Nobody can match my prices? Why do you get rock-bottom prices on name-brand home furnishings here? I sell furniture from my St. Paul warehouse with very low overhead. I work by appointment.I own B&M Furniture store for 43 years, first as a bricks and mortar retail location in Lowertown and now by appointment. I sell my online products at discount prices from my Charles Avenue warehouse. You will not find a fancy showroom here. Instead, you can order living room furniture, recliners, dining rooms, bedrooms, mattresses, kids furniture, home office and home entertainment – all at discount prices that will make you smile.Median income is similarly disparate, with white residents having earned on average $73,600 while blacks earned 38 percent of that, $27,950, according to 2014 census estimates. That was the sixth-worst ratio among the country’s 260 metropolitan areas with significant black populations, a New York Times analysis of the data shows. And the highest crime rate of the city’s five police precincts was in the Fourth Precinct covering North Minneapolis, which reported 1,428 violent crimes last year through November, including 18 murders.“
Clearly there are deep divisions and divides and gaps between white people and people of color in the city of Minneapolis,” said Betsy Hodges, the first-term Democratic mayor, who is white. “It is job No. 1 for the health of us as a community and for growth and prosperity to eliminate those gaps.”That divide plays out starkly in a roughly five-square-mile area on the north side, where nearly half of residents are black. The area is not lined with high-rise projects or blighted by abandoned parcels. But as Willesha Moorehead, who came here from Chicago a dozen years ago, can attest, struggle is baked into its streets. Seven of her friends or members of her family, including the father of her first child, have died from gun violence in North Minneapolis. She has struggled to get work, in part because she could not find child care for her two daughters, she said. And for the past three years she has bounced between the homes of friends and family because she could not find affordable housing.
Since the summer, Ms. Moorehead, 24, estimates, she and a friend have applied for 50 apartments. Most of the better units have been outside North Minneapolis, but the landlords have asked that they earn two or three times the annual rent, far more than they can cover with money from public assistance and her job at a beauty supply shop. All of the approximately 10 units they have viewed in North Minneapolis were run down, she said. Ms. Moorehead caught a break in November when she was approved for a Section 8 subsidized housing voucher after years of waiting. She must live in neighboring St. Paul for a year with the voucher, she said, after which she can move anywhere. She has not decided whether to return to the north side, where she works.“I love North Minneapolis,” she said. “Sometimes it just be too much.”Generations ago, Plymouth Avenue, one of the main north side corridors, was lined with Jewish-owned businesses. But two nights of rioting broke out in July 1967 after a confrontation involving the police;
community leaders at the time said the unrest was a cathartic exhale from a long oppressed community. And things were inflamed even more when a white bar owner shot a black man. The unrest, which drew hundreds of National Guard troops to the city, left dozens of businesses along Plymouth and other north side streets burned, and it hastened white flight to the suburbs. Today, residents of the north side lament that many of the problems from five decades ago remain.After bearing a wave of foreclosures on subprime loans with high interest rates, the Near North neighborhood, closer to downtown, has seen lending dry up. More than 55 percent of mortgage applications in the neighborhood from 2009 to 2012 did not result in loans, the highest rejection rate in the region, according to a 2014 report by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School. Yet downtown has many well-developed blocks, with packed bars and restaurants, and glittering office and residential towers with floor-to-ceiling windows.
Public transportation is poor, residents say, and though local officials are planning to spend more than $1 billion on a light-rail line, North Minneapolis residents have been critical because it will run through downtown and the suburbs but skirt their community. Even the food choices are limited, with fast-food restaurants dominating. Sammy McDowell’s cafe, Sammy’s Avenue Eatery, is a notable exception. Since Mr. McDowell, who is black, opened it four years ago, the restaurant has become a gathering place where chance meetings over meals have led to job offers. But that is not enough, Mr. McDowell, 39, said.“We need to bring in more businesses so we can have more jobs,” he said. “Otherwise, we will never compare to the other areas of the city.”Despite crime and their desire for better security, many black residents say they have little trust in the police. Blacks were nearly nine times as likely as whites to be charged with low-level offenses from 2012 to 2014, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union.John Elder, a spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, acknowledged a fractured relationship with black residents.
But he said a program started three years ago by Chief Janeé Harteau, requiring officers to engage more with residents, had helped. “There historically has been distrust,” Mr. Elder said. “I believe that from where it’s been to where it’s at now is light-years better. Is it where we want it to be? We have room to grow.” One lifelong resident, Angela Avent, 36, is sticking it out even though she has lived in a house that was struck by bullets and destroyed by a tornado. In September, one of her daughters witnessed a fatal shooting outside the brick flat where they now live.Yet instead of leaving after that shooting, Ms. Avent organized a neighborhood march against violence. She has kept her two oldest daughters in North High School, even though she could transfer them out of the Minneapolis district, where blacks trail whites in math and reading proficiency by more than 50 percentage points. And she is mentoring other parents through the nonprofit Northside Achievement Zone.