2 min read November 2022 — Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Lake Street Corridor is benefiting from creativity and its strong sense of community to rebuild and rebound after the tumult in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Allison Sharkey, executive director of Lake Street Council, spoke with Invest: about how the rebuilding and revalorization of minority-owned businesses are the centerpieces of these efforts.
What were Lake Street Council’s highlights of the past two years?
Since 2020, one of our biggest accomplishments has been helping reopen over 500 businesses that had been shuttered due to damage or theft during the civil unrest experienced in the region after the George Floyd murder. Thanks to the generosity of over 65,000 individual donors who really jumped in when everything happened in 2020, we were able to dedicate about half of those funds right away to getting businesses back open. Those were the very first resources directed at business owners. It was the grassroots support of the community that helped those businesses reopen. Since then, we have been able to pivot and have been focusing on helping the community meet our other goals of rebuilding. When everything happened, we convened stakeholders with the aim of rebuilding our corridor. Part of those efforts included bringing back as many of the small businesses as possible, making sure the corridor would continue to be a place where people from all different backgrounds could open a first business and keeping the land in local hands. People were really nervous that there would be this quick sell-off to investors from out of the state and that through gentrification we would lose some of our affordability and sense of character. Finally, people wanted to make sure that we created more opportunities for entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs of color, to become owners.
What is Lake Street going to look like moving forward?
Lake Street has always been for immigrants, in particular, to get their start at opening a first business. What is really important to all of us in the community is that Lake Street continues to play that role. We definitely see that continuing. What we also realized through this period of racial reckoning is that many of us have forgotten that Lake Street had also once been a really rich, Black business district. Over time, that entrepreneur community shrank along Lake Street and moved to other neighborhoods. We have realized in the last couple of years that we need to put intentional effort into supporting that entrepreneurial community and growing it as well. Our main focus is to continue to be a great place to start a business and to help make sure that those businesses that have opened and recovered continue to remain successful and become more successful and profitable. We also want to help grow Black entrepreneurship on the corridor as well.
A really important piece of it is preserving affordability. That is why it was essential to ensure that a significant portion of property in the corridor is owned by folks who are of the community and have as part of their mission to provide space for other entrepreneurs like themselves.
Added to that, ensuring we maintain a healthy ecosystem of nonprofit organizations that provide training in entrepreneurship is also important. We are lucky to have a rich ecosystem here compared to a lot of cities and those organizations continue to need support and investment.
Finally, we have to bring customers back. We often focus on getting businesses opened but then actually making sure that your business is sustainable and is growing is just as difficult. We are really struggling with Lake Street’s reputation right now. People have strong memories about what happened. We are also struggling with public safety, or the perceptions of public safety more than the actual situation. To address the situation, we are betting heavily on marketing; helping individual businesses get their own marketing in shape, especially their online presence, while also marketing the corridor as a whole and really telling our success stories through social media or more traditional media outlets.
How would you characterize Lake Street’s status as a cultural hub and what does that mean for the wider region?
Lake Street is really the place to go if you want to experience the diversity that a lot of people do not know that Minnesota has. Lake Street’s identity has really been shaped by waves of immigrants. It went through a really challenging period in the 1980s where there were high levels of vacancy and crime. Then the Latino entrepreneurial community placed a stake in Lake Street, invested a lot and reinvigorated the corridor. Along with that, the Midtown Global Market was developed. About 15 years ago, the global market redeveloped what was the headquarters for Sears, which was this vacant building that was the biggest building in the state of Minnesota.
The community came together at that time. It was a great public-private partnership that redeveloped that core of Lake Street, all while adding the Midtown Greenway, which was an old railroad path, and also developed one of the first urban bikeways that stretched across the whole city, from Bde Maka Ska to the Mississippi River. That combination of the new Latino investment in the area, plus public-private partnerships have really turned the corridor around. The truth is collaboration is in Lake Street’s DNA and so we are confident for a prosperous future.
What are your priorities over the next two to three years?
One thing that is going to be pretty important for us in the next couple of years is figuring out the plan for the remaining properties that were destroyed. The most significant damage was on about three of our major intersections. Over 35 buildings were completely burned down and a lot of those have been rebuilt, especially those that had a national tenant. But there are several that are owned by independent entrepreneurs who are not yet experienced developers. They are in a really challenging position to be able to rebuild. Helping shepherd the community over the next couple of years through the redevelopment of those properties is a pretty big challenge. Luckily, we have really excellent partners that are coming up with some groundbreaking proposals which prioritize wealth building and ownership by entrepreneurs of color. In order to achieve the full recovery we anticipate, we are going to need the support of both government, private and philanthropic sectors.
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