Before Megan Thomas and I began to talk this week about her experience as a former resident of the embroiled Lowry Apartments in St. Paul, she sent me a massive file. It contained information about the building that was sold Wednesday at a sheriff’s auction because of unacceptable maintenance issues.
“The thing that people don’t know about historians is that our job is literally to keep receipts,” said Thomas, the Minnesota DFL historian and history committee co-chair who left the Lowry Apartments this year.
Those receipts included a series of complaints from residents and exchanges between the property owner and the city demanding changes. The file included documented concerns about “trash in the hallways,” a “mouse infestation” and “no glass or screens on windows.” Thomas has pictures of cockroaches frozen in ice cubes, electrical wiring that was punched through walls and inoperable washing machines and dryers.
Thomas, who is disabled, said the majority of the building’s residents are members of a marginalized community and many are people of color.
“It’s a population that made them think they could get away with this,” she said. “And they did for a very long time.”
Too often, folks look the other way when the underprivileged, especially those within communities of Black, Indigenous and people of color, endure inhumane living conditions until those in power are exposed or publicly chastised. But why must things reach this point for folks to care about human beings — our neighbors — forced to live this way?
City and county officials and the property owner, Madison Equities, have publicly sparred ahead of a foreclosure proceeding in a blame game about a complex that, by all accounts, has descended into despair with residents complaining about rodents, roaches, broken elevators and even feces in common areas.
When I worked in that building in the early 2000s in the Star Tribune’s former St. Paul bureau and parked each morning at the Lowry Ramp, public officials frequented the area and it never seemed unsafe or downtrodden. A lot has changed since then, Thomas said.
