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By all accounts, this is the necessary response, and these types of efforts were essential in maintaining the stability of a still shaky region of nearly 3 million people. The foreclosures here in the last 18 months alone have surpassed and rendered minute any of the vacant property or neighborhood blight challenges in the past two decades. Starting in the 1980s, when places like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago were suffering from depressed economies, the Twin Cities experienced fairly significant levels of divestment, but it wasn’t to the level of other parts of the upper Midwest.

That all changed, however, with the Great Recession. Progress suddenly came to an abrupt halt, according to Andriana Abariotes, the executive director of the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC). “We were a strong market city, especially in more challenging neighborhoods that were older and closer to the core—places where LISC was working. We were seeing rebirth of these neighborhoods,” she said.

“Then we saw it begin to slide off the cliff.”

Part of the story of the Minneapolis’ Northside and the east side of St. Paul was that they were the last affordable places of value near the central core where people could still enter the housing market. But the easy availability of subprime loans and exotic mortgage products and the competition for homes by outside investors drove home prices way up without strengthening these fragile neighborhoods. Just over a decade ago, Abariotes said, property values ranged from $75,000 to $90,000. Two years ago, that level increased to roughly $170,000. Today, properties are going on auction at about $12,000 to $25,000. “It was like a flood. It happened that fast: almost overnight,” she said.

Two-thirds of all foreclosures in Minnesota occur in metropolitan areas and in the Northside, 60 percent of the foreclosed homes were investor owned, Abariotes says, painting a picture that could be transposed on so many neighborhood canvasses around the country: “People bought the homes to flip or to rent; they saw late night infomercials; they used subprime; they couldn’t refinance anything; they had exploding ARMs.” There were blocks with five to 10 vacant properties and, on average, a property only had to sit vacant for about 10 days before the copper was stripped. In the winter, it would take the same amount of time before there was a gas explosion or a water pipe burst, leaving the houses completely trashed. “Now this stock is so deteriorated,” Abariotes says.

And fixing the problem is not easy, and it takes time. But many people involved in the neighborhood stabilization effort in the Twin Cities remain confident that the existing partnerships helped to mitigate a problem that could have been much, much worse. “Some of the collaborations here have been in place for a long time,” said Dan Bartholomay, commissioner of Minnesota Housing, the state’s finance agency. “Relationships have evolved and developed and there is a certain level of trust required here, a willingness to solve problems, and a set of common goals.”

And of course, they took conscious effort and commitment to form and nurture. Offering an aside, Melissa Manderscheid, who chairs a key foreclosure response organization, is aware that the Twin Cities is often used as a model for collaboration. While many interviewed for this report touted the accomplishments of the collaborative network, all were realistic to the long-term challenges involved, as Manderscheid summarizes: “So many of the people who were around the table early on had an opinion. It’s important to note that it wasn’t some big love-in, and that there are people who have real, substantive differences when it comes to foreclosure response. But we try to hammer out ways to work through this, and sometimes it’s really challenging, but that’s the way we’ve been approaching it.”