1. NORTH MINNEAPOLIS, ONE YEAR LATERBy David Doody
“Disasters are not accidents or acts of God.” So argues Anthony Oliver-Smith,
professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Florida, in a 2011 article
titled “Haiti and the Historical Construction of Disasters.” They are, he continues,
“far more than catastrophic events; they are processes that unfold through time,
and their causes are deeply embedded in societal history. As such, disasters have
historical roots, unfolding presents and potential futures according to the forms
of reconstruction.”
North Minneapolis is not Haiti. And the tornado that ripped a 3.5-mile gash diago-
nally southwest to northeast across that section of the city on May 22, 2011 pales
in comparison to the earthquake that devastated the tiny island nation in 2010.
The latter may have killed as many as 300,000 people. The North Minneapolis
tornado killed two.
Still, one would be hard pressed to find a more vulnerable place in the Twin
Cities for the largest urban tornado in the state in 30 years to hit. In the reces-
sion-addled years preceding the storm the area saw a large concentration of
foreclosures; widespread property speculation and flipping; a steady increase
in the rental community, often with inattentive landlords who had no attach-
ment to the neighborhood other than investment properties; and dispropor-
tionate unemployment numbers.
If there were one place in Minnesota where a disaster could be seen as a process
that unfolded through time—one with historical roots—this would be it. And
though it’s important when talking about the tornado and recovery efforts to
understand the historical context that led the Northside to where it is today, it
is admittedly difficult to focus on that context when looking at the current situ-
ation; a year later blue tarps, broken windows and hulking, uprooted tree stumps
still dot the storm’s path. But the past does indeed unfold into the present and
potential future, therefore it cannot be ignored.
“The storm wasn’t, on the scale of storms, that terrible,” says Chad Schwit-
ters of Urban Homeworks, a non-profit organization that was, by all ac-
counts, invaluable to the immediate recovery response and continues to work
on recovery efforts. (Urban Homeworks is part of the Northside Community Re-
sponse Team [NCRT], a multi-faceted organization made up of a diverse group of
non-profits, community agencies and individuals that formed in response to the
tornado.) “But if you take the storm path and overlay the unemployment and
poverty index, it was catastrophic because of where it hit,” Schwitters explains.
“The economic capacity of the average household impacted by the storm was
such that it was debilitating for them to respond to their own damage and issues.”
“Of all places in the city where this tornado could have hit, this was the worst,”
says Julianne Leerssen, Executive Director of the Neighborhood Hub, another or-
ganization within the NCRT. “Every kind of social ill that you can think of was
already there. People were already experiencing disasters in their daily lives, and
then this storm decided to pick this neighborhood.” She continues: “Historically
[North Minneapolis] has been a dumping ground for the City of Minneapolis. I can
show you a map from 1935 that designates a significant part of North Minneapolis
as a ‘Negro slum.’ On a city-planning map. That’s the legacy … you had systemic and
institutionalized racism going on. Those things are not gone in this community.”
Tom Streitz, director of housing and policy development for the City of Minneap-
olis, puts it this way: “[The tornado] added a huge challenge on top of a challenge.”
Sometime in the middle of the last century, estimates Mandi Studler, businesses
started pulling out of North Minneapolis—adding to the area’s isolation. Studler
helps manage the North Minneapolis Post Tornado Watch Facebook page, which
was widely credited as the most helpful resource for people immediately after
the tornado. “We turned it into a pocket of poverty,” she says. “Where you have a
little pocket that’s not included in the bigger part of the whole, that’s not treated
the same as the rest of the whole, well, it’s not going to feel the same. It’s really
divisive.”
Jariland Spence, founder of God’s Prayer Center, one of the faith organizations
that became a hub for food, water and support in the days following the storm,
agrees. “Just being on the Northside, so many people feel abandoned and left out and
just forgotten about,” she says. “The neighborhood was already in a state of despair
[before the tornado] because of joblessness, gangs, poverty, prostitution, all of that. So
what the tornado did was just compound the problem severely.”
THE CITY’S RESPONSE
Many in the community agree with Studler and Spence, believing that since the area
has historically been cut off from the rest of the city, its residents were left to fend for
themselves after the tornado. Furthermore, they feel that this response was different
from the way residents would have been treated in, say, Uptown.
When I ask Marie Porter (whose kitchen and other parts of her home were destroyed
when the tornado tossed the 100-year-old black walnut tree in her yard into her house)
what she thinks of the overall recovery efforts put forth by Minneapolis and Hennepin
County, she laughs and responds with her own question: “How much time do you have?”
“I have never lived anywhere in my life where a city would put its own personal profits
and a football stadium over the health and lives and wellbeing of the residents,” she tells
me. “The entire time [after the tornado], the City was fighting against us … causing us
more stress than the tornado itself. It still is a fight. They’re still trying to screw us over
… I’m not from Minnesota … I don’t believe in Minnesota Nice and I fight the City right
back. And I’ve made headway with my problems. I can’t imagine the amount of people
[who] won’t fight—I can’t even imagine the position everyone else [is] in, because the
City has been ridiculous.”
City Council president Barb Johnson thinks there is a misunderstanding at play. When
I ask whether she thinks people looked to the City for things that weren’t technically
within the City’s jurisdiction, she responds with a laugh of her own, saying, “That’s the
story of my life—everything is the responsibility of the City. And I get that, because
the City provides that day-to-day [service, such as] public works, police response and
garbage pickup. So it is natural that people attribute the responsibility of everything to
the City. And we’re happy to be the disperser and the on-the-ground support, because
that’s what our job is, but there isn’t always a lot of control that goes with that.”
Don Samuels, City Council member for the Fifth Ward—one of the hardest-hit areas in
North—sees things similarly and finds claims like Porter’s somewhat unfair. In Samuels’
view people only saw the City’s efforts when it showed up in an enforcement role; any
work it did in support of or in partnership with local organizations on the ground often
went unnoticed by the community. “We can’t parcel out the function of regulatory ser-
vices,” he says. “We have to do that ourselves … It’s not a fair perception sometimes, be-
cause Habitat for Humanity and Urban Homeworks don’t drive up in a city rec-services
truck to fix your roof, [but we] drive up in a city service truck to see if you’re complying
with regulatory conditions.”
Members of both those organizations—Urban Homeworks and Habitat for Human-
ity—agree with Samuels’ assessment. “I think there was some recognition by the City
that there was some competent leadership that emerged after [the tornado],” Scwhit-
ters says. “So I think their position was: ‘How do we support [that leadership] well … we
need to figure out how we can provide support from up here’—you know, the air game
to the ground game. I think some might perceive that as the City taking a back seat or
kind of playing second fiddle, but I really think it was a competent move on their part to
recognize the strengths and support them.”
Still, some see missed opportunities for the City to connect with organizations and
resources that affected residents were using, like the Minneapolis Post Tornado Watch
Facebook page, for example, which was started by Peter Kerre, a man living in New York
at the time. The City “should have come to Kerre and said, ‘How can we help you? You
seem to be the voice, the way that people are getting their needs met,’” says Spence.
“That didn’t happen … But he was the glue that held Minneapolis together through
Facebook … They should have worked closer with the actual people and not with Red
Cross … Go to the people the people are going to.”
Studler believes there was resentment on the part of City officials toward the
Minneapolis Post Tornado Watch page, because it was being cited as the en-
tity offering the most help. “I almost think it became more of a butting-
“There’s no cavalry coming to the Northside. The thing that has to be done here needs to come from within.”
-Jariland Spence, founder of God's Prayer Center
PHOTOS:ELIESAJOHNSON

2. 044 METRO 05.12
heads [situation],” she says. “That because this was being
taken on by just a group of citizens, they didn’t want to
work with us, because we had something set up that was
working, was helping people in need.”
Spence says she felt similarly ignored. She expected the
City to contact her in response to her efforts following
the storm, especially, she says, since the Red Cross began
sending people to her for help. Samuels “knew that peo-
ple were coming to the Prayer Center,” she says. “They
all knew. If the Red Cross is sending people to the Prayer
Center, come on now. So I was very disappointed that I
was not included on the list of organizations that were
reimbursed, that were given money to keep going.”
FRUSTRATION FOR ALL
While there are differing opinions regarding the City’s
role in the tornado recovery efforts, frustration seemed
to trickle upward for everyone. Homeowners like Marie
Porter and Annie Hickman, who is a teacher at Bright Wa-
ter Montessori on 23rd and Girard Avenues North and
whose garage was destroyed and roof damaged in the
tornado, feel that, at best, there was a lack of commu-
nication on the City’s part and, at worst, the response
was filled with “racism and classism,” according to Porter.
Meanwhile, the City and those working with it felt frus-
trated with layers of bureaucracy that accompany differ-
ent levels of government.
“The more distant or global the source of the money is—
meaning city, county, state, federal government—the
more complex and seemingly heartless the regulations
are,” says Samuels, “because they have less intimacy with
the process and they need such control in the process …
By the time you get to the federal government it’s a pain,
not just for the consumer … we were having heartache
with the federal government, so you can imagine the
citizens who have to apply for this SBA [Small Business
Association] loan and it’s a business loan and, you know,
most people didn’t qualify for it and then they got to do
that before they qualify for the other [resources].”
If that sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In order to
access funds available in what are known as interest-free
Quick Start loans, residents affected by the tornado had
to first apply and be rejected by the federal Small Busi-
ness Association for its low-interest-bearing loans.
Andy Barnett of Habitat for Humanity sees this confu-
sion as “really unfortunate,” saying, “As a homeowner I
don’t think about applying to the Small Business Associa-
tion for a loan. [It was] really inscrutable and it didn’t take
long for the word on the street to get to be that very
few people were getting accepted for those SBA loans,
which meant that people stopped applying, I think.” They
stopped applying, even though that rejection from the
counterintuitively named Small Business Association was
actually the correct first step in the process of accessing
what money was available to help. So, somewhat mad-
deningly, part of the problem in the recovery of North
Minneapolis after the tornado seems to have been one
of semantics.
COMING TOGETHER
Despite the confusion in the recovery process, one thing
that is often cited as a success was the sense of commu-
nity immediately after the storm. Whether supported by
the City or not, the community in general, and commu-
nity organizations specifically, are widely praised for hav-
ing responded well in the face of such devastation. Time
and again residents reference the support they received
from their neighbors and places like Shiloh Temple, Ur-
ban Homeworks, Pillsbury United Communities and the
Prayer Center as the most helpful.
Just prior to the tornado’s descent, the Prayer Center
happened to receive a large donation of food from
Grace Church in Eden Prairie that was to last six months
as a food shelf. Many whose homes were destroyed or
ing to her car, she started to get physically ill and didn’t know
why. “I went ice cold,” she says. “I got upset without even think-
ing about it. It was just this physical response to the familiarity of
the sensation. It was very weird … I don’t have PTSD, but I don’t
like tornados.”
The inability, or lack of effort, by anyone to confront that stress
is one of the greatest mishandlings of the recovery, according
to Hickman, who also struggles to keep her emotions in check
when severe weather rolls in. She and her students remember
being terrified on stormy days during summer school last year,
just weeks after the tornado. She believes the rise in shootings
in her neighborhood in the weeks following the storm was due
to post-tornado stress that had gone untreated. “I was obvi-
ously upset at the kids who were shooting each other,” she says,
“but I was more upset that there just wasn’t anything for them.
They had no options … I don’t think they were bad kids. I think
they were doing what people expect them to do and they [felt]
like they had no choice in how to respond, because all of a sud-
den the support drops off.”
Leerssen agrees that the lack of attention given to mental health
issues is troublesome. “I think that’s one of the most persistent
problems, because it’s the least addressed,” she says. “People
experience that visceral reaction [to the destruction] but then
they don’t do anything about it.” She emphasizes that this is
especially a problem in the black community and has focused
much of the work at the Neighborhood Hub around trying to
figure out the best ways to address these issues.
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES
Any opinion about the adequacy of support offered to North
Minneapolis after the tornado and the success of recovery ef-
forts seems to depend on one’s point of view. Even disregard-
ing knee-jerk responses from people living outside of North in
favor of opinions from those living and working in the commu-
nity, it’s still impossible to come to any sort of consensus.
If you’re looking at it from the perspective of Chad Schwitters,
Andy Barnett or Tom Streitz, then the effort that has brought
the number of affected homes drastically down is astounding,
especially given the context in which the tornado happened.
Though, as Schwitters points out, celebration may be premature
since some residents are still struggling to recover, he and oth-
ers are proud of the work that has been accomplished.
But if you’re Marie Porter, Annie Hickman or Jariland Spence and
feel the Northside was, at best, forgotten about before the re-
covery was done and, at worst, actively fought against, then it’s
easy to feel abandoned and isolated. “I don’t care what you see
in the news, that it’s all [better],” says Spence. “It is not.” When
you add a constant barrage of seemingly unimportant things
who had no electricity began showing up for food,
however. Spence gave it all away and then some. “It
was just amazing that we were able to help people,”
she says.
Barnett talks about the community leadership that
coalesced into the NCRT as being the best thing to
come out of the tornado response. “Community
leaders from the Northside were stepping up to
say, ‘This is something that needs to be led out of
the Northside, the response to this disaster needs
to come from this community, and be led from the
community, so that we can achieve two goals: Meet
the needs of people in the community, but also
[make sure that] economic activity that was gener-
ated by the storm benefits the local economy on the
Northside to the greatest degree possible.’ That was
really remarkable to see.”
“These little groups do really good,” Studler says.
“They organize, because when something like this
happens, people want to help. In the days immedi-
ately after, people wanted to put on their hardhats
and work boots and get out there and help people.
And the little groups really helped them do that—
Urban Homeworks, Prayer Center, Shiloh Temple,
Masjid An-Nur … these people just really care. Their hearts
are in the community. They just want to help people.”
Of the community’s response, Schwitters of Urban
Homeworks says, “I am so proud to walk alongside
my friends and neighbors.”
POST-TORNADO STRESS
Like the Prayer Center and Shiloh Temple, Bright
Water Montessori became a place of support for its
teachers and students. In the days following the tor-
nado, they discussed the emotions that come with
living through such an experience. Simply talking
about the tornado helped the students cope with
the difficult feelings they were having, as do tor-
nado drills, which, according to director Anne Luce,
give the kids practical tools to respond to what once
seemed like an unreal situation, but now is all too real.
So real, in fact, that any severe weather now frightens
some kids to the point of near-hysteria. “Our chil-
dren would go out in the playground and if a little
dirt devil whipped up or the wind started blowing,
we saw that they were still not healed,” says Amoke
Kubat, a teacher at the school. “They were crying,
they wanted to come in, they were banging on doors.
So we knew that we had to keep being vigilant and
caring and letting them know, ‘You’re safe, we’re here,
we’re paying attention’ … It’s an ongoing process.”
Porter remembers a recent morning where the air
felt exactly like it did the day of the tornado. Walk-
the City is willing to put its resources behind, such as
a multi-million dollar football stadium, then from that
perspective the whole thing is simply “a bunch of
bullshit,” according to Porter.
If you’re looking at it from Nancy Beers’ perspective as
director of disaster services at Lutheran Social Services,
an organization that works with recovery efforts across
the country, it might just be that most people don’t
understand the role of disaster recovery and expected
too much or the wrong thing. Disaster case managers
are meant to get people back to where they were be-
fore a disaster and no more, she points out. If, for ex-
ample, a person was unemployed before a disaster, it is
not a case manager’s job to find them employment; that
work should fall to the social service agencies already in
place in the community.
A right or wrong answer to the question of where the
Northside should be at this point, a year after the tor-
nado, simply does not seem to exist. Each person has
a success story to point to and conversely, a person or
entity they feel failed or should have done more. The
degree of each varies from individual to individual. And
so it is with any disaster recovery, according to Beers. “I
would say that every disaster I’ve ever been involved in
is controversial,” she says, “and everyone has their own
opinion about how they think [a] community should
recover … [In North Minneapolis] a lot of people have
been there fighting for that community and they don’t
want to give up the good fight … But that’s what you want
a community to do—you want it to fight for itself, right?”
There are indeed a lot of people fighting for North Min-
neapolis. No doubt great strides have been made in the
last year. Residents and organizations already estab-
lished in North have been responsible for much of that
progress. And that seems to be the way the Northside
wants it, or at least how its residents feel it has to be.
“There’s no cavalry coming to the Northside,” Spence
says. “The thing that has to be done here needs to come
from within.”
But still there are those blue tarps, broken windows and
uprooted trees as you drive the path of the tornado,
which force you to ask if it would be like this, a year
later, in Uptown or Woodbury or West St. Paul. If the
answer is no, you’re left to wonder why. And then you’re
left at square one—back to pondering the “historical
roots, unfolding presents, and potential futures” of this
place, all at once a part of the city and a place unto itself. +
“If you take the storm path and
overlay the unemployment and
poverty index, it was catastrophic
because of where it hit.”
-Chad Schwitters, executive
director of Urban Homeworks
(Above) Area residents outside of Broadway Liquor Outlet at W. Broadway and Penn. (Previous page) Lowry and Knox Avenues North. Both images are from April 2012.
A damaged home with signs from the Department
of Inspections on its door stands in disrepair nearly
one year after the tornado.
A year later, uprooted stumps and severed trees still mark the tornado's path.
PHOTOS:ELIESAJOHNSON