Podcast #89: Talking Columbia Heights with City Council Candidate Sean Broom

Podcast – streets.mn

Sean and Stephanie in front of their Columbia Heights home.

Hello! I’m rebooting the podcast after a long hiatus. My equipment was stolen along with my bike pannier a while ago, but thanks to the help of some supporters, I was able to replace and upgrade it with some new and better microphones. So thanks to everyone who pitched in! I really appreciate it.

With important city and county elections coming up in a few weeks, I’m focusing on interviews with candidates for local races. And the first one is Sean Broom, a candidate for City Council in Columbia Heights, an interesting first-ring suburb just north of Northeast Minneapolis. Sean is a policy aide, urbanist, and first-time candidate who is running against two incumbents in the 20,000 person suburb, and I sat down with him at Community Grounds, a brand new coffee shop on 40^th Avenue, one of Columbia Heights’ main streets. We chatted about all kinds of things, including Central Avenue, development possibilities in Columbia Heights, and what it’s like to be in Anoka County.

https://streets.mn/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/podcast89seanbroom.mp3

Here are a few highlights of the conversation:

On the Heights Theater:

It kind of reminds you of the fact that in Columbia Heights right now you can’t go out to dinner and a movie, you can’t walk from a restaurant into this glorious theater we have along what should be our main street. Columbia Heights is nothing but opportunities; it’s all blue sky here.

On his Council race:

I’m running for City Council because I moved here to Columbia Heights and saw that this is this place of amazing opportunity. As someone who thinks of the urban form around us we are in many ways no different from South Minneapolis or Northeast Minneapolis in the density of our construction and the opportunity we have for economic vitality places to go out on Friday night businesses to have in your community. But I saw that repeatedly through conscious decisions that our government makes we have, a city who is zoned to have a bunch of car shops.

On 40^th Avenue:

40^th is an east-west, which is at its intersection with Central that is probably the first place we need to look at in the city of Columbia Heights at creating an walkable node of development and orienting what we want our city to be, to grow from 40^th and Central.

On tax rates and development

Part of the reason why I talk about the importance of low property taxes are that property taxes are a very regressive form of taxation for folks who live in our naturally-occurring affordable housing. If we have big property taxes, that’s reflected in our rent immediately, especially for folks on fixed incomes. We have a very old and grey section of our community, people who’ve lived here since the 40s, 50s, and 60s, who are now on fixed incomes and who can’t handle big stresses on property taxes. When we talk about equity one of the most important thing we can do is to make sure people have homes.

But, yes, there is a relationship between property taxes and development. You’d hope that in a place like Columbia Heights, you could argue to developers to come here and build here with Anoka County land costs. This has as good of transit access as any place in Minneapolis, and is closer to downtown than much of South Minneapolis. This is a place you want to be. You’d hope that development would further support your property tax base and keep property taxes low for everybody.

Thanks to Dan Choma for the new podcast theme music, and to Richard and Renee Holst for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. If you’re interested in sponsoring the streets.mn podcast in the future, please get in touch.