Family-style fancy at Eastside
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Get Out Guide. PAGE B10
February 7–20, 2019 Vol. 30, No. 3 southwestjournal.com
NIGHT AND DAY
Its nightlife remains a draw, but Uptown’s daytime retail scene is struggling “This year in particular it’s gone down so significantly that our company is considering breaking our lease to get us out of here,” Inside one of Uptown’s most recognizable landmarks, business has slowed. said store manager Jamie Liestman, who has been at the store since At John Fluevog Shoes in the Uptown Theatre at Lagoon it opened in 2012. & Hennepin, walk-in foot traffic has been dropping since a peak The other retail space connected to the theater is vacant. Down the in 2015, according to the store’s door-tracker. block, the facade on the former Heartbreakers is beginning to deteriorate By Andrew Hazzard / ahazzard@southwestjournal.com
SEE UPTOWN RETAIL / PAGE A12
Voces de South Central makes the news Lyndale, Bryant and Central neighborhoods co-publish newspaper
Council members highlight potential cost, energy savings
By Michelle Bruch
In the pages of a new neighborhood newspaper called Voces de South Central, a writer covers the Subversive Sirens, a local synchronized swim team that crowdfunded $10,000 to compete in the Gay Games in Paris, winning gold. Another writer interviews Tina Burnside, who grew up in Central and curates the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery, now open at 1256 Penn Ave. N. Every word is translated into Spanish. At a time when neighborhood funding is under scrutiny, a handful of groups are teaming up to try something new. The Bryant, Central and Lyndale neighborhood associations are splitting the cost of mailing about 7,400 newspapers to
Energy disclosure ordinances near passage
every address in their neighborhoods, investing more than $50,000 in the project through the end of 2019. Departing from the feel of a newsletter, writers are covering immigration, offering voter guides and highlighting dramatic changes in neighborhood demographics. “This newspaper obviously is something that we wouldn’t do on our own, even if we had the funding to just do it for our own neighborhood, because the issues are across those boundaries, and the conversations are across those boundaries,” said Eduardo Cardenas, lead organizer of the Central Area Neighborhood Development Organization. SEE NEWSPAPER / PAGE A10
By Nate Gotlieb / ngotlieb@southwestjournal.com
The Minneapolis City Council appears set to pass a pair of ordinances that would mandate the disclosure of utility costs to prospective apartment renters and efficiency information to prospective home buyers. The council will vote Feb. 15 on the proposed ordinances, which would go into effect in 2020 and 2021, respectively. A second component of the apartment proposal would require the owners of large multi-family buildings to report
energy use and emissions data to the city. The vote comes as the council continues to work toward its goal of reducing citywide greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050, using 2006 levels as a baseline. Some council members said the ordinances could spur homeowners to make energy-efficiency improvements that they otherwise wouldn’t. They also said the SEE ENERGY ORDINANCES / PAGE A11