, it doesn’t have to make sense: It’s city policy.

The inspections department is much more aggressive, says director Henry Reimer, especially in north Minneapolis.

The city issued 80,000 citations last year, ordering owners to cut grass, paint trim or make other repairs. Peeling paint might seem trivial, Reimer said, but city codes keep bad blocks from getting worse.

If you are a Minneapolis Republican…no, strike that.  If you live in Minneapolis and care about the future of your city, you should print out this next paragraph, quoting bureaucrat Reimer (emphasis added):

“People who maintain their property in disrepair help bring forth an environment in which crime is welcome,” he said. “We’re trying to move things in the right direction in terms of fighting crime. If you own property you don’t feel safe keeping compliant [with housing codes], then you shouldn’t own that property. Or you should pay someone to fix it who isn’t afraid.”

In other words, according to city bureaucrat Reimer, if you are afraid (of criminals the city can’t and won’t deal with), you are the villain.  You should leave.  Mr. Reimer:  Whose city is this?  The gang-bangers?  The Code Enforcement department’s?
If the Minneapolis GOP doesn’t have this quote in every mailbox in the city during the next mayoral election, they should disband.

Coleman even gets it:

But it isn’t that easy.

For the past 18 months, drug dealing was going on next door to Slyter. It was only when a recent police raid put an end to it that Slyter felt safe to do outside chores.

“I wouldn’t be out here in my yard if they were still next door,” Slyter said, nodding at the empty drug house where a pile of dirty mattresses sits on the curb. Even now, she says, she only does yard work before noon.

Why? “The gangbangers don’t get up until noon,” she says.

I can see R.T. Rybak’s next statement: “most of the victims are people who are out between 12PM and 5AM…”

Reimer says he respects Slyter’s concerns, but fear does not excuse homeowners from keeping up their property.

“We’re working holistically to address crime issues and take back our city,” he says.

It sounds good. In theory.

Barely.

With rights come responsibilities.  There’s a term for responsibilities without rights – in this case, the right to see your local drug-dealing gang-banger being tasered into incontinence and thrown into the back of a squad car, and then sent off to jail for a very long time.

Oppression.

But when you see a retired woman on a truck trying to reach the top of her house with a paint brush in a neighborhood where drugs are being sold on the corner, something is out of whack. Slyter isn’t the person who most needs cracking down upon.

Still, with luck, her house trim may now meet city approval.

Too bad the people of Minnesota can’t do the same thing to Minneapolis; walk in, declare the place out of code (“out of control gangs, catch ‘n release justice system, city government more concerned with citizen compliance than with fighting crime, largely for political reasons”) and start turning the screws through fines and harassment, ending in eviction.

Oh, wait – we can.  Every four years.

Will the people of Minneapolis be smart enough?

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 6:08 am and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Minneapolis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.