Author: Alexandra Kerl

On a Minneapolis fall morning, arriving buses plant casual-Friday-dressed workers along Hennepin Avenue. At most stops, jean-jacketed and khakied women and polo-shirted men stream out, but the passengers who disembark at 730 Hennepin are a different variety. They run the gamut of fashion, from dress shirts and polished shoes to hijabs to basketball jerseys to “Mean People Suck” T-shirts. As they drift into their building just a spitball’s distance from First Avenue, they attract the attention of the Hennepin Avenue crowd, which is exactly what Joel Gibson wants.

Gibson is executive director of Lincoln International High School, an alternative school whose student body is made up exclusively of immigrants and refugees. Established in 1997, Lincoln receives funding from the district; students find out about the school through social service referrals and word of mouth. Numbering nearly three hundred, the students hail from a dozen countries, though most are from Ecuador, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Alternative schools like Lincoln are run by organizations that use district money and their own methods to educate at-risk populations. “Once they get the tools they need to fit into society, they will enrich it,” says Gibson. The school raises three hundred thousand dollars beyond the money from the district to have the small class sizes and individual attention that will allow students to learn English, get job skills, and become collaborative members of society.

On the wall of the five-story school, “My Life” posters plot the paths of individual students from the countries where they were born to their arrivals in Minnesota. One story begins on a farm in Mexico and ends at an after-school job loading trucks at a fruit distributor. Another student tells of being born in Mogadishu to a businessman father, then fleeing to live among his grandmother’s camels in northern Kenya before finally coming to Minneapolis.

The past year was one of adjustment to the new location: new buses to take and more stairs to climb. During passing time, the school explodes with the sounds of slamming lockers—a novelty at the new site, as is hot lunch. The school newspaper brags about the new basketball team and, though many of the students’ cultures disapprove of dating, the school has organized a prom.

Many of Lincoln’s students have lived through war, terror, and other intense traumas. Some have arrived without parents and other family members, and about a third have never before attended school. They are older students, most between eighteen and twenty-two years old, with mustaches, marriages, and children. For some, the main objective can simply be learning to sit through classes for an entire day, along with learning English; for others, it involves navigating more complex social norms.

Suad Mahammud, a Somalian seventeen-year-old clad in a stylish turquoise skirt and hijab, is happy to rave about the school. Because she had attended school and learned English in Uganda, after her family had left Somalia, some friends and family were puzzled by her decision to attend the “immigrant school.” However, for Mahammud the decision was part of exercising her right, in America, to make choices. She wanted to attend a school where there is no violence, where students listen to and respect teachers. “We are all here for one goal,” she says.

There is an overwhelming sense among the students that despite their efforts, they and their school are going unnoticed. While the students who are in the country as refugees feel more secure than their immigrant classmates, there is still a permeating sense of otherness. The school’s downtown location is a step toward a solution to that segregation, as are planned internships and other interactions with the downtown business community. One of the reasons the school moved downtown from South Minneapolis last fall was to bring visibility to this hidden population. Even the orange and blue awnings that flutter outside the building were chosen not to show the school’s colors, but for their eye-catching combination. “If people would come in and check it out, they would see that we are trying to be the best people we can be,” says Mahammud.

Mahammud’s history teacher is screening All Quiet on the Western Front. Mr. Pilgram is the classic high school history teacher, dressed in a blue cardigan and a tie printed with a world map. An American flag-print Puffs box sits on his desk. “They’re burning books here,” he says, pointing to the movie screen. “Book?” one girl puzzles. Her classmate turns to her, whispers “B-o-o-k,” and opens and closes her hands in the international symbol for book.

The Man in the Housing Bubble

Did he die? Or just abandon his house to the “Ugly” people?

Ug bought my next-door neighbor’s house. I didn’t think it was dilapidated enough to be purchased by the “We Buy Ugly Houses” people, but apparently it was. When I moved in, my landlady warned me that the guy next door was weird, but I figured that was just because she was from the Home Depot school of property maintenance (vinyl siding and lots of pavement), while he preferred a more lived-in look that included randomly planted shrubs and ankle-length grass. The house’s peeling siding was an amalgam of different colors, with holes artfully covered in plywood. More power to him, I thought. My perfectly manicured South Minneapolis block needed some excitement.

He walked his dog wearing brightly colored hot pants and erected a limp chain-link fence that bisected his front yard, the way one might surround a trailer to protect it from rabid dogs. He hung his birdfeeder so that it leaned into my front yard, which soon became an unwelcome haven for a riot of birds and squirrels. He rarely appeared outdoors. I saw him so infrequently that when I picture him I see a sixty-year-old Andy Warhol, with shaggy grey-blond hair.

Last fall, his unmowed grass became a vast grass forest, with unraked leaves padding it in wet clumps. The bird feeder sat empty and all signs of life, already infrequent, ceased completely. For weeks I waited for an indication that he was alive, but there was nothing.

Then one day a few weeks ago, I heard a series of crashes coming from the house. Rushing to the window, I saw two men in blue uniforms throwing the contents of the house into a miniature dump truck marked 1-800-GOT-JUNK? HomeVestors had purchased the house, the dudes in blue told me. “You know, the ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ people.” These guys would clean the place out, and then HomeVestors would fix it up and put it back on the market.

HomeVestors is a national franchise with headquarters in Dallas. They pay cash for neglected homes and rental properties, close within a few days, and then fix them up and turn them around at a higher price. The twelve franchises in the Twin Cities combined buy about three hundred properties a year. To HomeVestors, ugly isn’t just multi-colored siding and unmowed grass; it’s more often messy situations. Many houses come into Ug’s possession because of the three D’s: debt, death, and divorce. Others are sold as a way to get rid of a burdensome rental property, which was why my neighbor’s house was sold. It turned out he was a tenant who just wasn’t wanted any longer.

By the time I got outside, the truck had been stuffed with two refrigerators, a stove, and a dishwasher, and the workers were in the process of rolling another stove down the steps, not on a dolly, but by rolling it end over end. From my side of the house, I could still see the only adornments that had ever been there: a crooked air conditioner and a small American flag, the kind you might see at a small-town Veterans Day parade.

On the overgrown front lawn there was a mournful display: an old metal kitchen cabinet, a fold-up metal bed, innumerable broken floor lamps, a set of floral TV trays, and a perfectly good basketball. These items looked like a pack of kids waiting for a late parent to pick them up from school. And still more stuff kept coming out of the house. As a second dishwasher was tossed into the truck, a left-behind spoon tumbled out of it onto the street.

The inside of the house was a scene of bare ruin. The whole place was freezing cold and, without the carpets, overwhelmingly brown. It felt as if I were exploring a house that had been abandoned for years, as if the floorboards would give way at any moment. An empty Xbox box sat in the middle of what was meant to be a dining room. In the threshold between that room and the bedroom lay discarded Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner bottles and a dirty glass ashtray. What would make my dog-walking, anti-yard-mowing guy leave all of this behind?

On the wall of the living room was a solemn portrait of a Hispanic family, circa 1992, that had never lived in the house. The father wore a Girbaud T-shirt and a steady expression. His wife and three children were equally stoic. The family stared straight ahead at a spot across the room, where an entire section of the wall had been torn out, revealing the guts of the house, water pipes, and wiring.

From the porch where neighbor dude had once smoked, the men in blue now heaved the contents of the second floor out onto the lawn. They threw oven racks, stiff sheets of carpet, flattened boxes, and blocks of wood. The American flag was one of the last things to go. Like an autumn leaf floating slowly to the ground, over and over it tumbled, finally landing with a little click on top of the pile of a forgotten life. —Alexandra Kerl

My brother recently had a job that required him to purchase 231 gallons of gas in seven weeks. Ben was behind the wheel of his 1997 Honda Accord ten hours a day, seven days a week, and he covered 5,500 miles without ever leaving the metropolitan area. But this was no trucking or courier gig; he was getting fifteen dollars an hour to drive his car along every single street in the Twin Cities and their first-ring suburbs.

Ben had answered a Craigslist ad posted by a technology start-up. They were looking for people in various cities who were willing to spend their days driving. Like Pac-Man on wheels, he trolled every avenue, lane, boulevard, and road, with a Palm Pilot suction-cupped to his windshield, scanning neighborhoods for wireless Internet activity. The company that hired Ben was apparently attempting to create a map of wireless signals on top of a GPS grid.

Ben is twenty-four years old, and is comfortable whether he’s jostling at Atmosphere shows or shaking hands with real estate pooh-bahs in his present job for a developer. He grew up in St. Paul and thought he knew the Twin Cities pretty well. While driving the streets and neighborhoods, however, he discovered that, beyond the familiar, high-density areas most of us regularly travel through (Uptown and downtown Minneapolis, St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, the lakes, and the Mississippi River) was a largely foreign territory. He circumnavigated downtown St. Paul’s airport, encountered the aftermath of a murder, peed at the shores of lakes you’ve likely never heard of, and witnessed a funeral parade with a crowd of mourners, on foot, trailing the coffin down the street.

For the most part, however, Ben was mostly a passive observer in the neighborhoods through which he drove; most of the time when he actually got out of his car it was to download his data at a Starbucks. He also discovered that public bathrooms tended to be readily available in affluent areas and virtually impossible to find in poor neighborhoods. He was financially strapped during this odyssey—he wasn’t reimbursed for his gas or mileage, and ended up making about ten dollars an hour—and subsisted primarily on gas station granola bars.

For the last leg of his journey—driving the remaining un-highlighted stretches on his map—Ben allowed me to ride along. We began our run in a tony Minneapolis neighborhood with elaborate brick pillars at its borders and a number of identical white cantilever porches. From there we swung into Bryn Mawr, with all of its quaint signage (Bryn Mawr Chiropractic, Bryn Mawr Coffee, Bryn Mawr Pizza), and headed out to Robbinsdale, before eventually ending up back in Minneapolis. There, we drove through suburban-style subdivisions with Mercedes in the driveways, hard by scrap yards where men delivered cans piled into garbage bags and stacked onto shopping carts.

Even on a Tuesday night, downtown Minneapolis was chaotic and bustling with people. Ben recalled his cruise through the streets of downtown St. Paul, where it was so deserted that he drove five blocks in the wrong direction down a one-way street before noticing.

After three hours, the Honda began to feel like a Tilt-a-Whirl from which I couldn’t escape. The car was constantly changing direction, pivoting, juking, and U-turning as Ben retraced his steps and searched for tiny hidden streets. Long stretches of straight avenues were welcome, but rare; more common were the one-ways, dead ends, and streets bisected by parks or office buildings. “There’s an art to this,” Ben said, and claimed that he’d developed an almost intuitive navigational sense. “It’s become second nature to drive with a map in my hand.”

Areas that departed from the usual grid—places with lots of single-block streets and dead-ends—required him to drive through multiple times in order to map all the sections. He occasionally got weird looks from people who saw him repeatedly passing by. “There’s definitely some suspicion, particularly in neighborhoods that are real homogenous,” he said. “And especially on cul-de-sacs; everyone knows who lives on their cul-de-sac.” Fortunately, he said, his Honda is an inconspicuous ride.

As we swirled through a cul-de-sac somewhere in the haze of inner suburbia, we passed a sign that read, “Tube Forming Factory,” another industrial site set incongruously among neighborhoods of low ramblers. One thing that really struck Ben on his travels was the amount of industry in the Twin Cities. “As a consumer, you’re so focused on retail and residential that you never really ask, ‘Where do things get made in the city?’” he said. “And it’s everywhere—places that you don’t normally go or think about, stuff is always going on and things are happening that are different. Everywhere you aren’t is somebody else’s reality.”—Alexandra Kerl