Background

Contamination and climate injustice continue to weigh most heavily on our racially diverse and lowest income communities. The East Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis is no exception.##The community has been fighting the city since the 1990s over ownership of a 7.6 acre plot known as the Roof Depot. While the city wants to exploit the land by expanding a maintenance yard which would further contaminate a part of our city already disproportionately overburdened with pollution, located at the heart of the “Arsenic Triangle.”

 

The East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI,) have long proposed repurposing the Roof Depot into a community-owned urban farm to forward urban agriculture that provides jobs, housing, healthy food and second chance opportunities to its struggling communities of color. 

 

But on 9/22/21, in a (7-6) vote at their POGO Committee, the Minneapolis City Council reversed itself and approved a “Staff Directive” that continues the City’s own proposed Hiawatha Expansion Project at 1860 28th Street East and 2717 Longfellow Avenue South —two adjoining parcels also known as the “Roof Depot.” Council Member Reich moved to continue the City’s original proposed Hiawatha Expansion with the exception of the Outreach and Training Facility and new Central Stores building. This move kills the alternative community-based, community-led East Phillips Neighborhood’s proposed Urban Farm Project and allows the City to demolish the Roof Depot building. That would expose the East Phillips Community to more toxic pollution such as the arsenic underneath the building. Health experts agree that the best mitigating plan for this highly toxic  arsenic is to leave it undisturbed! Their plan also increases toxic traffic congestion—a major source of life threatening asthma and heart disease in Phillips.

Read more at www.eastphillipsneighborhoodinstitute.org