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The Minneapolis Neighborhood and Community Relations department is spreading rumors about my potential “conflict of interest.” This is based on all the pretend dollars I have extracted from my social media empire while serving on a neighborhood board (it may sound like a fishy arrangement, but I assure you there is no “there” there). I have contacted NCR Director David Rubedor, asking him to instruct the person he supervises to stop the rumor mongering. He has declined my request.

Rather than get mad, let’s hold a pledge drive and grab as much fake cash as possible before the federal indictment comes down. I won’t be providing you with the actual means to send me actual money. This is only about creating the appearance of corruption. There is no gofundme, no bank account, no mailing address. Just this pledge form. Send it to your craziest uncle on Facebook. Then tell him to send it to NCR, because they’re the only ones who will humor this nonsense.

Click here for the PDF version.

Red squiggly boxes indicate inappropriate tweeting.

In my role as a person with a Twitter account and a seat on a neighborhood association board, I sometimes hear curious things about myself. One of these things involved the Neighborhood and Community Relations department, which oversees and assists Minneapolis neighborhood organizations. This prompted me to do a public records request. Many of the emails obtained in that records request are posted here.

Last May, NCR’s Michelle Chavez had some questions about me. Instead of asking me these questions, she used them to provoke an emotionally disturbed neighborhood resident into wild speculation. Chavez’s words:

…what does he gain from “At Wedge Live?” Is this a conflict of interest? Does he think that he can use his board position to drive more people to his twitter feed?… Does he get paid for his writing about neighborhoods?

Over the course of her conversation with the resident, Chavez used the following words and phrases to describe me: “tear the neighborhood apart” … “creates false pictures” … “biased” … “does [Wedge LIVE] need to go away?” Obviously, you’re allowed to think I’m bad news, but a city employee should use another platform to express those opinions (Twitter maybe?) rather than spreading official-seeming rumors using her dot gov email address.

For the next several months, the concerned resident remained in frequent contact with NCR. He submitted a large number of .pdf printouts and screenshots documenting my twitter activity. In August, the resident sent Chavez a deeply researched conspiracy theory, in which he concludes that I am likely a professional propagandist on par with the oil company scientists he saw in a movie. In another email forwarded to NCR, the resident speculates that I work for the Urban Land Institute.

The world is a canvas to the imagination.

Now, I’d prefer NCR back off my tweets, stop trashing me to neighborhood residents, etc. But if we’re going down this road, let’s apply some equal scrutiny. I often see a particular neighborhood board member using Facebook to compare city actions to Hitler/genocide/ISIS. That’s over the top, worthy of ridicule, and offensive to many–but it never dawned on me that I should lodge a complaint with the city over it. It would be a shame if I’m getting special attention because I’ve occasionally pointed out some ways that NCR might do a better job.

Finally, I need to answer NCR’s original question and put all the rumors to rest: No Michelle, I don’t get paid for any of this. What do I have to gain? Just the undying hatred of neighborhood lunatics–the same crowd of people you’re encouraging.

Some things to note for context: May 21 is the day after I became a LHENA Board Member. Here’s what I was tweeting during this period of time. On July 14, this happened. 

Below are emails to the Minneapolis’ Neighborhood and Community Relations department referencing myself and/or “Wedge LIVE” in 2015, my first year as a LHENA Board Member. This is the case against me, complete with all .pdf and .png attachments. If you see red squiggly boxes around my pdf’d tweets, those were drawn by the Concerned Resident. As you read, please keep in mind this is the person to whom NCR felt it was appropriate to encourage with speculative questions about how I might be using my board position and tweets to enrich myself.

mean tweets

The year is 1995. A landlord is renovating his triplex when a concerned neighbor appeals to the neighborhood association for help. The organization comes to the rescue, deciding¹ that “because the building has been vacant for over a year, the nonconforming use expires and the building should revert to a duplex.” The neighborhood was Lowry Hill East. And that heroic concerned neighbor would go on to become the chairman of LHENA’s 2004 rezoning subcommittee.

The history of Lowry Hill East is full of stories like this. Over the last 45 years, our neighborhood political process has operated largely from the perspective, and with the priorities, of the single-family homeowner. Lowry Hill East is a place with a long tradition of apartment buildings and a population that has hovered around 75-85% renter for as far back as I’m able to check (1940). But the politics is dominated by a consistent, uncompromising advocacy against dense, multi-family housing.

The elimination of high-density zoning was a founding principle of LHENA. In 1975, after years of hard work, the group succeeded in downzoning much of the neighborhood–both houses and apartment buildings–from high to low-density (R6 to R2). The inclusion of apartment buildings was done with the hope “that the properties would, if reconstructed, be redeveloped as single and two family homes.”

23 units, constructed in 1930. Downzoned to R2 (two-family) in 1975.

20 units, constructed in 1923. Downzoned to R2 in 1975.

6 units, constructed in 1913. Downzoned to R2 in 1975.

The Gentrification² Years

After declaring victory on the zoning issue, LHENA shifted focus towards promoting the restoration of single-family homes. Boarding houses were a particular target. In 1978, a LHENA-sponsored home tour proudly featured former boarding houses in the process of gentrification rehabilitation. Residents were celebrated in newspaper profiles for restoring their boarding houses to single-family homes. Neighborhood leaders would brag about rooming house conversions in their candidate bios. The boarding house nostalgia we’ve seen expressed in recent years, primarily as a product of the debate over the fate of the boarding house at 2320 Colfax, came as a shock to anyone familiar with LHENA history; when the group’s board of directors took up the issue of 2320 Colfax in 1992, they decided they were simply “opposed to the concept of a rooming house.”

In the early ’80s, LHENA took on the urgent task of preventing single-family homes from being “chopped up” into duplexes. The enormous house at 2400 Bryant Ave was eventually saved by the combined efforts of a LHENA committee and Calhoun Realty (it was recently promoted for sale at $1.2 million with a drone flyover video; a gentrification preservation success story if I’ve ever heard one). In 1986, the organization’s president editorialized that LHENA should take advantage of favorable interest rates and “redouble efforts to work with realtors to attract good buyers” with the goal of “reverting some duplexes and boarding houses to single family.”

This is not to say that I’m offended by the idea of purchasing and converting an old duplex or boarding house to a single-family home. But it’s important to acknowledge the history. In my time as an observer of neighborhood politics, I have heard protests of “gentrification” from the mouths of people who have restored their homes to single family, who would now like to downzone Lowry Hill East and have it frozen in time with an all-consuming historic district. People have even used boarding house residents as an anti-development cudgel while advocating for turning the same boarding house into a single-family home or a boutique “urban hotel.”

Allow me to quote myself, from an alternate dimension where I have written a much snarkier blog post:

It’s a legitimately lousy situation when boarding house residents are forced to find a new home. But that’s nothing new in this neighborhood. The Wedge has a past plagued by persistent gentrification. These senseless acts of renovation can’t be stopped; it’s simply too embedded in the neighborhood culture.

Good luck gentrifying the neighborhood, Scott and Linda.

2002-2004: Apartment Moratorium and Rezoning

In 2002, LHENA again took up the issue of rezoning. Council Member Dan Niziolek assisted in those efforts by introducing a moratorium on the construction of apartment buildings. The moratorium would last for 20 months, giving LHENA the time to chart a course for rezoning.

Stakeholders included former renters and current non-renters.

LHENA’s rezoning subcommittee met for nearly a year, starting in May 2003. One of the more hilarious (or frightening) tasks performed by the subcommittee was sending volunteers house to house looking for illegal units. Intelligence gathered on these missions was later passed on to the city so that the illegal housing could be, in CPED’s words, “alleviated.” But the most notable result of the rezoning effort was LHENA’s 2004 plan to completely eliminate high-density zoning categories (R5, R6) from Franklin Avenue south to 28th Street, affecting a total of 244 parcels. This would have applied even to existing apartment buildings, with the idea that if the property was redeveloped (or destroyed in a fire, for example), it could not legally be rebuilt at its current level of density.

The LHENA proposal would also have rezoned 69 parcels to single-family (R1A), a category that did not (and still does not) exist in the neighborhood. This is how CPED characterized LHENA’s push for a six block “single family core” in 2004:

CPED proposal (left) vs. LHENA proposal (right)

[Read the full 2004 LHENA/CPED rezoning proposals]

In an email from the time, Council Member Dan Niziolek is described as having a “concern” that LHENA’s proposal would not “maintain a transit appropriate density.” LHENA’s plan for a single family core, and outright elimination of high-density zoning–for a neighborhood bounded by bus service on Hennepin and Lyndale Avenues–was too extreme, even for Niziolek; and remember, Niziolek was sympathetic enough to LHENA’s cause that he kickstarted the process with a 20-month apartment building moratorium.

As rezoning discussions came to a close, the Wedge newspaper reported that “if the city does not accept the Wedge plan, [LHENA] would like [zoning] to remain as is.” With LHENA refusing to budge, neither proposal was adopted. When today’s downzoning proponents talk about the development “target” that R6 zoning places on a property, it should be noted that a large number of those R6 properties would have been rezoned to R4 more than 10 years ago if LHENA had accepted CPED’s proposal.

2005-2015: Backdoor Downzoning

Shortly after the rezoning fell apart, LHENA began its pursuit of a historic district. They used funds received from the city’s NRP program to pay for a 2005 historic study. The chairman of LHENA’s NRP preservation subcommittee named two primary reasons for pursuing the historic district: one was preservation, and the other was to use it as a tool of rezoning: “to make development like that which occurred in the ’60s and ’70s more difficult.”

In 2008, the city was willing to give LHENA some of what it wanted by offering a historic district twice the size of what was recommended in the study the neighborhood commissioned three years earlier. But many residents involved in the process had their sights set on a massive historic district extending “from 28th St. to the tip of the neighborhood.” The 2008 plan went nowhere, amid concerns within LHENA “that acceptance of this proposal could limit future possibilities for expansion.”

A successful effort to designate a historic district in 2015, initiated by Council Member Lisa Bender, was met with similar all-or-nothing opposition. One of the opponents was the previous Council Member, Meg Tuthill–LHENA founder, and veteran of the 1975 and 2004 rezoning efforts. She dismissed the modestly-sized historic district as unnecessary in an area already zoned low-density: “The designation is a ‘feel good’ ruse for the city, pretending to care about preservation.” This reflects the fairly common belief among anti-development activists that downzoning and historic districts are interchangeable tools. According to this line of thinking, city planners who would enact both policies in the same place are engaging in trickery.

Size of the 2015 historic designation was disappointing for some.

The Future: Downzone, Gentrify, Repeat?

Before I’d ever been to Minneapolis, I looked at some maps–not a map of historic places, not a zoning map, but a transit map. I noted the high-frequency bus routes serving Lowry Hill East. I studied a Google map, and I noted the proximity of grocery stores, and other amenities made possible by higher density housing. I’m fortunate there were affordable 50-year-old apartment buildings when I arrived. And I hope for future policies that allow neighborhoods to keep changing, so that 50 years from now there will still be 50-year-old apartment buildings to rely on.

I have concerns about taking one of the city’s most walkable, transit-accessible, bike-friendly neighborhoods, located on the edge of downtown, and freezing it in place. In the 1970s, Lowry Hill East was zoned entirely high-density–but that is no longer the case. The activists of the 1970s successfully protected the low-density character of the neighborhood’s interior. Still, there are those with predictions of imminent neighborhood destruction who would now like to restart the downzoning process. Based on the neighborhood history, I have my doubts about the kind of proposal this process leads to.

¹ The house is still a non-conforming triplex, thanks to a system that allows the city to disregard the advisory opinions of neighborhood organizations.
² The author’s repeated use of the word “gentrification” is not appropriate, and he does not endorse abuse of the word by others.

The hotel proposed for the southeast corner of Lake Street and Emerson Avenue has inspired dueling petitions (pro-hotel vs no-hotel). The petition battle has become TV-newsworthy. A shadowy group has even put out a pretend 30-second ad against it.

Site of proposed hotel. Lake Street in background.

There’s something happening in the Lyndale neighborhood. Many people think of Lyndale as the Rhode Island of our tri-neighborhood area. And these people are right, so it’s not worth trying to understand or explain the underlying issues (something about 17 dwelling units and a parking crisis). So let’s go straight to the videotape.

Year’s end means it’s time to clear out the draft folder on my blogspot. There were many times this year when I felt compelled to write a post, took the time to actually write it, but couldn’t pull the trigger. The following excerpt is from a draft entitled “Orthghazi II: The Screenshotting.” Written around the time of the 2320 Colfax demolition, it’s a tell-all about my experiences before and after writing this post. But I named too many names, and left it to languish. Until now.

Written in March of 2015.

Feb 24, 9:35 AM: The first photo of the demolition of 2320 Colfax is Tweeted. I hustle to the site for pictures and video. Healy Project people are already there.

Madeline from The Healy Project approached me, asked which side I was on. I told her, “The wrong one.”
— Wedge LIVE! (@WedgeLIVE) February 24, 2015

Feb 25, 6:00 PM: Nicole Curtis posts a series of Facebook statements about the demolition. She coins the phrase “Lisa Bender lied, the Orth died.” No one can articulate what Bender is supposed to have lied about. Over the course of three posts in 24 hours, clueless commenters piece together that Council Member Lisa Bender is the very corrupt, suspiciously liberal, Mayor or Congressman responsible for this crime against house-manity.

Feb 26, 1:22 PM: I try desperately to stay out of the Facebook cesspool. This causes domestic strain for @WedgeLIVE, as revealed in this social media conversation with @WedgePAL.

Panicked DM sent from @WedgeLIVE.

News tips/screenshots via DM were all the rage in early 2015.

Was the Orth demo faked? I’ll never tell.

Mar 5, 10:58 PM: Nicole Curtis calls me a racist.

I’m also the real carjacker.

Mar 5, 11:31 PM: I remain unaware of Curtis’ re-posting of my video, until one of her rabid fans sends me a hilarious late-night text.

Who knew my mom reads Twitter?

March 6, 7:20 AM: Curtis fan “Kelli” posts a shaky pirated copy of my demo video recorded from a computer screen. In retaliation, I record a much shakier video of her shaky video of my original video.

Mar 6, 11:36 AM: The source of the racism allegation (and of 12 pages of PDF’d Tweets) is telling tales in the Strib comment section. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the allegedly violent Ivy Leaguer, I’d love to hear his side of the story.

“You have the right to peacefully demonstrate, but you can’t block traffic, and oops we disappeared the sidewalk.”

Marcy-Holmes is frighteningly young.

In June 2004, approximately 90 people packed into a crowded room to partake in the annual election meeting of the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association, the organization designated by the city of Minneapolis to represent the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood. Neighborhood meetings are typically low-key, casual affairs, but this one was monitored as thoroughly as a U.N.-supervised election in a Third World republic. Representatives from the League of Women Voters scrutinized the credentials of all attendees. To be eligible to vote, they would need to be certified members of MHNA (which required the submission of a valid membership registration at least 30 days prior to the meeting) and they would need to present a photo ID as well as proof of residency in the neighborhood. The MHNA board also hired a parliamentarian from the city’s Neighborhood Revitalization Program to ensure that all proceedings were conducted legally. They even hired an armed beat patrolman to maintain security in case matters got out of hand.

What issue could possibly have been so contentious that the board apparently felt the need to prepare against the possibility of violence? In short, reformers were trying to amend MHNA’s bylaws in order to make the organization more accessible to student residents. The previous fall, a group of students had worked with an MHNA representative to prepare a list of amendments designed to enable greater student participation. The biggest change the reformers wanted was to change the month of the annual meeting — when elections for board officers and directors are held — from June to October. The reason was obvious: Students are less likely to be around during the summer. Despite this fact — or as I suspect, because of it — the association voted to reject the schedule change as well as every other student proposal.

Membership requirements of the Marcy-Holmes Neighborhood Association.

Linden Hills is typical of vast majority of Minneapolis neighborhood orgs.

White gunman stalks Muslim woman in Texas last week.

Last Monday night, four men showed up to the Black Lives Matter protest outside the Minneapolis Police Department’s 4th Precinct and shot five unarmed black protesters. This was after a week of similar visits from white men—armed with guns, cameras, and racist commentary—streaming live video to the internet for the entertainment of their fellow racists.

It’s become a cliche after such attacks to ask overly timid headline writers, “What if the white guy with a gun was a brown guy with a gun?” When armed men in masks menace unarmed civilians; when these men post video of themselves delivering hate-filled messages and flashing weapons; when this ends in a mass shooting… This describes an act of terrorism.

Here’s why it matters. We treat terrorism differently than other violent crimes. We go to much greater lengths to protect ourselves from it, and to punish those responsible. We see some greater value in stopping politically motivated acts of violence which are intended not just to maim and murder, but to intimidate whole populations.

I worry we’re not taking seriously enough these threats from well-armed whites with a political axe to grind. The Thursday before the 4th Precinct shooting, a video was posted online showing two men in a car, driving to the Black Lives protest. The driver held up a handgun while promising to engage in some “reverse cultural enriching,” finally signing off to his viewers with the phrase “Stay white.” Sitting in the passenger seat was Lance Scarsella, who returned to the protest with three other men on Monday, the night of the attack. These are the four men now under arrest in connection with the shooting.

Minneapolis Police had four days prior to the shooting to track down the two men in the video. The driver was correctly identified by name in a comment on the “Black Lives Matter” Facebook page three days before the attack. As a resident of south Minneapolis, it took me five minutes to retrace the route taken in the video—right back to the driveway they pulled out of—using a basic knowledge of local landmarks and Google Street View. If it was a priority, these details should have led police to Scarsella.

As MPD’s union head was comparing the Black Lives Matter protest to “Benghazi” on talk radio, the job of intelligence gathering was left to an unpaid social media detective:

Scarsella, Gustavsson and Macey, along with the man who was questioned and released, are featured in several videos of a now-deleted YouTube page. The page’s banner featured two dozen men — some masked — holding weapons, along with a pair of Confederate flags. The videos were deleted by Monday afternoon, but they had been archived by Minneapolis-based researcher Tony Webster.

I’m a big Tony Webster fan, but we shouldn’t have to rely on the work of a skilled volunteer to track and archive the online activities of the violent white extremists who threaten our city. It’s just too big of a job.

Since 9/11, domestic terror attacks by white Americans have killed anywhere from two to five times as many people as those carried out by jihadists. We often hear about the social media prowess of ISIS; far less publicized is the degree to which sites like 4chan and reddit are an increasingly effective recruiting tool for a new generation of white nationalists. Though the idea of white terrorism doesn’t seem to break into the headlines, police from across the country are aware of the threat: a 2015 NY Times national survey of law enforcement agencies identifies right-wing terror as the top threat facing American cities.

I assume there are people in positions of authority who are aware of these facts, but recent events do not inspire confidence in local law enforcement. The racial and religious diversity of the Twin Cities makes them a tempting target for hate groups. Let’s be sure we’re focusing our anti-terrorism efforts, both locally and across Minnesota, beyond the usual suspects.