The Long Fight Against Toxins in One Neighborhood

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When Cassandra Holmes was growing up in the East Phillips neighborhood and Little Earth community of Minneapolis, she didn’t realize that the community around her was designated a Superfund site because of a 1938 arsenic contamination event in the soil. Additional local industry and vehicle emissions — especially from the now-closed Smith Foundry and Bituminous Roadways — contributed to toxins. One area began to be known by residents as the “Arsenic Triangle.”

After her 16-year-old son Trinidad died in 2013 of dilated cardiomyopathy — a condition associated with exposure to air pollution — Holmes became an activist. Many people in her Indigenous community were dying before the age of 55, and she began to question what had once seemed normal.

She grew up surrounded by people who modeled activism. Relatives included her aunt Jolene Jones and uncle Clyde Bellecourt, who taught her that standing up for the community was simply part of life.

Joan Vanhala came to the neighborhood in 1982 as a homeless mother with two children. She did not have experience as a community organizer until “my neighborhood trained me.” She learned that organizing is less about standing at the front of a crowd and more about creating conditions that enable neighbors to decide what they want and push for it.

“You are setting up the room for good decision-making on behalf of the community, and having the community be the voice,” she says.

The diversity of lived experiences and relational coalition-building helped transform a neighborhood campaign of frustrated residents into a broad decade-long movement that challenged city leadership and developed its own plans for a healthier future.

The Long Resistance

More than a decade ago, the City of Minneapolis proposed turning an abandoned neighborhood warehouse known as the Roof Depot into a large public-works facility. It would store and send out dozens of diesel-propelled trucks every day in a neighborhood that was already besieged by pollution. Early community meetings left residents feeling that decisions had already been made by city leaders.

At one point, Holmes recalled, residents were asked to use colored stickers to indicate which elements of the city’s proposal they preferred. “We didn’t like any of it,” she says.

Residents decided they needed to develop their own vision rather than simply respond to the city’s plan. Community members began to build lists of city officials to contact, figuring out who would visit with them and who would not.

Organizers not only met with elected officials, but also collected data, negotiated with the city, engaged in civic processes, and built alliances outside the neighborhood. The data helped give residents’ arguments weight.

Residents documented increased incidences of asthma, lead exposure, and other environmental hazards. Karen Clark, a longtime environmental justice advocate and former state representative, helped turn that community knowledge into policy.

“Karen Clark was the elder who pulled through that data over time to talk about cumulative impacts,” says Vanhala.

Organizing also required residents to navigate the opaque bureaucracy of politics. Holmes tried to bring younger people into organizing by having them shadow her. After witnessing a city facilitator’s extreme disrespect to Clark, one youth decided they wanted no part of city politics.

Holmes described meetings with elected officials who seemed supportive privately but changed their positions publicly. In one meeting, she was asked whether she preferred to have jobs or clean air. She countered that “we should have jobs we’re proud of that aren’t killing our families at the same time.”

Residents envisioned a site centered on green jobs, food production, education, small businesses, and community ownership. Today, the proposed East Phillips Neighborhood Institute vision includes an urban farm and space for green enterprises, potentially including aquaponics, a commercial kitchen, a coffee shop, bike repair, a cultural arts space, holistic health clinics, and nonprofit offices.

The project is now in its second decade of negotiations and capital development.

Tracking the Health Impacts

The East Phillips neighborhood always has had to push for a healthier space — including better access to fresh food. Residents of Little Earth of United Tribes, the nation’s only urban Native American preference housing community, had been working on successful farming initiatives. Hmong and African immigrant growers are exploring similar agricultural opportunities.

Twelve years ago, when a sprawling 200,000-square-foot building became available, residents realized that controlled-environment agriculture inside the warehouse could produce fresh food without exposure to polluted soil. They sought to purchase the building from a New York–based owner for $5.7 million, said local architect Dean Dovolis.

Dovolis, who has worked on affordable housing and community development in the neighborhood, is now a board member — with Holmes and others — of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI). They are building a unique co-op ownership structure for the land and Roof Depot, and he shared some of the site history in a conversation about co-op development.

The City of Minneapolis had its own idea for the property, for an expansion of its nearby public works maintenance yard. The space would add hundreds of parking spaces for municipal vehicles, including diesel trucks, fuel facilities, and even asphalt operations. Officials indicated they could claim eminent domain and purchase the property for about $7 million.

A resident-led campaign began as an informal weekly coalition meeting to persuade city officials to reconsider. Over time, support expanded to include community organizations, environmental advocates, churches, and activists connected to George Floyd Square.

As the conflict intensified, organizers faced criticism and resistance. “We were labeled terrorists, wacko farmers, eco-terrorists,” Dovolis says. “It got very intense.”

The group eventually pursued legal action using Minnesota’s cumulative pollution law, championed by former state representative Karen Clark. Unlike traditional environmental reviews that assess individual pollution sources separately, the law requires regulators to consider the combined impact of all pollution sources affecting a community.

Supporters raised money from churches, donors, and neighborhood organizations to fund the lawsuit. At one point, residents occupied the warehouse site to prevent demolition. Their efforts culminated in a court injunction that temporarily halted plans to tear down the building.

“Within hours of demolition, the occupation and intensity of the protest made the judge put an injunction on the process,” Dean said.

A breakthrough came at the state capitol. East Phillips advocates successfully persuaded Minneapolis-area legislators to pressure city leaders during negotiations over state funding requests. Lawmakers tied support for municipal funding to a resolution of the warehouse dispute.

Eventually, a compromise emerged. The city and community organization agreed to divide the property. EPNI would receive roughly half the building and 3.6 acres on the site, while the city would retain the northern section for municipal operations.

Recent legislative action provided additional funding to complete the arrangement, leaving the community responsible for a debt-free acquisition, with $4 million from a bonding bill that will go to the city for purchase as well as $2 million in community fundraising. 

“We finally can say we now have a building,” Dovolis says. “We now have a location for the community.”

The Neighborhood Vision

Yet for supporters, acquiring the property is only the beginning. The larger goal is to create a new model of community ownership designed to prevent displacement and keep wealth in the neighborhood.

“We did not want this managed by a nonprofit,” Dovolis explains, citing past experiences in which community assets were lost after nonprofit organizations encountered financial difficulties. Instead, organizers envision a structure with distributed ownership among residents and community groups, creating safeguards against future asset loss while allowing local people to build equity.

“We’re trying to create a new ownership model that’s community-driven,” Dovolis said. “Not nonprofit-driven or for-profit-driven.”

EPNI is now waiting to sign a purchase agreement with the city for half of the site, waiting for the city’s deconstruction work before being able to work on executing their vision. In the meantime, they are developing plans for the building and its tenants.

Currently the space includes an urban farm with raised beds, because of concerns about contaminated soil. “Everybody comes with their specialty — with what they know — and everyone’s pitching in,” says Holmes. She adds with a laugh, “I’ll fight for people to grow, but I don’t have a green thumb.”

Vanhala adds, “It’s about finding that balance between being visionary fighters — so essential to leverage the resources and the wins that we need to keep our community healthy — to the times when we put down our bullhorns and sit at the table and negotiate with power the resources we need to fulfill the vision.”

 

Related Stories

Related Reading

• EPNI
• Roof Depot site
• Northern Iron Foundry in Saint Paul to close (MPR, July 2026) — Modeling the work of the Roof Depot movement, organizers in Saint Paul recently won a shutdown of the Northern Iron foundry — another long-time challenge led by residents impacted by pollution.
• Indigenous Team Transforming Superfund Site (Civil Eats, 2023)
• Purchase Agreement Negotiated (Fox news)

 

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