LISC_EcoVillage_Case_Final

METLIFE FOUNDATION COMMUNITY-POLICE PARTNERSHIP AWARD WINNER
HAWTHORNE
ECOVILLAGE
Minneapolis,
MN

COMMUNITY SAFETY PAPER SERIES
Writing: Chandra Conway
Photos: Courtesy of Project for Pride in Living and David B. Wheeler
Design: B. Boyle Design, Inc.
LOCAL INITIATIVES SUPPORT CORPORATION –
COMMUNITY SAFETY INITIATIVE
LISC is the nation’s leading community development support organization. Since 1980,
LISC has helped resident-led, community-based development organizations transform
distressed communities and neighborhoods into healthy ones – good places to live, do
business, work and raise families. By providing capital, technical expertise, training and
information, LISC supports the development of local leadership and the creation of afford-
able housing, commercial, industrial and community facilities, businesses and jobs. LISC
established the Community Safety Initiative in 1994 to support strategic alliances between
community developers, law enforcement and other key stakeholders in troubled neighbor-
hoods. The partners’ work creates strong, stable and healthy communities by reducing
persistent crime and disorder and spurring economic investment.
METLIFE FOUNDATION
MetLife Foundation, established by MetLife in 1976, is a long-time supporter of LISC’s
community revitalization programs. In 1994, the Foundation made a $1 million leadership
grant to pilot the Community Safety Initiative. MetLife and the Foundation have also made
below-market rate loans and grants of almost $90 million to the organization. For more
information about the Foundation, visit www.metlife.org.
COMMUNITY SAFETY PAPER SERIES
This publication is part of a series published by LISC’s Community Safety Initiative as part
of the MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Awards program. Sponsored by
MetLife Foundation since 2002, the Awards celebrate and promote exemplary community
safety strategies bolstered by collaboration between police and neighborhood leaders. For
other case studies and papers in this series, please visit www.lisc.org/resources.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge MetLife Foundation for its continued support of the Community
Safety Initiative and strong dedication to public safety partnerships around the country.
We would like to also thank the police and community development leaders who
participated in the awards process as application readers: Jaime Ayala, Lisa Belsky, Emily
Bolton, Kwame Flaherty, Celayne Hill, Lt. George Kappe, Frandelia Moore, Beverly Smith,
and Anne Tremblay.
The authors and publishers are solely responsible for the accuracy of the statements and
interpretations contained herein. Such interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views
of MetLife Foundation.

MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award Winner 2010 / HAWTHORNE ECOVILLAGE Minneapolis, MN 3
Pam Patrek can’t put a date on when her north Minneapolis neigh-
borhood made a turn for the worse and took her quality of life with
it. But looking back, she knows when things got really bad and she
can recall exactly when she couldn’t take it anymore.
Everyone involved in the remarkable transformation of Patrek’s
neighborhood also remembers when she gave up on the area.
Their campaign coalesced around the desire to remake – from the
ground up – a neighborhood where Patrek, and other respectable
residents, would choose to live.
Patrek moved into her house on 4th Street N in 1985, when
she inherited the home from her late aunt. At that time the Haw-
thorne neighborhood (named for the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne)
was filled with long-time homeowners. By the mid-1990s, however,
urban flight had shifted Patrek’s neighborhood towards rentals.
Around the same time, deadly gang violence earned Minneapo-
lis the nickname “Murderapolis.” Over the next 10 years, Patrek
learned to negotiate an uneasy coexistence with the gang members
next door and their fondness for drive-by shootings.
By 2005, the neighborhood was unrecognizable. “It was a war
zone. Gun shots through the whole day and night,” says Patrek.
“We’d call 911 every single day.”
In 2005, Inspector Mike Martin was working in the neighbor-
hood as Metro Commander of the Minnesota Gang Strike Force.
He recognized that Hawthorne’s problems ran deep. Absentee
landlords owned many of the homes and their nonexistent prop-
erty management allowed gang members and drug dealers to
move in. Criminals were emboldened by the fact that the police
department was stretched thin and that some residents were afraid
to call 911. “It was a time when scarce police resources were being
used across the city to address the plague of crack cocaine and
increasing gang violence,” says Martin.
Martin launched an investigation against street-level drug deal-
ing in the neighborhood that led to 33 indictments and convictions
for narcotics sales. Yet, the quality of life for law-abiding residents
in the neighborhood continued to decline. They didn’t even feel
safe inside their own homes – the fear of stray bullets led some
to practically live in their basement. By 2008, a homeless prosti-
tute and her pimp had strung up a blue tarp and set up “house”
between a dumpster and Patrek’s fence.
The neighborhood’s criminal activity radiated from the inter-
section of 31st Avenue and 6th Street N. The intersection was such
a blatant drug market that any driver passing through was figured
to be a customer – actually stopping at the stop sign was an invita-
tion to drug dealers to step inside the car for a transaction.
Patrek stopped inviting family and friends to her house. Every-
one urged her to move but she couldn’t find a reasonable exit strat-
egy. “There was no way I was going to be able to sell – you couldn’t
get anybody to even look at the house,” she says. “And I couldn’t
afford to move out and just abandon the house.”
Patrek tried to draw attention to the neighborhood’s prob-
lems – she called the police, she reported code violations at the
crime-ridden apartment building next door, she wrote letters to the
city, she even yelled at the gang members, but none of her efforts
brought any relief. She remembers thinking that regardless of all
else, the important thing was that she was still alive. At the same
time, Patrek felt certain that the neighborhood was going to kill her.
“It wasn’t a matter of if we were going to get shot, it was
when,” she says. “There were dead bodies in the intersection. Peo-
ple would find dead bodies in their backyard. It really was lawless.
HAWTHORNE ECOVILLAGE
Minneapolis, MN
Inspector Martin (left), who helped to launch an investigation against the
street-level drug dealing in the Hawthorne neighborhood, and Chief Dolan
of the MPD (far right) are present at the unveiling of the first completed
green home.
LEAD PARTNERS:
Project for Pride in Living
Minneapolis Police Department

4 MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award Winner 2010 / HAWTHORNE ECOVILLAGE Minneapolis, MN
Project For Pride and Living
Established in 1972
Development history:
Developed more than 1700 housing units in the Twin
Cities
Manages nearly 900 units of affordable rental housing
Key programs:
Emergency Housing Fund
Workforce Training Program
College Mentoring Program
Timothy Dolan, Chief of Police
Number of sworn officers: 800
Key community policing initiatives:
Minneapolis National Night Out
Minneapolis Block and Apartment Clubs
Rental Property Owners Workshop (RPOW)
Community Crime Prevention/SAFE unit
LEAD PARTNER FAST FACTS
Truly, there was nobody running the streets except for the gang-
sters and the prostitutes.”
Police told Patrek they could only do so much. “They’d say,
‘Well if we didn’t witness anything there’s nothing we can do. And
I’d say, ‘You really think that in a cop car they’re going to deal in
front of you?’ It was so frustrating.”
Patrek says she and her long-time neighbor, Valeria Gole-
biowski, felt alone in their struggle. “We thought nobody knew
that this was the worst neighborhood in the city. We thought
we were the forgotten,” she says. “When I would call they’d say
‘Well, ma’am we have a plan, we’re working on it, we’re aware of
the problem.’ And I’d say, ‘your plan isn’t working. Can you try
another plan? Cause we’re kind of drowning out here.”
In April 2008, Patrek’s home was burglarized. At that point,
she says she felt like she was done with the neighborhood and the
neighborhood was done with her.
In the past, Patrek had felt a sort of agreement with her crimi-
nal neighbors. “Most of them knew that I lived alone and that I
really didn’t have much,” she says. “I wasn’t doing anything to
harm them.” But new people had recently moved into the apart-
ment building next door and Patrek suspected they were behind
the break-in. “The code of ethics kind of fell to the wayside, it
didn’t apply anymore.”
THE CLUSTER STRATEGY
The city’s plan for North Minneapolis began in 2003 when neigh-
borhood leaders appealed for help with the area’s serious com-
munity and housing issues. The city responded with a partnership
to target resources for redevelopment and investment in the area.
Impressed by city departments’ willingness to work together, sev-
eral non-profits joined with the city to create a collaborative called
“Residents’ dedication to watching the
neighborhood helped fill the gap in what
the police could observe. They refused to
accept crime, and held us accountable for
developing effective strategies.”
— Inspector Mike Martin, Commander of the 4th precinct
To celebrate the visit of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter with Habitat for
Humanity, local organizations coordinated this parade as well as other
community activities.

the Northside Home Fund (NHF) with seed money from the Fam-
ily Housing Fund.
NHF formed what is known as a cluster strategy to “address
boarded and vacant properties, finance housing redevelopment
and increase homeownership in North Minneapolis.” The idea is
to concentrate on small areas in order to make a big impact.
NHF asked each North Minneapolis neighborhood to nominate
an area that would most benefit from the strategy. The Hawthorne
Neighborhood Council (HNC) represents residents – mostly Afri-
can Americans along with Southeast Asians and Caucasians – in
one of the lowest-income neighborhoods with one of the highest
number of boarded and vacant residential properties in the city.
HNC nominated a four-block area that includes Patrek’s street.
The area, bounded by Lowry Avenue to the north, 30th Avenue to
the south, 4th Street N to the east and Lyndale Avenue to the west,
was named as one of six clusters.
As part of the cluster designation, HNC selected a develop-
ment partner for its plans and the city provided financial support
for property acquisition and development. HNC chose Project for
Pride in Living (PPL), which had developed affordable housing in
Hawthorne for close to a decade.
Chris Wilson, director of real estate development for PPL, says
the company began putting together a plan for parts of the four-
block area in 2002. That plan coasted along while the county wid-
ened Lowry Avenue and then evolved when the cluster designation
formalized PPL’s role in a dedicated redevelopment area.
PPL’s plan picked up speed in 2006 after the cluster strategy
attracted a $500,000 grant from the Home Depot Foundation that
allowed PPL and residents to pursue their project as a model of
sustainable revitalization. The concept for the EcoVillage, as the
cluster area is now called, really took off when the foreclosure crisis
swept through the neighborhood and everything, says Wilson, was
suddenly for sale.
HAWTHORNE HAWKMAN
Jeff Skrenes became Hawthorne Neighborhood Council’s housing
director in April 2007. Skrenes brought to the non-profit organi-
zation his experience as a loan originator at US Bank in addition
to his experience with the Association of Community Organiza-
tions for Reform Now (ACORN) where he was the first organizer
against predatory lending in the state and helped pass Minnesota’s
predatory lending legislation in 2007.
He also brought some preconceived notions about the job that
he says were dashed on day one. “‘I’m going to knock on all the
doors, I’m going to save all these people from foreclosure, it’s going
to be great,’” he says with a laugh. “Then I get in the neighbor-
hood and everything’s already vacant. And the houses that are in
foreclosure, the neighborhood is like, ‘Oh thank God that slumlord
and his crap tenants are about to be evicted [and] we’re going to
have an empty property next to us. It was not what I expected.”
Instead of focusing on foreclosure prevention in Hawthorne,
Skrenes says he spent the first three months sorting out the answers
to questions like, “If you’ve got three people left on a block and
everything else is vacant what do you do?” and “If a bunch of
landlords go through foreclosure, how do you organize a response
to foreclosed properties hitting the market?” and “How do you
work with the city to say, ‘What kind of regulations can we put into
place in terms of licensing and inspections that will keep this from
happening again?’”
Skrenes became known as “The Hawthorne Hawkman” for his
property studies. He put his notes in a spreadsheet and found that
many of the same properties would recycle from “one slumlord or
one type of mortgage fraud to the next.”
Community participation and input were major driving forces for the Eco-
Village revitalization project. Here local residents review suggestions for
improvement in targeted areas of the neighborhood.
NHF formed what is known as a clus-
ter strategy to address boarded and vacant
properties, finance housing redevelopment
and increase homeownership in North Min-
neapolis. The idea is to concentrate on small
areas in order to make a big impact.

HAWTHORNE ECOVILLAGE:
ECONOMICALLY VIABLE AND
ECOLOGICALLY FRIENDLY
The development of EcoVillage is at the halfway mark. In
addition to the first of two LEED-certified and Minnesota
Green Communities houses, master developer Project for
Pride in Living (PPL) has completed one renovation, is at
work on a second, and has renovation of a third property
planned for 2011. The first two renovations have been
funded with $536,000 from the Minnesota Urban and
Rural Homestead (MURL) program.The 3rd rehab is funded
through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which is
part of the Federal stimulus package.
Habitat for Humanity International has joined the EcoVil-
lage efforts with two new homes and four renovations of
existing boarded and vacant homes underway. All four
renovations were funded through the federal Neighbor-
hood Stabilization Program. An additional three projects
are planned for 2011.
PPL Real Estate Director Chris Wilson estimates the $30-
35 million project will eventually include 160 units—multi-
family and single-family houses along with duplexes,
triplexes and apartments—and some commercial space.
For sale houses will be available to buyers who are 80 per-
cent of Area Median Income (AMI) while renters will be at
50 percent of AMI or below.
EcoVillage, in partnership with the Center for Energy and
Environment, is supporting existing homeowners with a
program that offers energy auditing, weatherization and
energy-efficiency upgrades.
EcoVillage’s sole business, Bangkok Market, is taking part
in a test study of photovoltaic panels. The panels on the
market’s roof will allow the business to benefit from the
renewable energy while EcoVillage partners consider pho-
tovoltaic panels for neighborhood homes.
The Mississippi Watershed Management Organization has
funded soil testing and a feasibility analysis to determine
the best way to filter storm water within EcoVillage so the
impact on the Mississippi River—just six blocks east—will
be lessened.
To learn how to utilize the city departments, Skrenes depended
on Jill Kiener, the coordinating consultant to the Northside Home
Fund. Kiener manages communications and project flow between
partners in the cluster areas. While she’s not a city employee, her
office is at the City of Minneapolis. “I work really closely with
all the different divisions within Housing and Regulatory Services
and police – all of the partners,” says Kiener.
With Kiener’s help, those partnerships were coming together,
yet by late 2007 the Home Depot Foundation donation to support
sustainable construction and landscaping hadn’t been touched.
City of Minneapolis’s Community Planning and Economic
Development (CPED) Director Mike Christenson knew what was
holding the EcoVillage back. “You can’t invest in poison dirt,”
he says. “The dirt is poisoned by violence and it is impossible to
develop around crime.”
Skrenes had come to the same conclusion. But Patrek drove the
point home when she called Skrenes in April 2008 to tell him her
house had been robbed. She asked Skrenes to use his real estate
knowledge to help her move out of the neighborhood. Skrenes
said he agreed but told Patrek, “My job as the housing director is
to try and keep you in the neighborhood.”
After their conversation, Skrenes emailed an appeal to Kiener.
“I said, ‘You know if we do all these fancy things for the EcoVil-
lage but the long-term residents leave before it gets better, then
really we’ve failed.’”
Kiener used the email to rally Christenson, who in turn rallied
the police and Regulatory Services. “A couple days later we were
in the Hawthorne neighborhood offices sitting across the table
from Pam,” says Kiener.
About a dozen people attended the meeting, including Inspec-
tor Mike Martin who had returned to the neighborhood in 2007
as Commander of the 4th precinct. Martin says he was aware
that neighbors were “very skeptical of the police and our com-
mitment to solving their crime problem.” Still, he was riled when,
during the meeting, neighborhood activist and blogger John Hoff
accused the department of “drive-by policing.”
“He felt officers didn’t take the time to solve problems, listen to
residents, or intervene in criminal activity,” Martin recalls. “I was
“Absentee landlords owned many of the
homes and their nonexistent property man-
agement allowed gang members and drug
dealers to move in.”

furious at this comment and used it to challenge and motivate offi-
cers. From that moment on, I was hell-bent on proving him wrong.”
Christenson says Martin expressed frustration with the number
of problem properties in the neighborhood. “I said, ‘Well that’s
going to change. We need more of a strategy—a public safety strat-
egy and a problem property strategy,’” says Christenson.
After Patrek tearfully recounted her circumstances, those in
attendance started throwing out ideas on how their respective
departments could help. However, Patrek wasn’t easily convinced.
“And at the end of the meeting, [Christenson] said, “Pam, do
you feel more confident now?’ And she looked at him and said,
“I’ve heard it all before. When I see it, I’ll believe it,’” says Kiener.
“It was a challenge.”
Christenson asked Patrek to give the group two weeks to show
some results. She agreed. “He delegated stuff to all the people in
the room,” says Patrek. “In two weeks it was all in motion—the
foreclosures, getting people out of the neighborhood, the police
converged. It was an obvious concentration.”
The prostitute and her pimp who were living against Patrek’s
fence were evicted.
NOW, IT’S PERSONAL
Two weeks after the burglary, Patrek’s house was broken into
again. The replacement TV she had purchased was stolen. She
called Martin for help boarding up the smashed kitchen window.
He arrived with a replacement TV from his own home.
Martin’s gesture and the positive results she’d seen so far were
enough to keep Patrek in the neighborhood. “Pam held tough and
became more committed than ever to staying in her house,” says
Martin. “I took it personally and really stepped-up enforcement
As part of the EcoVillage’s “green” vision, 3600 square feet of community garden space was created to give residents the opportunity to grow and harvest their
own vegetation in an effort that promotes healthy and connected communities.

in the neighborhood to support Pam and send a message to the
criminals.”
Each spring residents steeled themselves for a surge in street
crime following the winter months. Martin says that after a great
deal of surveillance and intelligence gathering, officers entered a
“shock and awe” phase in spring 2008. During May, police made
eight narcotics arrests in the EcoVillage, compared with three dur-
ing the same month in 2007. Two weapons arrests were made in
May 2008 compared with none during the same time in 2007.
Residents pitched in where they could. Skrenes patrolled vacant
properties, looking for signs of squatters and he and John Hoff
conducted their own kind of stakeouts. “John and I would go to
the Bangkok Market and get ourselves some lunch and we would
park our car in front of the drug dealer’s house,” says Skrenes. “We
would eat lunch and chit chat and every time we saw something,
we’d call 911.”
Hoff filmed drug deals from the house across the street. Conse-
quently, the house’s owner Peter Teachout, who was HNC board
chair at the time, had his truck set on fire, and Hoff’s car tires
were slashed. Thankfully, there were no physical altercations. Both
the footage and their 911 calls contributed to officers’ surveillance
schedules and plan to raid the drug house.
Martin said residents’ dedication to watching the neighbor-
hood helped fill the gap in what the police could observe. “They
refused to accept crime,” says Martin. “And held us accountable
for developing effective strategies.”
The neighborhood also showed their appreciation for police
efforts. Residents publicly thanked the department and cooked for
officers on several occasions.
The partners continued to meet on a monthly basis. “They
looked across the table at the residents, saying, ‘This is what I’ve
done for you in the last weeks.’ There was this level of accountabil-
This home, built on a vacant lot in the EcoVillage, was built over two days by a group of trained volunteers from Habitat for Humanity.

Several non-traditional community development efforts have added a creative
component to EcoVillage. The efforts have been, in part, shaped by the hous-
ing market crisis and its impact on development plans. But the goal has been
to build community during EcoVillage’s development of a sustainable, green
neighborhood.
Demonstration Garden
Five vacant lots planned for new-construction town homes
are temporarily being used as a native species demonstra-
tion garden. Funded by The Home Depot Foundation, the
garden offers homeowners sustainable landscape examples
using native plants. The garden includes a nursery area that
provides residents with starts of native plants.
Tree Nursery
In 2008, EcoVillage partners started a tree nursery in a
vacant lot near the homes of longtime residents Pam Patrek
and Valeria Golebiowski. The City Trees program donates
saplings, which pass through the nursery and are made
available free of charge to Hawthorne residents. Patrek and
Golebiowski help care for the trees; so far more than 100
saplings have incubated in the nursery.
Design Workshops
During summer 2009, more than 25 residents took part in a
series of EcoVillage design workshops. The first two work-
shops were dedicated to community input. During the last
two workshops, the design team presented three options for
planning the four-block project. Residents tried their hand at
planning during a design exercise and offered their feedback
on the design options.
Rebuilding Together
In 2008, the Northside Home Fund and the City of Minne-
apolis funded a “Rebuilding Together” event that focused on
existing EcoVillage homeowners.
More than 30 volunteers built fences and did exterior main-
tenance to three homes. “You can spend all this money
building new houses and bringing in new homeowners,”
says Northside Home Fund Coordinating Consultant Jill Kie-
ner. “But it’s just as important to keep the existing people
stable.”
Volunteers included police officers, city employees, the
developer and local residents.The homeowners thanked the
volunteers with homemade sausages.
Fourth Precinct Inspector Mike Martin says the community
events have built hope and a sense of neighborhood for
everyone involved. “I couldn’t have been more proud when
we built Pam’s fence and worked on the other homes. It
allowed us to bond with one another, outside of our tradi-
tional roles.”
INNOVATIVE PROJECTS IN THE ECOVILLAGE

FROM DRUG HOUSES TO
HABITAT HOMES
EcoVillage partners were thrilled when Habitat for Human-
ity International joined their revitalization efforts with a
commitment to build new homes and renovate existing
ones. In early October, EcoVillage hosted the 2010 Jimmy
Rosalynn Carter Work Project, a week of building that
highlights the worldwide need for decent and affordable
housing. The Carter Work Project is held at different loca-
tions each year and draws thousands of volunteers.
“We’re delighted to have the kind of extra synergy,” says
EcoVillage Developer Chris Wilson.
President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter were
joined at the EcoVillage build by his former vice president,
Walter Mondale as well as U.S. Senator Al Franken and
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. While Habitat lauded the
EcoVillage partnerships between government, the private
sector and non-profits as a “model of what revitalization
can achieve,” President Carter paid a compliment to Eco-
Village that its partners won’t soon forget, saying that the
Carter Project had never worked in a nicer neighborhood
during its 27 years.
The Carters, Mondale and Franken pitched in at the con-
struction site of a new Habitat home.. During the Carter
Work Project, Habitat and volunteers built two new homes,
renovated five existing boarded and vacant homes, and
also did maintenance and repairs to five currently occupied
homes in and around the neighborhood.
Hawthorne Neighborhood Council Housing Director Jeff
Skrenes called the build week “tremendous” and consid-
ers EcoVillage “blessed” to have seven new families joining
the community.
“I’m an optimistic guy and I’ve got a yard of guts and that
helps,” says Skrenes of EcoVillage’s road to revitalization.
“But if you would have told me two years ago—in the
midst of all of this –‘Hey man, don’t worry Jimmy Carter
is going to be coming to your neighborhood to help build
some houses. I would have said, ‘What the heck? Get out
of here! That’s not going to happen!”
ity and things moved so fast,” says Kiener. “If we hadn’t addressed
the crime and safety, none of the development could have hap-
pened.”
By 2008, more than half of the EcoVillage’s 63 properties had
gone through foreclosure. It was a good thing for the EcoVillage
says Christenson. “We wanted foreclosures because we had irre-
sponsible ownership in 30 properties. We wanted them out. Fore-
closure gave us the chance to eject them permanently and take
down their substandard building.”
While the city acquired properties that needed to be demol-
ished and then held the land for future development, PPL focused
on acquiring properties that could be rehabbed. To keep constant
track of property status in the EcoVillage boundaries, Kiener cre-
ated maps and met regularly with Chris Wilson and Skrenes, who
offered updates drawn from his neighborhood walks.
THE BIG FOUR
Four properties stood out as the biggest problems in the EcoVil-
lage—two houses and two apartment buildings.
Gang members controlled the larger apartment building and
used it for drug dealing. Martin describes the efforts to shut down
that building, which neighborhood activists referred to as “the
apartment complex of anarchy,” as an example of the collabo-
ration between residents, the city and the police department at
work.
“Residents funneled information to the police and allowed us
to use their homes for surveillance,” he says. “We made drug buys,
executed warrants, and then worked with City Inspectors to con-
demn the building. The city’s Regulatory Services Unit then took
away the rental license.”
The owner forfeited the property and then the bank released
it for demolition. Eventually all of the four properties went
into foreclosure but tenants lingered. When tenants at one of
the houses figured out an illegal means of getting water service,
Councilwoman Hofstede who is active in the EcoVillage prodded
Regulatory Services to shut the house down for good.
After the buildings went through foreclosure, Christenson says
Regulatory Services recruited demolition dollars from the County
of Hennepin.
MAKE WAY FOR THE ECOVILLAGE
Martin calls the demolition of the apartment buildings the turning
point for EcoVillage. “I actually teared up as I watched the back-
hoe tear down [the problematic apartment building],” he says.
“It was like watching the fall of the Berlin Wall or the destruction
of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad. It was a symbol of a
new era.”

Over the course of 18 months, 30 problem properties were
demolished. Patrek not only achieved her goal of seeing the apart-
ment building next door torn down, but she literally ended up with
the whole block to herself. “I loved it,” says Patrek. “I went around
taking pictures to show everybody that I lived on an island.”
Skrenes says when spring 2009 came around, he and other
residents didn’t feel the usual “Uh oh, here it comes” crime vibe.
During May of that year, officers made one narcotics arrest and no
weapons arrests.
By the end of 2009, crime in EcoVillage had dropped dramati-
cally. Between 2007 and 2009, Part 1 crimes in the EcoVillage
decreased 73 percent (from 64 to 17). Part 1 crimes include mur-
der, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft
and arson. Narcotics arrests dropped 85 percent over the two-year
period (from 40 to 5). In 2007, there were 14 burglaries in the four-
block area, while in 2009, there was one.
Patrek gained a new neighbor when PPL completed a single-
family home on her block. It quickly sold to a family who saw it
while they were biking through the neighborhood – an unthinkable
occurrence two years ago. The house was built to American Lung
Association Health House standards, and meets Minnesota Green
Communities standards. Hopefully, it will be the first home in Min-
neapolis to achieve LEED Platinum certification.
Of the four block total renovation of the Hawthorne neighborhood, the first home completed was unveiled in late 2010.
“Residents funneled information to the
police and allowed us to use their homes
for surveillance.”
— Inspector Mike Martin, Commander of the 4th precinct

PARTNERSHIP INFORMATION
CONTACT INFORMATION
Christopher Wilson, Director of Real Estate Development
Project for Pride in Living
Chris.Wilson@ppl-inc.org
612-455-5416
Michael Martin, Inspector
Michael.Martin@ci.minneapolis.mn.us
612-673-5704
“I have a little bench in my driveway and
we sit out there in the summer—which we
would have never done before. We just sit
there and look around, going ‘Boy! Things
have changed haven’t they?”
— Pam Patrek, longtime resident of transformed EcoVillage
neighborhood.
With a small scale model of the targeted neighborhood, Project for Pride
in Living staff and community participants can better conceptualize and
redevelop the chosen site.
According to Chris Wilson of PPL, the development of EcoV-
illage is at the halfway mark. In addition to the newly constructed
green house, PPL has completed and sold one renovated home
and is at work on two more. Habitat for Humanity International
has joined the EcoVillage team and has two new homes and four
renovations of existing boarded and vacant homes underway.
Also, a property formerly owned by a notorious slumlord was
purchased out of foreclosure by a young couple, one of whom
grew up on the north side, who are living in the home and making
improvements to it. In total, by early 2011 Pam will have wel-
comed 10 new neighbors to the EcoVillage.
Wilson estimates the $30-35 million project will eventually
include 160 units, multi-family and single-family houses along
with duplexes, triplexes and apartments, and some commercial
space.
Construction of another green and healthy house is planned
for spring 2011, representing the environmentally-responsible
theme for all development in the EcoVillage cluster that has taken
hold at the behest of both residents and developers. Wilson says
the Home Depot Foundation donation enabled the partners to
think sustainable in a big way. “Instead of just saying, ‘Here’s our
inner city neighborhood, we want to kind of rebuild it, say, ‘You
know what, we’re this cutting edge neighborhood,’” recalls Wil-
son. “That was a huge paradigm shift.”
Wilson says the partners stopped thinking of the neighbor-
hood from a defensive standpoint. Instead, the feeling was, “‘Look
at us, we’re out in front.’ That was very valuable psychologically.”
Martin says in his nearly 20 years with the Minneapolis Police
Department, EcoVillage has been the most complicated commu-
nity partnership. He says the residents were the key to its success.
“The residents who stayed and supported our efforts gave us own-
ership in the initiative and put a face on the work we were doing.
It was no longer the 3100 block of 4th Street North, it was ‘Pam’s
Block.’”
Patrek wishes she hadn’t had to experience the death of her
neighborhood, but she and her friend and neighbor Valeria Gole-
biowski are enjoying its rebirth. “I have a little bench in my drive-
way and we sit out there in the summer – which we would have
never done before,” she says. “We just sit there and look around,
going ‘Boy! Things have changed haven’t they?”
EcoVillage is the new reality for this section of North Min-
neapolis. “We will continue to keep crime out of EcoVillage and
encourage efforts to rebuild quality housing,” says Martin. “Eco-
Village is now a place where the criminals feel uncomfortable and
the residents have the power. We want to keep it that way.”

LISC_EcoVillage_Case_Final

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