(S1E9) We’re Still Here: Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition
How can tenants transform threats of privatization into a movement for dignity and equity? How can community memory serve as a powerful tool for social justice?
Glendale is a model of what public housing should be, but there is no public housing in Minneapolis right now that's like Glendale. We're the last one. They've destroyed all the other ones that were like us.
-Ladan Yusuf, Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition Co-Founder and Campaign Organizer
Glendale Townhomes: A Place to Belong
In Southeast Minneapolis’s Prospect Park neighborhood, the Glendale Townhomes is historic ground, not just for housing, but for resistance. Built in 1952 under Mayor Hubert Humphrey’s administration to shelter World War II veterans from homelessness, this 184-unit complex is the city’s oldest remaining public-housing development. For decades, working-class families, immigrants, and African Americans laid down roots here during waves of displacement and urban renewal. Yet in recent years, Glendale has also become the epicenter of a grassroots fight to protect the right to stay. The Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition is at the heart of this fight.
Resisting Displacement: Forming Defend Glendale
Ladan Yusuf, Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition Co-Founder and Campaign Organizer on the threat of displacement and founding the organization.
“I was a single mom raising my child here, and I really didn't know much about what was happening,” recalls Ladan Yusuf. Though deeply committed to educational organizing, she had never been active in neighborhood groups until the day she was door-knocking and learned that the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority intended to demolish her home.
Glendale sits between the University of Minnesota and the affluent Prospect Park neighborhood, where MPHA quietly lobbied homeowner associations for support. As Ladan explains, “MPHA would go to the Neighborhood Association that were majority homeowners … and try to convince them that they want to demolish Glendale and would they approve it. And at the time, we didn't know anything about it.” Only when a neighbor warned, “You should know what's happening to Glendale,” did she grasp the gravity of the threat.
Her shock turned to resolve after she emailed City Councilmember Cam Gordon, only to receive the blunt reply, “I'm sorry you found out this way.” That curt apology revealed that plans to raze Glendale had been in the works. Ladan and other tenants realized they had to act fast. Despite MPHA’s previous efforts to dismantle all other tenant councils, they formed a new resident council.
Over the following months, subtle service cuts exposed MPHA’s strategy of “demolition by neglect.” “They changed the way they provide the heating,” Ladan recounts. Though tenants paid 30 percent of their income in rent, heating assistance became centralized, maintenance dwindled, and eviction rates climbed. Yet no one ever warned residents that “your homes are about to be demolished”—until it was nearly too late.
MPHA had assumed that language barriers would silence Glendale’s Hmong and East African residents, Ladan argues. But as Ladan stresses, “they thought the people that didn't speak English … were uneducated. I think that was their downfall.” Refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia, university students, nurses, and bus drivers united under a single truth: Glendale would not go quietly.
Thus was born the Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition, a tenant-led campaign that refused displacement. Through door-knocking, public meetings, and fierce advocacy, residents transformed despair into action, ensuring that Glendale’s 184 townhomes would remain a place not only of affordable housing but also of community, dignity, and collective power.
We’re Still Here: Glendale Town Homes 70th Anniversary
“One of our city councilors said explicitly that Glendale did not have historic value... We got all these old houses that nobody ever goes to and nobody knows who lives in them, who get recognized as historically valuable and important all the time, because white people lived in them...And it really got me going. I was, again, upset by the injustice of it. So I was like, listen, if they don’t think it’s historic, why don’t we put together a history exhibit?”
Kaaha Kaahiye on the motivations for the developing the award-winning exhibit.
By 2021, Kaaha Kaahiye thought she was done with housing organizing. “I had sort of like, formally, like very publicly left working with Defend Glendale in 2021, not because of any actual bad luck with my mom, know, but because I didn’t want to do housing organizing anymore,” she reflects. At the time, Kaaha worked as a housing organizer at the Prospect Park neighborhood organization, just steps from the teardrop of red-brick townhomes she’d grown up in.
Prospect Park had long backed Glendale’s fight for historic designation, but in early 2021, the city council committee assigned to vote “kind of rejected the proposal.” A council member “said explicitly that he did not think that Glendale had historic value,” and insisted “privatization will not be prevented by historic designation. So there’s really no point.” The blow was devastating after years of victories: Defend Glendale had expanded its fight from a single townhome complex to a city-wide campaign, resisting the privatization of nearly 700 single-family homes and high-rise buildings across Minneapolis.
Volunteer historian Samira Ali discusses community-led curation efforts behind the exhibit’s development.
“Almost 700 homes—single-family homes—were privatized by MPHA… and also Elliott twins,” Kaaha recalls, naming the historic high-rise buildings replaced under the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program (RAD), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiative that enables Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) to convert their public housing properties to a Section 8 project-based voucher (PBV) or project-based rental assistance (PBRA) model. When residents living near the Super Bowl stadium were displaced, she thought, “Glendale is the oldest public housing in the city. It’s from the ’50s. The ’50s is historic. That was a long time ago. If this is not of historic value, then what is?”
Determined to prove Glendale’s value, Kaaha proposed a history exhibit. “I was always a history nerd in school and everything,” she says, although she “hadn’t studied history formally.” She contacted the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Transform program—a reparative initiative for communities the university had harmed—to fund “a history exhibit” chronicling seven decades of tenant activism and everyday life.
Even after Kaaha quit her day job and worried the project might stall, her mother Ladan Yusuf kept the vision alive. “We’ve never been given this money to do this sort of work before,” Kaaha remembers her mother saying, and together they rallied a team of community volunteers. That collaboration produced We’re Still Here—a commemorative exhibition and documentary that, on Glendale’s 70th anniversary, reaffirmed what generations of residents had always known: Glendale is more than houses. It is a living community whose history, culture, and continued struggle for dignity and equity demand preservation and recognition.
Envisioning Glendale’s Future
For Ladan Yusuf, the fight to preserve Glendale Townhomes is a struggle to protect the very idea of public housing. “We want to keep Glendale public housing. We want to protect it as a public housing community,” she says, underscoring the need to maintain affordable rents and honor the generations who built life here. Through the coalition’s exhibit and research, Ladan hopes “that people change their ideas and minds about what public housing is and not to demonize it.”
For Ladan, the fight to preserve Glendale Townhomes is a struggle to protect the very idea of public housing. “We want to keep Glendale public housing. We want to protect it as a public housing community,” she says, underscoring the need to maintain affordable rents and honor the generations who built life here. Through the coalition’s exhibit and research, Ladan hopes “that people change their ideas and minds about what public housing is and not to demonize it.”
She stresses that public housing is far from “free housing”: tenants often pay “$1,500, $2,000 sometimes for rent in public housing,” an arrangement that keeps rent stable at 30 percent of income—vital for working families who staff daycares, hotels, restaurants, and cab services. Yet since the 1990s, a relentless “war on public housing” has erased communities and their stories. Glendale’s exhibit, she argues, “shows…the value of public housing and how all of these stories and all these amazing people…have contributed greatly to society a lot more than millionaires do.” In Ladan’s view, defending Glendale is about safeguarding the backbone of cities—Black, brown, and low-income neighbors whose labor and leadership deserve recognition, respect, and the security of a home and a place of belonging. This leadership is exemplified in the legacy of Black women who have protected and saved Glendale over the decades, such as Ruby Barber and Dorothy Whitaker.
Ladan Yusef, co-founder of the Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition, on challenging unequal historic designation practices and the ongoing fight to secure Glendale’s recognition as a historic site.
Looking to the horizon, organizer Kaaha Kaahiye reminds us of one of the many qualities that make Glendale exceptional: “Glendale is one of the only communities in the country that has successfully fought off a Rental Assistance Demonstration privatization effort.” Unlike Hope VI in Atlanta or Cabrini Green in Chicago, where entire Black and poor neighborhoods were razed, Glendale stood firm, and that victory fuels her vision for tomorrow. Kaaha warns against following the path of cities where housing inequality reigns: “We don’t want to end up like San Francisco…some people want Minneapolis to become San Francisco. That’s not something we want.” Instead, she sees Glendale as “a beacon…of hope that you can fight against big money and win.”
Equally urgent is the role of nearby institutions. Volunteer historian Samira Ali challenges her university to reckon with its influence: “There is a group called the Minnesota Innovative Exchange, and it is a University of Minnesota Real Estate Foundation group…that is basically a real estate developer for the U of M.” In Stadium Village, she explains, this initiative has been “pricing out some of the mom-and-pop restaurants and shops…creating like a tech hub, or like a biotech hub.” Drawing on Devarian Baldwin’s critique in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, Samira warns that “universities are taking up public land and then the community surrounding them do not have access to this university’s resources.” Her call to action is clear: “My call to action is for university students, especially at the U of M, to take into account how our university is possibly raising rent prices and pricing people out of these neighborhoods and these historic communities.”
After a decade of being “silenced, demonized, and dismissed,” tenants continue “speaking truth to power”—even when that power wields “multimillionaire, sometimes billionaire lobbyists and real-estate developers.” For Kaaha, the lesson is clear: “You can beat big money. It is possible. We have to believe.” In an era marked by despair, she urges residents to remember that “regular people can come together and show strength in numbers” to resist “white supremacist, capitalistic, violent…colonial power.” Glendale’s seventy years of community—and its hard-won preservation—stand as living proof of that resilience. “That’s why I want Glendale to stay exactly as is for a very long time.”
Together, Ladan, Kaaha, and Samira envision a future where Glendale remains a public, affordable, and vibrant community—where grassroots organizing outlasts gentrification, big money, and institutional neglect, and where allies everywhere hold both city and campus accountable to the people who call Glendale home.
Historic Designation of Glendale Townhomes
Glendale residents have pursued historic designation since 2015. Nationally, only three percent of all National Register listings are considered significant for African-American History; in Minnesota, the historical contributions of Black communities are even less visible, with only 0.59% of NRHP listings considered significant for African-American history. After a second application was submitted in 2024, the Minneapolis Heritage Preservation Commission voted 7-1 to recommend designation of the Glendale Town Houses Historic District citing the following findings:
It is the first affordable housing project in Minneapolis and thus its social and community planning qualified as landmarkable.
It retains the landscape and volumetric integrity that was initially created when the buildings were built and sited.
The buildings still convey their historic integrity although we recognize that they have been changed over time.
In 2024, the Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office stated that it “believes that a compelling argument could be made for [nominating Glendale Townhomes to the National Register of Historic Places] in the area of Social History or Ethnic Heritage within a broader context than post-WWII housing.” Despite the recommendations from state and local preservation experts, the Minneapolis city council and local media continue to disregard this history and the calls of experts and residents.
Call to Action
Submit public comments and letters to the Minneapolis city council and urge them to vote yes to designate Glendale Townhomes as a historic district.
Donate to help Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition nominate Glendale Townhomes to the National Register of the Historic Places.
Follow and Support Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition
Website: https://www.dgphc.org
Email: defendglendale@gmail.com
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