Black Architect-Developers of the Twin Cities: Their Journeys, What’s Next, and Why It Matters
Interview by Mary-Margaret Zindren, CAE | June 2, 2022
From left to right: Urban Design Perspectives’ Alicia Belton, FAIA, 4RM+ULA’s James Garrett Jr., and Redesign’s Taylor Smrikárova.
FEATURE
Leveraging their architectural knowledge and skill, Alicia Belton, FAIA, founder of Urban Design Perspectives; James Garrett Jr., AIA, cofounder of 4RM+ULA; and Taylor Smrikárova, director of property development at Redesign, are collaborating to aim higher than standard development on projects like the Coliseum Building renovation and the U.S. Bank site redevelopment, both on Lake Street in Minneapolis. ENTER publisher Mary-Margaret Zindren sat down with them to learn more.
Mary-Margaret Zindren: You all are collaborating on projects in the areas that were affected in the civil unrest, after the murder of George Floyd. How does your work in those areas differ from other architecture and development efforts that you’ve been a part of?
Alicia Belton: The Coliseum Building renovation that Taylor and I are working on is more than just a building. It’s a heart project. This is for the community. This is for people in that area who often are left out of the conversation, who often have decisions made for them. We want to include them as part of the process.
What happens at the Third Precinct site—that’s the big elephant in the room. There’s been no discussion about what’s going to happen there. It is a place of trauma that at some point is going to need to be addressed.
Despite that, there are some wonderful things coming about as a result of all the engagement that’s been happening. Some intentional dialogue about the hopes and dreams that community members have for the area. And those dreams are realistic, both short term and long term. We’re asking how we can make sure that BIPOC folks in the area are part of the generational wealth–building opportunities that will happen here, through the kinds of businesses that come, through the opportunities to partner in doing the work. I wish all my projects were like this, to be quite honest. We’re having hard discussions, but those discussions don’t deter us from doing what we think is going to be right, in step with community.
The soon-to-be renovated Coliseum Building at 2700 East Lake Street, yesterday and today. Image provided by Redesign.
Taylor Smrikárova: Yes. I absolutely agree. There needs to be another news cycle that says, “We’re back. We haven’t been forgotten. We’re not going to stay stagnant for a decade. We are going to reopen.” And the way that we’re doing it is, as Alicia says, with people. With people who were and are using that space, who are walking those streets and enjoying those businesses.
It’s about saying no to, “Let’s just gentrify it from here to everywhere, because we need to have a new Uptown in every part of Minneapolis.” Instead, we’re saying, “We were always using this space and we’re going to use it again, but now we’re going to own it. Now we’re going to drive what happens here. Now we’re going to make sure that the art on the wall looks like us. Now we’re going to pull the financing together in a way that makes the projects affordable for renters and small businesses.”
We’re going to use public financing as a way for the public to pay to redo this. It’s city, state, and county funds that are going in here and bringing stuff back online.
I’ll let James share his perspective, but I’ll say this about the U.S. Bank site, [which Redesign is working on with 4RM+ULA]: This behemoth of a company [U.S. Bank] said, “We won’t put the property up for auction, or on the open market. We will donate it—purely donate it—to you. We’re going to request that the best and the brightest from this community step forward to suggest what should happen with it, and then you all take it from there. You take this and you make it what it needs to be. We’re going to get out of the way.” And U.S. Bank followed through on that. That is not normal. That is not what normally happens.
“We’re asking how we can make sure that BIPOC folks in the area are part of the generational wealth–building opportunities that will happen here, through the kinds of businesses that come, through the opportunities to partner in doing the work.”
Garrett: A lot of what happens in communities of color and under-serviced communities is that people react out of fear. Fear of being gentrified and pushed out. Fear of eminent domain coming in, just like it took my great-great-grandmother’s home where my mom was born, displacing folks out of the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul and forcing us into completely different circumstances. A lot of times, decisions are made out of fear or a scarcity mindset.
[At 4RM+ULA] we want to present ideas and visions for community that are coming from more of a bountiful, optimistic mindset. It’s part of everything we do, from our Springboard for the Arts project to Great River Landing. We build with optimism, with the goal that we design things creatively—that we express artistically different values that people can relate to. So, from that standpoint, our projects on Lake Street are just business as usual, because we’re going to bring that same optimism. We’re going to bring to bear what we’ve learned, in an artistic way that expresses people’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations.
On the other hand, as Taylor mentioned, this is a big deal, and this is a different deal. What U.S. Bank did—the choice they made—was huge. We want to honor that decision by exceeding their expectations, in terms of what this project could be, what it aspires to be.
Because I knew George Floyd, I’ll also say this: “Big Floyd,” as we called him, was larger than life. He was highly respected in both the Latino community and the African American community. He lived across these cultural boundaries.
Article: “The Death of George Floyd Has Become a Catalyst for Social Change and Urban Redevelopment,” by James Garrett Jr.
So, in working with Taylor and others at Redesign and thinking about the U.S. Bank site holistically and what we would propose for it, we thought it only made sense to reach across cultural boundaries and say, “We’re going to create space for Black ownership, for Latino ownership, and for Native American ownership.” It’s like what we did at Rondo Commemorative Plaza, creating physical space around which people can interact, mourn, celebrate, and share their culture with one another.
Zindren: What would you say to students and other architecture and design professionals, especially BIPOC professionals, who are thinking about engaging more directly in development?
Belton: Don’t be afraid of it. There’s lots to learn. I think the beauty of our profession is that you can use the foundational learning we’ve had in so many directions. I did a dual master’s program in architecture and business, and that was so good; it helped me understand how buildings get put together, the financing behind them, and all the decisions that need to be made. I would say, find somebody who has that wheelhouse of experience and maybe shadow them. Take some courses, tag along. It’s really the predevelopment work that’s needed to get these projects moving, and architects and designers have the skillset to think it through.
A project like the Coliseum Building is one that my firm has dreamt about for a number of years. We have a vision board in our office with all these sticky notes on what we wanted a project like this one to be about—from how it operated, to who was involved in it, to how the process of its creation would be a collaboration among mostly people of color. We had been looking for a place for that vision to be realized.
We looked at quite a few buildings, and it was just never the right time or space. And then I met this wonderful woman here, Taylor, and we started talking about the vision. And she’s like, “Hey, there’s a project coming online [the Coliseum Building, severely damaged in the unrest]. What do you think about this?”
So, it’s always been in the back of my head. I just never knew when it would materialize.
“Approaches to development tend to be a little less structured. So, if you can get comfortable knowing what you don’t know and have the right vocabulary to ask the right questions, you will quickly catch up with where you want to be. Then just follow your interests and be willing to learn quickly.”
Smrikárova: Recognize that you’re not starting from nothing. Having some working vocabulary and understanding some of the basics will get you far enough to ask the right questions. And once you begin to understand the process, you can home in on the details.
I graduated into the 2008 recession, when literally no one was hiring architects. I ended up going back to grad school to get a master’s in real estate development for a holistic understanding of the entire building process. The program was housed in the School of Architecture at the University of Maryland.
I’ve obviously never abandoned my design brain, and I think it’s very useful—extremely useful—to understand how the design process mimics the development process. Usually by the time an architect is hired, decisions have been made that you just can’t easily unpack.
Development is a very entrepreneurial profession. Approaches to development tend to be a little less structured [than approaches to design]. So, if you can get comfortable knowing what you don’t know and have the right vocabulary to ask the right questions, you will quickly catch up with where you want to be. Then just follow your interests and be willing to learn quickly—or at least just be willing to learn.
Garrett: “Go for it,” is my answer, too. I’ve always been interested in real estate. When I was an undergrad at UC-Berkeley, I had a wonderful professor and mentor, Robert Herman. He was a nonprofit housing developer and did amazing senior housing, affordable housing, and supportive housing in the Bay Area. One of the things I learned from him was that the developer has a lot of control over the parameters and the scope of the project before the architect is involved. The further upstream you can get into that process, the more you can help shape it.
When I was a grad student, I wanted to learn more about how these decisions were made. I took nonprofit real estate development and finance courses in the business school. [My business partner] Nathan Johnson and I also traveled to San Diego to attend an architect-as-developer conference led by Jonathan Siegel, then a young architect who I really looked up to. Soon after, I purchased a piece of land here in St. Paul. I’ve been trying to develop the property for more than 20 years. It’s been a thorn in my side, something that I’ve . . .
Belton: It’s a labor of love. It’s coming. It’s coming.
Garrett: I’ve had so many starts and stops with that project, with the global recession and the global pandemic. But we still own it, and we still want to develop it. We’re going to work with Taylor on the U.S. Bank project, then apply what we learn from that process to develop our smaller parcel.
Controlling land in our communities is something Black Americans have had several bites of the apple at, and we’ve been thwarted each time. I think of our history coming out of slavery, through Reconstruction and the creation of Freedmen’s Towns all across the country, like Black Wall Street in Tulsa and Rosewood in Florida, among many others. And then the Red Summer of 1919 when mobs of angry, jealous White people burned and bombed us.
I think about the next generation, when folks left the South and the Southwest and headed into larger cities. People started to create other versions of Black Wall Street, including in St. Paul, on Rondo Avenue. There were Rondos in cities across the country with Black business owners, entrepreneurs, homeowners, churches, schools, everything. Then the government targeted those neighborhoods for destruction, purposely routing freeways through communities where entrepreneurship and the spirit of ownership were so prevalent for us. A second wave of destruction, and of widespread loss of capital and wealth.
We’re in a third wave right now, and we’re trying to learn from what happened in the past. We’re trying to rediscover ways to express ourselves and to control the land in our own communities. To avoid that type of mass targeting for destruction that we’ve experienced—the double mass extinction of black economics and black entrepreneurship in this country.
We’re trying to learn from those difficult lessons. What we lack is capital investment. We’ve never had reparations—not from America’s Original Sin, or the mass disenfranchisement of the 1910s, or the mass disenfranchisement and destruction of the 1950s and 1960s with the Federal Highway Act running through our neighborhoods. And so, this third time, we demand equal and even preferential access to capital and development opportunities. Public and philanthropic dollars need to flow into these areas.
There is talent, desire, purpose, and initiative on the ground. There are organizations and individuals who’ve been doing amazing work, performing miracles with almost nothing. Now is the time to fund these ventures, to put capital behind these organizations and entrepreneurs so that we can, again, flourish as we have in the past. But this time with no retribution, with no mass extinction events, so that we can build a permanent basis for our success in this capitalist system.