Saint Paul, MN

A city with a kaleidoscope of heritage and opportunity

St. Paul is built on a rich history of cultural experiences and a longstanding reputation as the entry point for offering newcomers opportunity.

It’s the ancestral land of a tribally diverse American Indian population who remain today and whose deep-rooted heritage and traditions significantly shape the city’s identity. Following the Civil War, newly freed slaves established a thriving Black community of businesses, homeowners, and civic institutions. In the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican migrants found work on sugar beet farms, persevered, and later built the Chicano movement for social justice and cultural autonomy.

Why Saint Paul?

Perpetual rebuilding after a cycle of forced relocations

Despite such promise and possibility, centuries worth of forced displacements of Indigenous people, decades of upheaval of Black and Latino neighborhoods by urban renewal projects, and racial covenants and redlining targeting Black residents have repeatedly destroyed these communities and left many Black, Indigenous, and Latino residents in a perpetual state of playing catch-up.

St. Paul has some of the worst racial disparities in the U.S.

Source

Unemployment rates among Black and Indigenous are roughly 4 times higher than white residents

63%

63% of white residents own homes, compared to 19% of Blacks, 25% of American Indians, and 39% of Latinos

$29k

There’s a $29K per capita income gap between white and BIL residents

I’m drawn to what Dr. King and others referred to as ‘the beloved community’, and what it would take to create [that]…Equity will get us there. Equity is a means towards an end, not an end in itself. The goal is really to have this beloved community whereby we value each person, and we value them so much that we’re willing to customize, and adjust accordingly to what they need.
Daniel Rodriguez, Merrick Community Services, PERC Saint Paul Lead

St. Paul Local Partners

Forging a stronger community through collaboration

Merrick Community Services, lead organization for PERC St. Paul, has curated a coalition of 60-70 healthcare, education, economic stability, social, community, and environment and neighborhood professionals and organizations. The collaborative develops and prioritizes projects to secure federal funding, working closely with the Office of Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter.

Image: PERC Saint Paul collaborative table

PERC St. paul in action

Building the action plan

Using PERC’s model for shared decision-making and consensus building, PERC St. Paul has designed a data-centered action plan to apply for potential investment dollars, and to execute and deliver measurable, results-based outcomes once the investment is received.

Image: PERC Saint Paul collaborative table

Research & analysis

What is currently driving the inequities?

The coalition conducted a comprehensive data review and analysis of the factors currently sustaining the racial disparities in the city, and found that Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities are caught in a vicious cycle of factors which stall growth, limit opportunity, and prevent building wealth, including:

A lack of affordable housing options, thus limiting the traditional pathway to building wealth
Lower incomes and higher poverty rates limiting what Black, Indigenous, and Latino families can afford and driving higher rates of crimes of possession
Depressed job opportunities exacerbated by a racial digital divide and significant changes to employment practices in sectors hit hardest by the pandemic
Decades of disinvestment in neighborhoods leading to lower quality infrastructure in schools, transportation, etc.

Identifying Solutions

Catalyzing growth through public investment

The St. Paul coalition is currently developing public investment opportunities to influence the factors driving racial inequities while building new systems for long-term impact. Here are highlights for the coalition’s five-year targets:

Housing

Increase homeownership to 80% of Black, Indigenous, and Latino residents by advancing available financing options and support, and increasing funding for home maintenance and foreclosure prevention to reduce evictions and foreclosures.

Increase affordable housing options for renters by 25% through initiatives that increase affordable rental units, power-sharing mechanisms for housing policy decision making, and explore nontraditional housing models such as co-housing innovative financial systems.

Economic Development

Reduce racial wealth gap by 25% by building capital and development for Black, Indigenous, and Latino (BIL) businesses, laying groundwork for culturally informed policy efforts for wealth building, strengthening community capacity in education, and increasing the number of BIL-centered teaching institutions.

Civic Infrastructure

Ensure 70% of infrastructure public and philanthropic resources are invested in Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities to expand public transportation options, improve community physical infrastructure such as roads and sidewalks, improve digital broadband access, and integrate health and human services into community spaces.

Key Milestones Achieved

Building infrastructure for the long-term

Carefully curated multi-sector coalition with 65 community members across five sectors

Identified and staffed three working groups to focus on housing, economic development, and civic infrastructure

Completed 10 learning sessions on equity framework for collaboration

Logged 30.5 hours of collaborative table meetings, including five planning sessions

Designed 10-year implementation plans for 15 projects aimed at improving the lives of more than 85,000 people

Expanded coalition capacity by hiring a project manager

Awarded $2.5M in local philanthropic dollars over the next 3 years

Submitted one federal grant application for funding opportunities

Are you interested in becoming an active participant in PERC’s transformation process? Let’s partner!