Hear from our Communications Coordinator, Julia, as she reflects on partnering with the City of Saint Paul to help verify descendants for the West Side Flats Inheritance Fund in 2025.
Four West Side Flats descendants have now received down payment assistance for a new home through the Inheritance Fund! This Sunday, WSCO was joined by Mayor Melvin W. Carter III, CM Rebecca Noecker, and Flats descendants to celebrate this meaningful milestone and to honor all those who made this moment possible.
I serve as the point person for descendant verification for the WS Flats Inheritance Fund. In this role, I worked closely with applicants and with the City to verify that each person was a direct descendant of a displaced WS Flats homeowner. This work is deeply personal to me. I come from a WS legacy family, and I am also a descendant of the WS Flats. My great-grandmother lived on the Flats, alongside many of my great-aunts and uncles.
As part of the verification process, I spent a lot of time combing through the Relocation Survey conducted by the City of St. Paul. In those records, you can see displacement not just as a policy decision, but as something that reached into people’s names, identities, and futures. You see evidence of assimilation, erasure, and survival in the smallest details.
For example, one of our recipients that applied for the Inheritance Fund listed his great-grandfather, Arturo Mendez, as his displaced ancestor. But when I searched for him in the survey, he didn’t appear under that name. Instead, I found him listed as “Arthur Mendel”. A clear anglicization. It’s a small change on paper, but it tells a much larger story about what families were navigating at the time: pressure to assimilate, to translate themselves into something more “acceptable".
I also saw language that reveals bias in the Relocation Survey. The way officials described people’s homes – and by extension, about the people themselves. Homes are described as “deplorable” or “atrocious.” Some buildings are described as “no value.” And one line that stuck with me said a building “if it were located in a “better demand area” could “almost double its income.” That language matters. Because when you label a home as worthless, when you paint a neighborhood as a problem, it becomes easier to justify removing it. Not repairing it. Not investing in it. Not listening to the people who are proud to live there.
What has endured this displacement is not of “no value.” What endures are cherished memories and stories of a connected, diverse community that lives on through the West Side we know and love today. While the Inheritance Fund is a step toward repairing generational wealth loss, descendants widely feel it was developed without their involvement and fails to address the full scope of harm. Many community proposals center on expanding economic repair options to meet diverse needs. All of us at WSCO are fully committed to moving forward these proposals and toward meaningful memorialization of the West Side Flats.
In community,
Julia Diaz
Communications Coordinator
West Side Community Organization