Frogtown corner is getting a new start

Dedrick Young and Damen Johnson moved their barbershop, the Grooming House, more than once while waiting for new digs to open in the roomy new Frogtown Square complex at University Avenue and Dale Street. As far as they’re concerned, the effort was worth the wait.

“It was developed for the light rail, it’s on the corner, it’s new, and we had the opportunity to purchase the space,” said Young, seated in front of his nine barber chairs, most of them full of customers or well-wishers. “We moved three times. Our purpose was to get into this space.”

On Friday, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan was on hand to congratulate the two barbers, as well as Frogtown Square’s six other commercial tenants. Together with the adjoining 49-unit Kings Crossing senior apartments, the $13.57 million development relied heavily on city, county, Metropolitan Council, state and federal support to become reality.

Standing in front of a crowd of onlookers in the future dining room of the Fasika Ethiopian Restaurant, Donovan said Frogtown Square and the Kings Crossing project is in line with the goals of HUD and the White House of pairing affordable housing with retail businesses to create jobs along a transit line.

In the case of Frogtown Square, the route in question is the Central Corridor light-rail transit line, a $957 million, 11-mile corridor under construction from downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis. The line will have a stop directly

outside the complex when it gets rolling in 2014.

Frogtown Square is kitty-corner from the Rondo Community Outreach Library, and nestled into a somewhat economically depressed corner of University Avenue. The site once housed a police substation, and later a series of bars and restaurants.

“We know from years of building and financing affordable housing that the most successful developments include a range of not only incomes but also uses, both commercial and residential,” said Donovan, praising the myriad planning efforts that went into getting Frogtown Square and Kings Crossing off the ground.

Those efforts were led in large part by a partnership among four nonprofits, which will own and manage the retail space and a new coffee shop on the site, the Rondo Coffee Cafe. The partners are Model Cities Inc., the Neighborhood Development Center, the Aurora-St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corp. and the Greater Frogtown Community Development Corp.

The tenants include an ethnic grocer, a women’s clothing boutique, a Subway restaurant franchise and a mobile phone store. Nieeta Presley, executive director of the Aurora-St. Anthony NDC, said the nonprofits worked hard to ensure that the tenants were small-business owners representative of the surrounding community, which is heavily ethnic.

Likewise, emigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China, Ethiopia and Trinidad occupy about half the one-bedroom senior units in Kings Crossing. About 30 percent of the building’s population is African-American, and about 15 percent is white. Rents, including utilities, are set at 30 percent of each tenant or couple’s income. Kings Crossing is owned and managed by Episcopal Homes of St. Paul, which received more than $6.7 million in HUD grants and financing.

All the units were leased as of September, and the waiting list is 80 families long.

“We could have filled this place twice,” said Paul Hagen, a spokesman with Episcopal Homes.

Before his visit to Frogtown Square, Donovan met with members of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative at the Minneapolis headquarters of the McKnight Foundation. In October, HUD awarded the Twin Cities a $5 million grant to be used for planting trees along University Avenue and development planning around five future transit routes, including the Cedar Avenue Bus Rapid Transitway in Dakota County.

Members of the Funders Collaborative, a coalition of foundations invested in the neighborhoods along the Central Corridor transit line, expects to work in tandem with the Met Council, the regional planning agency, as the funds are distributed.

Donovan said that nationally, unemployment has dipped 0.9 percentage points in the past three months — the largest drop since 1983 — to reach 8.9 percent, which he said is “still too high.” The private sector grew by 222,000 jobs last month, while the public sector shed workers, for a net of 192,000 jobs added.

“Eight of the 222,000 jobs that the private sector created in February (were) right here in Frogtown Square,” he said.

Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172.

Article source: http://www.twincities.com/news/ci_17543212?source=rss