Making the City of Lakes: Whiteness, Nature, and Urban Development in Minneapolis

Minneapolis has the twin distinctions of having one of the most highly rated park systems in the United States and some of the most pronounced racial disparities in wealth and homeownership. We argue that this coupling of urban nature and racial inequality was intentionally produced by the city’s real estate industry and local government. Drawing on Mapping Prejudice’s first complete metro-wide map of racial covenants—clauses in property deeds barring sale to anyone not considered white—we pair quantitative spatial analysis with archival research on turn-of-the century greening campaigns and local real estate practices. We use two developments, Nokomis Terrace and Walton Hills, as illustrative examples of the ways in which developers worked with civil society organizations and local government agencies to secure public investments in green amenities, including gardens and public parks, while blanketing their developments with racial covenants. To boost property values, developers paired “greenness” and legal guarantees of whiteness, engineering idealized nature while excluding racialized groups. The result was that 73 percent of park acreage added from 1910 to 1955, the period in which covenants were used in Minneapolis, had at least one racial covenant within 0.1 miles. Our research links urban greening, racialization, housing discrimination, and environmental injustice with consequences for understanding and confronting environmental inequalities today.