[Mpls] Hi-Lake Center

[UncleHugo]

A couple of weeks ago I stopped to pick up lunch for myself and a co-worker at the Vietnamese restaurant in Hi-Lake Center, but found it closed.  When I got back to the store, I explained why I did not have the promised egg rolls and spring rolls, a customer volunteered that he had heard that city inspections had ordered major changes in the kitchen, which the owner wasn't sure if he would be willing to make.  Since the new owner had completely torn out the old kitchen and put in a completely new kitchen when he bought the restaurant just a 2 or 3 years ago, I thought it strange that inspections would be making such demands now.  But there has been discussion on this list over the last few months of other Minneapolis restaurants being forced out by new demands from inspections, and I assumed this was just another example of the same thing.

This morning I asked a usually very reliable source about the Vietnamese restaurant, and she told me that the city was using inspections to try to drive all of the businesses out of the Hi-Lake Center.  Suddenly, she claims, all of the businesses in Hi-Lake are being inspected up to 3 times in a week, with inspectors looking for excuses to either shut them down or trying to demand new work that will make it too expensive for them to stay.

(For people who are not familiar with the history of this issue, let me point out that the Hi-Lake Center is right next to the Hiawatha-Lake LRT stop.  Back in 1990, our former city council and mayor tried to make a land grab of the Hi-Lake Center so that a developer could build a huge housing complex on the site (I heard up to 1500 apartments on the site) with a small retail component.  They tried to get Ray Harris to help them by getting him to take some of the Hi-Lake businesses into the old Sears building (even though it had not been renovated and had no parking available).  Neither Ray or the businesses were willing to go along with that, at which point the mayor and the head of MCDA starting making public speechs about how the lack of progress on the Sears redevelopment was all Ray's fault and he had to go.  The city council also declared the Hi-Lake Center to be "blighted" even though it was fully rented and said they were going to evict all the businesses by the fall of 1990.  The neighborhood strongly fought back to save Hi-Lake, and the city backed off, deciding to set up a committee to study the situation for a while.  I think southside disgust at the city's actions regarding Hi-Lake played a significant role in the turnover at City Hall in the next election.)

Can Paul or anybody else confirm that the city is now using inspections to try to force the businesses out of Hi-Lake in order to justify it's "blighted" designation?  If this is true, I can think of two possibilities:
1) The new elected people in City Hall are already as bad as it took many years for the old gang to become; or
2) There are non-elected people who are still up to the same kind of garbage, regardless of who the elected people are.
I can't decide which possibility is more troubling.

Don Blyly
Central