A novel about three teens and a Norse woman’s journey, plus memoirs about political activism in the Black community, and life in all its big and small experiences, are being launched by Minnesota authors this week.

(Courtesy of Soho Press)

“Ashes to Ashes”: by Thomas Maltman (Soho Press, $29)

Even if the stone lies, carved in a previous century by an enterprising shyster, what is true is that winter calls the stones from under the earth, and some of them rise bearing a strange magic. — from “Ashes to Ashes”

Thomas Maltman (Courtesy of the author)

Thomas Maltman blends contemporary teen life with a Norse saga in this inventive novel, one of the best of this literary season.

Set in a small Minnesota prairie town, it begins after Ash Wednesday services when the ashes on a congregations’ foreheads do not wash off. Is this a curse or a blessing?

Among them is Basil, a “gentle giant” who’s thought to be mentally slow, prodded by a coach who painfully pinches him to make him angry enough to hurt another player. Basil’s father was injured when he rescued Basil from being “drowned” in a corn bin, and the teen’s mother has been in a mental facility for years. Basil is not mentally impaired, and he wants to change, to be taken seriously and not hurt people. So he decides to fast and pray but keeps his vow secret from his best friends Lukas and Morgan. The trio call themselves “a gay, a goth, and a giant.” Luke is the gay one, but he’s afraid to come out in such a small town, and goth Morgan is a writer.

When a windstorm blows over a big tree, the teens discover under the roots the remains of an explorer whom they call The Lady in the Hill. And this is where the magic grows strong as they read from pages of a diary that describe her journey into inland North America in the 14th century. Her chapters are written in a cadence that begs to be read out loud:

“I knew the sea even before I was born, adrift

within my mother’s womb waters,

hearing the dull drum-thumping of her heart

washing over me in waves…”

Maltman drew inspiration from the real-life Kensington Runestone in a museum in Alexandria. The inscription (which he quotes on the first page) tells of “eight goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the West” in the 14th century. The runestone, discovered  in 1898 in a Swedish farmer’s field, is controversial — whether it is a hoax is still debated.

The three teens decide to honor The Lady by staging a historical pageant just before the COVID lockdown, from the early centuries to contemporary times, subtly working Luke’s sexual preference into the script.

Both stories — contemporary and Norse — end tenderly. “Ashes to Ashes” has everything you want in a novel — interesting plot(s), family problems, an old saga involving magical dreams of humans in fish form.

Maltman has an MFA from Minnesota State University at Mankato and teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington. His previous novels are “The Night Birds,” about the 1862 Dakota Conflict; “The Land,” which explores a white supremacist enclave deep in the Minnesota North Woods; and “Little Wolves,” in which a teen shoots the town’s sheriff. There is a hint of magic in some of these plots, but nothing like the aura that surrounds “Ashes to Ashes.”

Maltman will launch his novel with a conversation with award-winning Minnesota author William Kent Krueger at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Bryant Lake Bowl and Theater, 810 W. Lake St., Mpls., presented by Valley Bookseller of Stillwater and Literature Lover’s Night Out. Music by Nate Boots. $10. Information at bryantlakebowl.com/theater/ashes-to-ashes.

(Courtesy of the University of Nebraska Press)

“At the Corner of Past and Present”: by Pamela Carter Joern (University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, $17.95)

These days I am overly tender about the clumsiness of our efforts to get by. I cry over Hallmark card commercials. The wafting of a memory, the rustle of a rabbit through a snowbank, the unfolding of a rose. I am scraped raw by precious things on the brink of being lost. — from “At the Corner of Past and Present”

Pamela Carter Joern (Courtesy of the author)

In this wide-ranging memoir in essay form, the author writes a love letter to her native Nebraska, where she worked on the farm. She explores her experiences raising children, surviving cancer and becoming a writer.

Author of four novels and six plays that have been produced in the Twin Cities, Joern shares on her publisher’s blog that the personal essays in this book “are chock-full of disparate pieces brought together: my father’s life and the experiments of Isaac Newton; the Shaker colonies and butchering chickens; Salvador Dali and considerations of time to a cancer patient; even the ancient art of alchemy and writing processes… I do like shining an observation from one aspect of life on something seemingly unrelated to see what I might learn.”

Joern, who has taught at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, will discuss her book with Minnesota author Sheila O’Connor at 7 p.m. Thursday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

(Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society Press)

“Rewind: Lessons from Fifty Years of Activism”: by T Williams with David Lawrence Grant (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $24.95)

We also understood something else that our white allies did not: Even if all racially prejudiced Americans lost that prejudice overnight, there was still a long road ahead in targeting and dismantling the systems of institutional racism that had long been oppressing Black access to capital, decent housing, equitable employment opportunities, a quality education, and equality under the law. — from “Rewind”

Theatrice (“T”) Willliams and his family moved to Minneapolis in 1965. After military service and earning a master’s degree in social work, Williams became a leader in the Minneapolis Black community beginning in 1975 when he was named executive director of the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center, a Minneapolis institution.

Williams’ new memoir is a mini-history of the successes and struggles he participated in through the murder of George Floyd and beyond.

One of his biggest accomplishments was helping form the Minneapolis Urban Coalition after the Plymouth Avenue violence in 1967. The coalition was a rare political collaboration among community, corporate and political leaders to address issues of race and poverty. After the 1971 rebellion at Attica prison in New York, Minnesota Gov. Wendell Anderson appointed him the first corrections ombudsman in the country. Williams was also a teacher and school board member, always working for his community’s betterment.  Now he is an independent consultant specializing in questions of social and distributive justice with emphasis on issues affecting minority populations.

Williams will discuss his book with co-author David Lawrence Grant at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

Related Articles

Arsenic in books? Exhibit shows that some pages can kill

How Desi Arnaz finally gets his due in ‘The Man Who Invented Television’

Readers and writers: Two books take clear-eyed view of health care system’s flaws

Literary calendar for week of July 6

8 graphic nonfiction books that use comics to unlock memoir, history and more

Nearly six months into Donald Trump’s presidency, a Trump Doctrine is coming into view. Contrary to the fears of his critics, and the hopes of some admirers, Trump is no isolationist. And contrary to those who claim Trump is simply a marvel of ac hoc-ery and inconsistency, there is a distinctive pattern to the policies he has pursued.

This Trump Doctrine emphasizes using American power aggressively — more aggressively than Trump’s immediate predecessors — to reshape key relationships and accrue U.S. advantage in a rivalrous world.

In doing so, Trump has blown up any talk about a post-American era. Yet he has also raised troubling questions about whether his administration can wield America’s outsized influence effectively and keep it strong.

The isolationist label has long followed Trump, but it’s never accurately described an idiosyncratic man. Yes, Trump disdains core elements of U.S. globalism, from the international trade system America established to its promotion of democratic values and its defense commitments around the world.

Yet Trump has also argued that America should assert itself more forcefully in a cutthroat world. And today, as Trump pursues a capacious view of presidential power at home, he is offering an equally ambitious conception of American power abroad.

Trump rails against long, costly nation-building efforts. But he has nonetheless waged two short, sharp Middle Eastern conflicts: one to deter Yemen’s Houthis from attacking U.S. forces and Red Sea shipping, the other to roll back the Iranian nuclear program. Several U.S. presidents pledged to use force to keep Tehran from crossing the nuclear threshold; Trump really did it. That’s not the policy of a man in thrall to the Republican Party’s Tucker Carlson wing.

Meanwhile, Trump started trade wars against dozens of countries, in hopes of reshaping the international economy. He deployed diplomatic leverage, and explicit threats of abandonment, to remake the transatlantic bargain by getting European allies to spend much more on defense. Trump also wielded America’s innovation power — its role in designing high-end semiconductors — to bring Saudi Arabia and the UAE into Washington’s tech bloc and make them partners in his push for “AI dominance.”

Closer to home, Trump used veiled threats to pry Panama out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He has demanded territorial concessions from Panama, Denmark and Canada. At the same time, Trump touts his Golden Dome missile shield, meant to protect the homeland and give America greater freedom of action against its foes.

This isn’t standard-issue, post-1945 American internationalism: It’s hard to imagine prior presidents telling allies to yield their land. But neither is it a retreat into Fortress America. And by applying American power in such energetic, omnidirectional fashion, Trump has revealed much about the true state of world affairs.

Policy journals brim with articles about American decline and the advent of multipolarity. But Trump, in his inimitable way, has reminded so many countries where power really lies. For example: The strike on Iran demonstrated America’s unique global military reach and its ability, together with Israel, to reshape the Middle East while relegating Russia and China — nominally Iran’s allies — to the sidelines.

Trump’s key insight is that the world’s sole superpower has more muscle than commonly understood. Yet the Trump Doctrine nonetheless suffers from three big problems.

First, its exercise of power is weakened by its dearth of strategy.

Trump’s trade war got off to a farcical start because he failed to consider how sky-high tariffs might wreck the U.S. economy — a real-time discovery that forced a rapid, humiliating climb-down. A president who privileges the art of the deal over intellectual consistency sometimes pursues contradictory policies: Trump’s tariffs against Indo-Pacific allies erode their prosperity and make it harder for them to spend more on defense.

Second, a president who sometimes struggles to distinguish friends from enemies sometimes fails to point U.S. power in the right direction.

Trump delights in taking aim at U.S. allies. He has been more reluctant to confront Russia, even as Vladimir Putin makes a mockery of Trump’s desire for peace in Ukraine — and even though Putin’s war economy is increasingly vulnerable to the commercial and financial coercion that Trump so often threatens to employ.

Related Articles

Bill Dudley: America, this isn’t how you lower interest rates

Zeynep Tufekci: Another day, another chatbot’s Nazi meltdown

David Brooks: How literature lost its mojo. For now

Sheldon H. Jacobson: You cannot ‘restore’ high scientific standards if they are already in place

John T. Shaw: A university president stands up for higher education as it’s under assault

Third, the best presidents build U.S. power for the future, but Trump risks depleting it instead.

Maybe the One Big Beautiful Bill will juice the economy — or maybe it will lock in structural deficits that constrain defense spending and growth. Slashing foreign aid saves little money but squanders U.S. global influence; the war on universities threatens the research ecosystem that underpins America’s economic and military might. Moreover, a policy of tough love toward allies could turn into mutually destructive hostility, and a superpower that regularly coerces its friends could wreck the soft power that lubricates key relationships.

Trump revels in using U.S. power, but he doesn’t quite understand where it comes from. That’s the central irony, and fundamental weakness, of the doctrine guiding his administration today.

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

DROPMORE, Manitoba – I’ve heard it said there are two kinds of boaters.

Those who have hit a rock. And those who will.

I was reminded of that adage last month, when three of us visited friends who have a cottage on Lake of the Prairies in far western Manitoba.

Arriving about an hour later than planned on a recent Friday afternoon after some poor navigation by yours truly – I knew I’d screwed up when we hit the Saskatchewan border – we still were able to spend a few hours in our host’s boat for an enjoyable evening on the water.

The walleyes weren’t snapping like they did during my previous two visits in 2023 and 2024, but we still managed to catch enough for an evening fish fry. Regulations on Lake of the Prairies require releasing all walleyes longer than 45 centimeters – about 17 inches – so finding fish small enough to keep can be a challenge, at times.

The plan for the rest of the weekend was to spend a full day fishing Saturday and a few hours Sunday morning before heading home.

Sometimes, though, things go off-script.

Created in the mid-1960s by a dam on the Assiniboine River, Lake of the Prairies – also known as Shellmouth Reservoir – generally follows a north-to-south course, with a slight southeasterly jog closer to the Saskatchewan border. Even though Lake of the Prairies is situated in a deep – and very scenic – valley, north winds or south winds can be a pain.

Such was the case on this Saturday; no matter what shoreline we fished, we couldn’t escape the wind. We spent the morning fishing the sheltered confines of the Shellmouth River, catching just enough walleyes to keep things interesting and begin replenishing a key ingredient for that evening’s “surf and turf” dinner.

We headed a few miles north after a midday break, finding a spot behind a woody point that provided just enough protection from the wind to keep the fishing manageable.

The trolling motor battery ran out of juice just before we planned to head in for dinner. Combined with the walleyes we’d kept that morning, we were just short of our four-person limit.

At this point, it should be noted that our host has years of experience fishing Lake of the Prairies. There are treacherous spots along the west shoreline, he said, and it’s best to avoid boating too close to shore in those places.

Because of the wind and the waves, he took it slow and easy on the way back to the dock, following a course perhaps 100 yards from shore in 15 to 20 feet of water.

He was pointing out a spot on the west shoreline, where we’d seen a beautiful cinnamon-colored bear two years ago, when it happened.

Bam! Crunch!

Ugh.

The sound of an outboard motor – in this case, a 150-horse Yamaha four-stroke – hitting a rock is absolutely horrible.

It’s the sound of a good day on the water grinding to an abrupt halt.

Raising the motor, we saw the stainless steel prop was folded like foil in a couple of spots, and the skeg – the fin-like structure on the lower unit – was broken off.

On the positive side, the boat itself hadn’t hit the rock and wasn’t damaged.

Through it all, I don’t think our host uttered a single colorful word. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have been the case if it had been me who hit the rock.

And yes, I’m already in the camp of boaters who have hit rocks.

The motor vibrated violently any faster than trolling speed, but we were able to limp back to the dock, which was maybe a mile or so from where the prop-crunching catastrophe had occurred.

Had we been able to go full speed, which wasn’t an option because of the waves, our host figured he wouldn’t have hit the rock because the boat and the motor would have been riding high enough to miss it.

Dang the luck.

Despite the unfortunate end to any further fishing plans, I received an update a few days later with the good news that the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Miraculously, there was no damage to the lower-unit shaft, the skeg was repaired a couple of days later, and a shop in Brandon, Manitoba, was able to fix the propeller, which at first glance looked like it might be damaged beyond repair.

As for the two kinds of boaters – those who have hit rocks and those who will – the first camp now has a new member.

With a rebuilt skeg and prop to prove it.

Related Articles

How was Crosslake chosen to host Minnesota Governor’s Fishing Opener?

Free steelhead identification decals help Lake Superior anglers avoid keeping protected fish

Lake of the Woods, Rainy River deliver walleyes on Minnesota fishing opener

Wisconsin angler fishing in Lake Michigan fog discovers remains of abandoned tugboat J.C. Ames

Gov. Walz encourages legislators, and anglers, to get the lead out

It’s a small space, but Obadiah “O.J.” Pipeboyd, 50, has a name for the studio apartment he keeps within Bimosedaa, the former warehouse building across from the police station on Fourth Street in downtown Minneapolis.

He calls it home, as does Banksy, his new domestic short-hair kitten. Its high ceilings, which lend themselves to his favorite hobby — painting — and its sweeping corner views of the Minneapolis skyline are a far cry from the shelter he lived in for more than a year following a difficult divorce that left him making do off the streets.

“I really appreciate this building from the roof to the bottom,” said Pipeboyd later, demonstrating how he sits on its small roof deck and meditates to his favorite music before sunrise. There’s easy access to public transit, and from there, a food shelf.

To hear Chris LaTondresse explain it, the answer to repeat or chronic homelessness is obvious. First, provide people from target groups — say, juveniles aging out of foster care, or in Pipeboyd’s case, the Native American community — with an affordable place to stay and build community. Then surround them with one-on-one counseling and other voluntary services to help them avoid returning to the streets. In that order.

“We’re trying to find a way to screen people in rather than screen people out, instead of ‘you can’t stay here, you have a history,’” said LaTondresse, a former Hennepin County commissioner who now runs the Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative in St. Paul.

Executing that “Housing First” vision has sometimes proven far more complicated than the rhetoric. The role he stepped into little more than a year and a half ago as president and chief executive officer of one of the metro’s largest and fastest-growing nonprofit housing providers came with much responsibility, more than a few headaches and some outright heartache.

In early May, a spate of shootings that claimed six lives in South Minneapolis shook the Native American community, including many residents of Beacon Interfaith’s 48-unit Bimosedaa apartment complex, which opened in December 2023 in the Minneapolis Warehouse District. The name “Bimosedaa” means “we walk together” in Ojibwe, and through a partnership with the Red Lake Nation, most of its occupants hail from tribal roots.

“Native Americans are about 32 times more likely to experience homelessness than whites, a number that has gotten worse in recent years,” LaTondresse said.

Kimball Court among three ‘Housing First’ sites

Beacon Interfaith operates some 16% of Ramsey County’s and 20% of Hennepin County’s “permanent supportive housing,” or housing with support services for the most vulnerable.

Three sites in particular — Kimball Court Apartments on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, American House in downtown St. Paul and Bimosedaa — all go a step further, following a “Housing First” model that aims to provide studios and single-room occupancy apartments to some of the hardest individuals to place. The goal is to interrupt homelessness by providing immediate access to permanent housing for individuals, regardless of other factors like pre-existing participation in treatment programs.

Arriving with a disability or an addiction is a feature of entry, not a bug, LaTondresse said.

“There is a significant amount of substance abuse,” acknowledged Josie Blake, a program manager with Avivo, which handles substance dependency assessments and provides case managers at Bimosedaa.

Beacon Interfaith’s housing strategy includes moving residents to “Housing First” sites directly from shelters or homeless encampments, which can be a difficult transition. Some 65% of residents who are chronically homeless will return to the streets within months after being taken out of an encampment and placed in low-income housing without services, LaTondresse said. For residents of permanent supportive housing, the return-to-street rate is about 15%, he said.

Critics point to crime, loitering, vandalism

That puts each apartment building on the frontlines of a controversial effort to get the poorest of the poor stabilized.

When that effort has gone badly, it’s made headlines, and drawn neighborhood homeowners by the dozens to community meetings held last year in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood, where many critics pointed to an uptick in crime, loitering and vandalism around Kimball Court.

“I have seen residents literally hanging out the windows doing drug deals. Most of the neighbors have seen that,” said longtime Hamline-Midway homeowner Jerry Ratliff.

Related Articles

Today in History: July 13, Live Aid concerts

Trump says he’s considering ‘taking away’ Rosie O’Donnell’s US citizenship

Rice Street clinic celebrates 100 years

EPA places Duluth lab staff on leave for signing dissent letter

Minnesota on air quality alert all weekend

“My friends are surprised I still live here and get nervous visiting us,” added Ratliff, noting Snelling Avenue north of University Avenue has suffered from the loss of long-standing businesses, like a hardware store and funeral home, and vagrancy has added insult to injury.

“It’s a complex problem,” he said. “I don’t mean to say it’s going to be an easy fix, but it’s going to take a lot of leadership, which I haven’t seen yet.”

St. Paul police have had the following calls for service yearly to Kimball Court, 545 N. Snelling Ave.:

• 2020: 296 calls.

• 2021: 189 calls.

• 2022: 425 calls.

• 2023: 113 calls.

• 2024: 258 calls.

• 2025: 45 calls, year to date.

Meanwhile, LaTondresse hopes to elevate more of the success stories, and he hopes to see sites like Bimosedaa and Kimball Court replace low-income single-occupant residencies, or dorm-like “flop houses.”

“Dollar for dollar, investing in permanent supportive housing is one of the biggest returns on investment,” he said.

To LaTondresse, that means moving past simple rhetoric and celebrating the residents at Bimosedaa — and its sister “Housing First” apartments — as tenants and partners, not just as visitors, occupants or charity.

‘Not a shelter setting’

Asked why security at Bimosedaa’s front desk — or Kimball Court, for that matter — doesn’t inspect bags as tenants enter and leave the building, LaTondresse waved away the suggestion.

“This is not a shelter setting. These are residents. These are people’s homes. They have a lease, with rights and responsibilities,” said LaTondresse, following a recent tour of Bimosedaa’s conference rooms and common areas. Services for the homeless, he said, rest on a continuum, with emergency shelter serving as triage toward the bottom.

“If it feels challenging, it’s because this work is extremely challenging,” he said. “If there’s going to be a better future on these issues, I think our public needs to understand how exactly we go about solving homelessness. ‘Shelter’ is not the solution to homelessness. It’s an emergency response to homelessness.”

As a leading developer of affordable housing in the Twin Cities, Beacon Interfaith already houses some 1,200 residents in about 800 residences across the metro. It’s also poised for major growth. In 2024, there were another 392 Beacon Interfaith homes in development across Minnesota, including the planned expansion of the 76-unit Kimball Court building, which was a lightning rod for neighborhood controversy and back-to-back police visits when LaTondresse started in his new role.

Some, but not all, of that neighborhood tension has since faded as construction and fencing have eliminated places to loiter. With about $3.85 million in no-interest loans from St. Paul and financial backing from a wide range of partners, construction of the addition is now well underway, with an opening for the expanded Kimball Court residences expected around February 2026. The goal is to make Kimball Court, after a $19 million refresh, more like Bimosedaa.

The building addition and remodel will add 22 units, as well as new offices and common areas, better sight lines for security, improved ingress and egress, and other features intended to make the dormitory-like structure similar to Bimosedaa in its security and amenities.

LaTondresse maintains that physical environment can make all the difference.

In addition to one-on-one counseling, Bimosedaa residents have on-site access to twice-weekly group therapy with a licensed clinician in the housing development’s conference room.

Some sessions have taken the form of traditional Native American “talking circles,” led by a community leader. A roof deck outfitted with a small raised-bed garden allows residents to grow their own sage, which is used in ceremonies or hung on doors. Having spaces to congregate offers an alternative to loitering outside, which has been an issue near Kimball Court, he said.

‘They’ve never done sweeping and mopping’

At Bimosedaa, Avivo, a Minneapolis-based provider of vocational counseling services and shelter supports, provides case managers who in some cases guide residents through everyday tasks. With an office located near the front door, it’s easy to hail residents and schedule them for their next appointment as they walk by.

“For a lot of them, this is the first housing stability that they’ve had,” said LaTondresse. “There’s going to be rules and guidelines that you follow. … Some people have never had an apartment before. They don’t know how to clean out an oven. They’ve never done sweeping and mopping.”

The population Beacon Interfaith targets with its “Housing First” model has a wide range of needs.

Once construction is complete, Kimball Court will span 98 residences, adding 22 apartments to the existing 76-unit building. The new apartments will have their rents subsidized through the St. Paul Public Housing Authority and the site-based federal Section 8 housing program. Referrals to Kimball Court will be made through Ramsey County Coordinated Entry and the Red Lake Nation Coordinated Entry systems for single adults.

In St. Paul, more than one Hamline-Midway resident has expressed doubt about the efficacy of adding more people in vulnerable situations to a challenged area.

“Rampant public drug use, trespassing (despite clearly posted No Trespassing signs), and public intoxication is not something the city should be willing to accept as normal or acceptable,” wrote Devin Creurer, a property manager with a Snelling Avenue apartment building situated across the street from Kimball Court, in a petition to the city council and mayor’s office last December.

Creurer said trespassers forced their way into his building to engage in everything from drug use and prostitution to defecation, so his company invested $32,000 in three new high-security, tamper-resistant doors.

“Our residents routinely reported to us the people conducting this illegal activity were seen coming and going from Kimball Court,” he wrote.

Fast forward seven months, and Creurer said he’s keeping an open mind.

“I think its too early to say how the expansion/renovation will impact the neighborhood as it’s not fully open yet, is it?” said Creurer, in an email. “Logically, the large investment they’re making should make their building more secure and hopefully some of the funds will be allotted to enhance security patrolling around their property.”

A hub for narcotic traffic

In crime incident reports last September, St. Paul police identified an empty lot next to Kimball Court as “the hub for most of the narcotic traffic” in the western police district, which stretches from Larpenteur Avenue to West Seventh Street and Minnesota 280 to about Dale Street. “As soon as squads leave the area, dozens of unsheltered individuals line up waiting outside the building to buy and sell narcotics.”

The lot also became known as a major distribution hotspot for goods shoplifted from area stores. Homeless and transient residents, sometimes as many as 40 at a time, began congregating last year in and around the parking lot of a boarded-up CVS store at the corner of Snelling and University avenues. In community meetings, residents complained of garage burglaries, street litter, vandalism and fighting.

“Just because we’re concerned about crime doesn’t mean we’re against the homeless,” said Ratliff, the longtime Hamline-Midway resident. “A lot of the people we have problems with were not living at Kimball Court, but they were attracted to the theft circles and drug circles.”

Former City Council President Mitra Jalali, who took strong criticism as one of the building’s defenders, resigned from the council in March, months after helping Beacon Interfaith secure public funding for Kimball Court’s expansion. Voters will choose a new Ward 4 council member on Aug. 12, and the challenges surrounding both Kimball Court and the general Snelling-University area have crept into campaign discussions.

A St. Paul police spokesperson declined to speculate why calls for service have plummeted from 258 calls last year down to 45 this year to date, except to point out construction has eliminated some spaces to congregate.

Beacon Interfaith officials have said Kimball Court has sometimes been unfairly scapegoated for societal woes.

“I hear the community loud and clear on this,” LaTondresse said. “But what percentage of challenges in the community are related to the broader trends … and what percent are on account of an individual property or building?”

Improvements with time

The fentanyl crisis, rising housing costs and other “aftershocks” of the pandemic “hit many of our communities extremely hard, which in turn has hit a lot of our residents, even those that are stably housed, and nonprofits in particular,” LaTondresse said. “There’s been a real before-and-after sea change in the last five years, certainly in Hamline-Midway, but also in a lot of our communities.”

Still, the situation has since improved, and notably so.

Related Articles

Rice Street clinic celebrates 100 years

Joe Soucheray: Why did Tim Walz need $430,000 worth of law-firm coaching?

Letters: Yes, what does happen ‘when laws are only applied based on who is in power?’

‘Today we get justice,’ sister of chef fatally shot at St. Paul funeral reception says in court

Two charged after gunfight at downtown St. Paul pool party

The vacant Star Market next door to Kimball Court has been torn down to make room for the addition. Fencing now surrounds the CVS parking lot, discouraging loitering. Litter has become less of a concern, and a new coordinated security effort along University Avenue — “Safe and Strong University Avenue” — combines the efforts of Metro Transit police, civilian Transit Rider Investment Program (TRIP) agents and partner agencies.

The nonprofit has made its share of changes within the apartment complex. Before the pandemic, Beacon Interfaith was able to provide its “Housing First” model at Kimball Court with civilian staff manning a front desk. It now provides 24/7 security, as well as a different property management company than it had a few years ago. A street outreach organization, 21 Days of Peace, has helped direct loiterers to resources.

Ratliff isn’t convinced that Beacon Interfaith or the city is fully prepared for the expanded facility.

“Yesterday, we had a guy with a machete stopping people from getting into a coffee shop on Snelling,” he said Monday. “They need more than sight lines and cameras.”