In the 1950s, Debbie Montgomery, a former St. Paul City Council member and the first woman hired by the St. Paul Police Department, watched her parents thrive in the city s Rondo neighborhood.
The flourishing Black family owned a multilevel home and a pair of lots, crucial acquisitions toward building generational wealth, before local planners used federal money to cut through one of the state s most prominent and affluent Black communities to create Interstate 94. It decimated the village, Montgomery told me during our conversation last week. We don t have a village anymore. We ve got community but we don t have a village. We lost that.
Others are doing it well; can the Twin Cities?
It’s 7:15 a.m. on a November Sunday morning, and a voice in the back of my head is asking why I’m not at home in a warm bed. Instead, I’m at the airport, meeting up with others before embarking on a group business trip. My ability to think at this point goes only so far as to wonder where the nearest Starbucks is located.
Within 20 minutes, everyone’s there: Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, Minnesota Chamber of Commerce President David Olson, and about 70 other community and business leaders taking part in the ninth annual InterCity Leadership Visit, sponsored by the chambers of commerce in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Their enthusiasm wakes me up a bit as I realize they, too, could have slept in. Instead, they are eager to spend three long days in Austin, Texas, studying how to better position the Twin Cities region as