The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has always been, quite literally, a tale of two cities, but soon the two will be a little more united. With this month’s opening of a new light-rail line–the largest public works project in the state’s history–the two Twin City downtowns are going to be connected by rail for the first time since an old streetcar system went defunct in the 1950s.

Behind the massive amounts of planning and funding that went into the Green Line construction is a unique program that aims to do something that most large infrastructure projects fail miserably on: Help existing communities along the transit corridor flourish, rather than flounder, during and after the construction.





“We’ve heard this effort being referred to as the most coordinated effort to prevent displacement that has ever been done,” says Ben Hecht, the CEO of Living Cities, a collaborative of the world’s largest foundations that made the work possible through an innovative program called The Integration Initiative.

Working from a combination of grants and loans from Living Cities and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Corridor of Opportunities project brought people together from government, nonprofits, businesses, and the local community to collaborate on developing the Green transit line (and other future lines like it) a little differently.

“We said, ‘Alright, we’re building this billion dollar line between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Let’s make sure to capitalize on this investment, and make sure we are not leaving people behind,” says Mary Kay Bailey, project director for Corridors of Opportunity project. “Infrastructure projects of the past have tended to hurt neighborhoods, and predominantly those neighborhoods are mostly people of color,” she says (In the Twin Cities case, see Interstate 94).





The strategy involved financing seven mixed-income and affordable housing development, as well as about two dozen smaller projects and market research studies that would not only bolster the communities disrupted by construction and but also protect them from inevitably rising land values in the future.

The motto around a program to help small businesses, many run by immigrants from Southeast Asia who had long lived in the community, became: “Protect, survive, thrive.” Of 350 businesses that received assistance during the period of heavy construction, only four folded–a rate that reflects business-as-usual rather than disaster unfolding, Bailey says. The partnership also funded facade and infrastructure improvements to help businesses improve their own look.