Hope Block
What we now call the Hope Block surrounds the original house where Hope Community began.
It is a piece of land central to our vision and our story. The block is adjacent to the intersection of Franklin and Portland Avenues, major arteries through the city. There are now Hope buildings on all four sides of the block and common space in the middle.
But back in the early 1990s, the block surrounding St. Joe’s was a desperate place.
The crack cocaine epidemic had claimed the streets, and many landlords had abandoned their buildings. St. Joe’s guests and the families living on the block hid their children inside. Police regularly ran through the block with guns drawn, targeting drug dealers and prostitutes (desperate themselves) who broke into the deserted buildings. At the north end of the block where two major Minneapolis streets intersect, gas stations and a minimart were havens for drug deals. Just a few years later businesses had abandoned the intersection entirely.
But if you knew whom to talk to and what to look for, you could glimpse the future.
Neighbors and volunteers connected with St. Joe’s demonstrated against drugs and took action. By the end of 1993, Hope owned five buildings on the block (most were abandoned properties acquired for a dollar) and had recruited volunteers to fix a house and a duplex for rent to low-income families. In 1994, St. Joe’s was renamed St. Joseph’s Hope Community (now Hope Community, Inc.) and took on Hope’s first publicly funded housing revitalization project.
As we began to work together, we quickly immersed ourselves in the neighborhood and its people. We listened and watched. We asked: What would make it work here? What would work better?
We didn’t hold meetings to ask, “Do you want a playground?”
We watched the mom go outside to give her child an opportunity to play in an area that was in no way conducive to children’s play. And we saw the barriers. People wanted to relate to each other, but they couldn’t get from one yard to the next. So we took out the fences. And then we put a playground in. One pregnant mom was out there with her 2-year old trying to sit down on some narrow railroad ties. We knew we needed a place for her to sit. If the kids got a playground, where would the adults be? So we built a picnic pavilion and some benches.
One horrible drug house had been in the neighborhood for more than 10 years. Because of that house, longtime residents on the block wouldn’t even come out to talk. They said they had tried for many years and failed. They were burned out and weren’t going to try again. Hope renovated a beautiful duplex next door, and the porch shared a driveway with the drug house. We finally had to put a fence around the porch, because the drug dealers boldly ran through it to get around the other fences.
The drug house was a triplex, with several small children living there who were terribly neglected and abused. The children were so desperate for something to do that they would climb onto the garage or climb over the fence, anything to try to reach our playground. The playground system had a crawl tube on the ground that was five or six feet long. We cut a hole in the fence and put the tube through it to give the little kids their own doorway into our place. The drug dealers would have to embarrass themselves to crawl through the tube, and some did. But the kids themselves were delighted.
The kids’ private door powerfully expressed the idea that drug dealers are not welcome here, but children are always welcome.
One day in desperation we called several of our donors and raised the money to buy that house (it felt like we were paying ransom), and now there’s a new duplex in its place.
Step by step, house by house, Hope took back the block.
Over a 10-year period beginning in 1990, the block was completely rebuilt. Gradually the destruction and violence began to give way to a new reality. The Hope Block has become a model for our Children’s Village vision and a much larger-scale development.