Healthy Community Initiative

By Colton Kemp for the Northfield News

Emily Culver is back in her college town of Northfield, taking on a new role as Network Impact Coordinator for the Northfield Racial and Ethnic Equity Collaborative of Healthy Community Initiative.

As she finds her footing in the community again, she was given an official tour of the city’s affordable housing options led by Rice County Neighbors United Executive Director Mar Valdecantos, who has spent years advocating for the low-income residents of Northfield facing challenges and maltreatment from their landlords.

Healthy Community Initiative, or HCI, is a local nonprofit working to advance health and racial equity by expanding educational and economic opportunity in Rice County. The collaborative Culver works with seeks to address challenges in adjacent sectors, such as housing, that impact academic achievement and economic mobility for youth and families.

“As a convener of a lot of different community partners, I think it’s important to know what the housing landscape looks like in Northfield, because that’s what the Housing Work Group is focused on and wanting to improve,” Culver said. “Mar is one of our community partners, and it’s interesting to get a partner’s perspective on what the landscape looks like.”

In a followup Tuesday, Culver said the community partners she meets with include the city and county governments, several area nonprofits and the Northfield Public School District.

After meeting in the Emmaus Baptist Church parking lot, the tour kicked off with driving a short loop through one of Northfield’s most infamous examples of what Valdecantos says is unfair practices managing low-income housing, Viking Terrace, a manufactured-home community with nearly 200 homes.

The park was bought by Lakeshore Management in April 2022, and sent out a 40-page document with a list of new rules and regulations for residents, who own their homes but rent the lot they sit on. Valdecantos pointed out the signs the company put up at the entrance and exit of the park some time later, which had positive messages like “Have a good day.”

The new rules spanned from limiting secondary structures like sheds. One rule said items “not in active use” weren’t allowed to be kept outside the home. Those items included a wheelchair that couldn’t fit through the front door, according to one resident’s testimony to the Northfield City Council at the time.

Things seemed to quiet down once the park manager was fired following pushback from Attorney General Keith Ellison. However, Valdecantos said the company installed water meters recently, and will soon require each unit to pay water and sewer costs.

“Come May, these people are gonna have to pay quite a bit more, every family,” she said. “They’re doing this because this is the area that consumes the most water in town, because they have to have the water going all winter, because otherwise the pipes freeze. Even though they might have a system that heats the pipes and all of that, it’s still bad.”

Housing advocate

As the tour continued, Valdecantos shared a wealth of firsthand accounts from multiple community protests and controversies. She watched protests unfold that were looking to stop development at the former Paulson Christmas Tree Farm in 2021.

“It wasn’t really a good communication with the neighbors,” she said. “Although, the neighbors knew this was coming, so they, all of them, could’ve bought some of the land, preserved the forest. I mean, it was very unfortunate that we lost such a huge forest in the middle of town, but you need also land. It was very painful.”

City officials ultimately approved the construction of 30 homes and a 100-unit apartment complex, a housing development eventually to be known as Kraewood.

Since the area wasn’t full of trees before the farm was there, it didn’t meet the requirements to be protected. The old house on the property now has a sign on it, which notes it will soon be relocated as development of the new site continues.

Next, Valdecantos took Culver to the Northfield Estates, which she said was once full of cockroaches and located in a food desert, meaning access to food is limited or disproportionately inaccessible. In fact, she said it’s the birthplace of Rice County Neighbors United.

After she learned of the conditions in Northfield Estates, she advocated for the residents in a meeting with a number of city officials, who eventually helped craft a more comprehensive rental ordinance to address the issues.

“They ordered the first provisional rental license in the history of Northfield,” Valdecantos said.

Upon meeting the new owners, Valdecantos said she’s more confident about their intentions and is pushing for a new playground like Northfield Estates once had.

She spoke about leading pushes for several changes throughout the city over the years, like putting crosswalks and a slower speed limit in front of Northfield Middle School. She said that process was far more work than one might expect, as it needed to go through the state and not the city.

“This is why it’s so important that we have the radio and we have the newspaper, because you are on top of what is happening,” Valdecantos said. “I mean, otherwise, they say that when those things don’t exist in a community, the accountability of the city council goes down the drain. There’s nobody paying attention, because not everybody has the time.”

She drove past a park she hopes to see renamed someday, due to the negative history associated with the former governor it was named after, Henry Sibley, who helped oversee the largest state-sponsored execution in U.S. history after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. To rename the park without upsetting people, she mentioned her fascination with a policy the school district implemented for its buildings.

“The school district had a great idea, which is the policy of not using names anymore,” she said. “You’d now name a park after a tree or a rock or something. Instead of upsetting everybody by removing the name on that one, they removed all the names.”

Low-income issues

The tour continued through more low-income housing like Jefferson Square, Parkway Townhomes and Spring Creek Townhomes. As Valdecantos’ new SUV pulled into the Emmaus parking lot, she spoke about the main issues facing low-income people in Northfield.

“We have low-income people that rely on the food shelf, and the food shelf, they’re not growing as fast as the demand,” she said. “Especially after the pandemic, the numbers don’t work.”

She also said low-income people have poor access to jobs, transportation and housing.

“Then if you add to the mix that — not everybody, but many community members in the low-income community — they have no legal status,” Valdecantos said. “If you add that into the mix, the options for housing are very narrow, because you go places and they start asking questions, and say ‘Present this document,’ and ‘We need a social security number.’”

She added that many are forced to travel outside of Northfield to find work that doesn’t limit employment due to immigration status.

“Options are so narrow when you can’t [provide those things],” Culver said.

Valdecantos added that some community members mischaracterize immigrants as a whole, but she said the community is far more diverse than many realize.

For one, they don’t all get along, she said. They also don’t all work in manufacturing and agriculture. Just like Northfield attracts well-educated citizens, the city also attracts well-educated noncitizens.

“We have accountants, we have nurses, we have so many teachers,” she said. “That’s the community. They’re professionals. They’re business owners. Some of them had to leave because they were — with the cartels and all of the trafficking and all of that — they were extorted. They would go to your little place and say, ‘Okay, now you pay,’ which is common now in many places in Mexico.”

Culver said the tour was enlightening, and Valdecantos noted that she’s given it to new pastors, new political leaders and many others in town.

“Even though you live in a place it’s not like you’re seeing everything,” Culver said. “There’s not often reasons to just drive around and see what the entire town looks like, and see places you normally don’t see and may never know about otherwise.”

Many of the issues discussed on the tour, Culver said, have real-world consequences when it comes to educational outcomes and economic mobility.

“All of those things feed into a young person’s ability to succeed, and how much their family as a whole is able to thrive too,” she said. “So you know, if you have a parent who is unstably employed, it may also affect a student’s ability to go to school, or that student may be working part time to help fill in income.”