Lavenna Ransom never thought moving back to Frogtown would be so hard.

“When the train went in, I thought it was going to be better, the commute was going to be better,” said Ransom, who now lives in another St. Paul neighborhood, on the city’s East Side. “Then we started getting notices. I had a friend who lived down the street, she said, ‘My rent’s going up, how about yours?’ ”

Each facing a rent increase of more than $100, they had to move. That was back in 2009.

Now, with a steady full-time job and another part-time job in the works, Ransom wants to move back — only to be met with apartment rental prices that are hundreds of dollars higher.

“They’re definitely way higher than the West Side or East Side. I’ve had a year looking.”

So long, in fact, that her three-month Section 8 voucher expired before she was able to use it.

Frogtown tenant advocates say Ransom’s tale isn’t rare: In the wake of the Green Line light-rail line, the traditionally depressed Frogtown neighborhood is seeing a renaissance in housing prices. And not everyone is celebrating.

“Before the Green Line, you could get a one-bedroom $550, for dirt (cheap). Now, the cheapest I find is around $800,” said Carolyn Brown, who works for the Community Stabilization Project, a local non-profit that serves dozens of clients seeking help with housing issues every year.

“A lot of these houses, here in Rondo, are turning to management companies now,” she says as she uses an online search engine known as Housing Link to look for available spaces in Frogtown. Related Articles St. Paul district reports enrollment drop as pandemic moves school online

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The field has thinned, and requirements pop up that used to be rare for the neighborhood: credit scores of 600, background checks, incomes three times the rent level. Brown says she has found only one result that doesn’t require the triple-rent income. “That never happened before.”

Which leaves area tenant advocates decrying gentrification in action. And some hark back to the old days of Rondo, when the area’s poor, black population was forced to make way for another transit line — Interstate 94. Now, the advocates say, that same population is being forced to move again.

Low-income housing has been built along the line. Minnesota Housing Finance Agency officials are accustomed to saying that whatever they do, it’s not enough — as they did during a news conference Wednesday.

The multiple renters and tenant advocacy groups interviewed by the Pioneer Press note spaces in those low-income complexes fill up almost instantly, and many have the same checks and credit requirements that make it hard to rent from the private sector.

The Community Stabilization Project felt strongly enough about the recent housing trend that they took the unprecedented step of showing the Pioneer Press their raw intake data, relating to the dozens of clients they’d received since the beginning of last year.

While much of the data is sporadic — with different clients coming in to address different problems, and thus difficult to draw a conclusion from — one data point stood out:

During the first half of last year, 23 clients came in wanting help because they were facing evictions.

For the first half of this year, that total shot up to 40 clients.

FRUSTRATED SEARCH FOR HOUSING

“I’ve been trying to get in there myself for about a year,” said Donna Evans, the office manager at the Aurora-St. Anthony Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit low-income housing developer with offices on University Avenue.

She’s talking about the apartments above the Rondo Library at Dale and University, a housing project her own organization developed about a decade ago. The wait list there — with one-bedrooms starting at $699 — is in the hundreds, said Nieeta Presley, the corporation’s executive director.

There was some recent grumbling about the organization itself when it built a “workforce” housing complex at Western and University Avenues with for-profit partner Sand Property Management LLC, which now manages the place, known as Western U Plaza.

Except for a smattering of studios for lower-income tenants, rents for the six one-bedroom units at Western U Plaza were $782, and the large majority of units were two- or three-bedrooms, with rents at $927 and $1066, respectively.

And some, including some of Aurora-St. Anthony’s own clients, saw Sand’s screening criteria as too stringent: no felonies, no “unlawful detainers” (forced evictions) for two years, an income that’s twice the rent, and a credit score, in most cases, of 550.

“I had frustrated people come up to me at the train stop, saying, ‘You people didn’t develop those for us,’ ” said Roxanne Draughn, the organization’s community development manager.

Regardless, “As soon as they started advertising, they got booked,” Draughn said. “Only a few of our people actually got in.”

Draughn feels their pain. Once homeless, she’s been looking for housing for herself and her two young boys for months now.

“The two-bedrooms here, the lowest I’ve seen is $850, and the highest is $1500,” she said. “Fifteen hundred. For something, here, with 700 square feet. I’ve lived on the West Side, and you get plenty of room over there.”

Even the low-income units, Brown notes, can be a bit high for the area’s traditional renters.

SCREENING AGENCIES, APPLICATION FEES

Insidious side issues have cropped up. Ransom, who’s searching weekly, said that as the market has tightened in Rondo, she has seen an increase of scammers: people advertising an apartment they don’t own or telling would-be tenants to send money orders by mail.

And in recent months, Aurora-St. Anthony has been canvassing neighborhoods and holding listening sessions with renters. With just over 200 surveys in, one fact stood out above all.

The biggest issue for renters by far — above being unable to pay rent — was apartment application fees.

At up to $55 per application, some landlords seem to be surviving on them, organization staffers say. And those searching can often be out hundreds of dollars a month.

“The way the screening agencies are charging people, they can make a living just doing that,” executive director Presley said. “They never even have to rent the place.”

GREEN LINE IMPACT

The market, certainly, is hard to fight.

Statistics provided by the St. Paul Area Association of Realtors show staggering price fluctuations in the neighborhood immediately after the Green Lines opened, far in excess of the city’s overall statistics.

In early 2010, when construction was underway, median sales prices in the neighborhood shot up 120 percent in month-to-month comparisons, before settling back down by the end of the year — compared to an overall city increase that peaked at just under 40 percent for that time frame.

In late 2013, the year after the line opened, median sales prices again shot up just over 80 percent, compared to a 28 percent peak jump in the city overall. There was another 60 percent jump in the first quarter of 2015, as well.

Home price spikes are even more relevant, notes Stabilization Project executive director Metric Giles, because 75 percent of people of color are renters, not owners.

It’s not as if local groups didn’t see it coming.

In 2010, a collection of neighborhood advocacy organizations, including the NAACP, combined to sue the Metropolitan Council and U.S. Department of Transportation for a variety of reasons related to Green Line, including resident displacement and gentrification.

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank ruled against the groups on the housing issue, noting that the defendant’s environmental impact statement said the Green Line was “not expected to have long-term adverse impact on neighborhood cohesion or identity.”

The Judge also noted city of St. Paul’s “Central Corridor Development Strategy,” which included “maintaining and ‘lifting up’ the existing, diverse neighborhoods.”

In the end, the judge ruled that the Green Line’s impact had been adequately considered, at least enough to not trigger a federal penalty.

The ruling still rankles Tom DeVincke, the attorney who argued the case.

“The whole point of the (Green Line) project was to displace this neighborhood. That was their goal. They want to redevelop. That’s what redevelopment is,” DeVincke said.

The Metropolitan Council argued their intention was for all to benefit, and the ruling noted St. Paul’s plan to counter displacement: financial and regulatory incentives for builders, and home ownership assistance.

There have been some efforts to preserve affordable housing along the Green Line — including the usual financial incentives, such as tax breaks, for developers.

An effort known as the “Big Picture project,” a consortium of public and private entities, touted the fact that in the Frogtown neighborhood, called “Midway East” in the project’s latest report, 309 low-income units had been preserved — though it included units dating back to 2008 — with another 332 units “in the pipeline.”

The latest of those “pipeline” projects, yet to be opened, is the 35-unit “Brownstone” at the corner of Victoria Avenue overseen by Model Cities Inc, where one-bedrooms are projected to start at just under $700.

But screening criteria have yet to be established, said Craig Johnson, Model Cities’ real estate development manager, who added that Sand, the same developer who manages Aurora-St. Anthony’s Western U Plaza complex, will be managing the place.

The consortium’s latest progress report did sound some warning bells.

After acknowledging that median rent for a two-bedroom along the entire Green Line had jumped 44 percent between 2011 and 2015 — compared to about half that for the rest of the metro area — the report noted, “With rising rental rates throughout the corridor, the threat of families losing their homes is very real, especially those with fixed or marginal incomes.

“How can we strengthen support for renters who are the most vulnerable to displacement?” the report asks in bold.

The answers, presumably, would come at a later date.