Koerth: The link between racial covenants and the development of Minneapolis parks

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When President Donald Trump stepped into his second term in office last January, one of his first actions was an executive order terminating any federal program that could be connected to the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the lost research and data was work on environmental justice. This is the understanding that climate change and other kinds of pollution affect different communities in different ways — and some Americans are left holding the short end of the stick.

It shouldn’t be a difficult concept to understand. You can look around Minneapolis with your own two eyeballs and notice that nobody is building industrial sites near Linden Hills. Other parts of the city have had factories plopped down in the middle of them, though. And it’s not too much of a stretch to suspect that might lead to different environmental outcomes.

The president can erase funding for environmental justice, but he can’t erase the reality of the problem or the need for solutions. That’s why research like the kind being done by the Mapping Prejudice project at the University of Minnesota is so important. Its work shows how a history of racism in Minneapolis led to a city where some neighborhoods are hotter and less prepared for climate change than others.

Today, neighborhoods along Minnehaha Creek and the Chain of Lakes have some of the highest rates of tree cover in the city. That feature is both aesthetically pleasing and environmentally protective. Temperatures in these parts of town can be as much as three degrees cooler on average than the overall city.

That seemingly small difference matters on hot summer days. It shrinks electric bills, makes the outdoors more livable, and improves the health of the elderly and medically vulnerable. And it all started with agreements between land developers and the Minneapolis Park Board that created a network of exclusive whites-only neighborhoods with ample public parkland.

When Walker began researching racial covenants in the city, she knew that these neighborhoods overlapped with the majority of city parks developed during the time period the covenants were in effect. But she assumed this would turn out to be a coincidence, the simple result of the city rapidly expanding and building parks to keep up with growth in a time period when racist housing policy was common.

Instead, Walker found that developers collaborated with the Park Board to ensure new parkland was established close to neighborhoods that excluded people of color. “The real estate developers shaped the fabric of the city to incentivize public resources towards covenant neighborhoods,” Walker told me. The city parks were just another marketing tool the developers could use to sell lots. For example, some of the land that became parkland and trails along Minnehaha Creek near Lake Nokomis was sold by developers of whites-only neighborhoods to the Park Board for $1.

The result is that three-fourths of the parks added to Minneapolis over that 45-year period are within a block of a racial covenant neighborhood, according to Walker’s research. That’s why even today, those neighborhoods have more tree cover and more parkland than neighborhoods where Black and brown Minneapolitans could live.

Nature in the city isn’t all that natural. It’s planned. And sometimes that planning has been racist as hell. And when a city has been intentionally designed to exclude people of color, the only way to fix that is by intentionally planning to include them. You know, DEI.

“Since the 1970s, the Park Board has done a lot of work trying to invest in smaller parks in the city’s more diverse and working-class communities,” Walker said. But the differences in tree canopy — and the real, tangible differences in public health related to them — still exist. Mechanisms that drive inequality in park development are still there, as well.

But the result is a system where parks are still only being reliably built for people who are wealthier. Even a separate system that allows neighborhoods to vote for property tax increases to pay for park development and improvement only works if residents have the cash to choose a higher tax bill.

“In a big picture way, the housing market continues to be unequal. Access to amenities continues to be unequal,” Walker said.

Making parks and access to nature more fair starts with where people live: robust public housing and better rent control, used in ways that create neighborhoods less segregated by income, she said. That way, when rich Minneapolitans get a new park, so do their less-well-off neighbors.