The walk begins in a place full of life.

Along Franklin Avenue, you’re surrounded by places that reflect decades of Native leadership and community investment. Affordable housing. Healthcare clinics. Art galleries. Community gathering spaces. Small businesses. Organizations that have spent generations building opportunities for Native families and strengthening one of the largest urban Native communities in the country.

You can feel that this is a place with a story.

Then the street changes.

The sidewalks narrow. Buildings disappear. You’re walking next to fast-moving traffic, separated only by a line of flexible bollards. Ahead, the road descends beneath two long bridges where daylight gives way to shadow. For several blocks, there is little to see except concrete, metal fencing, and speeding cars.

Eventually you emerge at the intersection of Franklin and Cedar where twelve lanes of traffic converge around one of the region’s busiest transit stations. Crossing the street feels less like arriving at the heart of a cultural corridor than navigating a highway interchange.

That contrast is impossible to ignore.

The challenge facing Franklin Avenue isn’t that it lacks destinations.

It’s connecting them.

Recently, Redesign partnered with the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI), Seward Civic & Commerce Association (SCCA), Franklin Avenue Business Association (FABA), and Seward Neighborhood Group (SNG) to create space to experience the East Franklin Avenue corridor together, learn from its history, and listen to one another’s perspectives about its future.

A Corridor Built by Community

The American Indian Cultural Corridor did not emerge through a single public investment or city initiative.

It exists because Native organizations built it.

For decades, Native-led organizations have invested in affordable housing, healthcare, arts, entrepreneurship, cultural preservation, and community spaces. They created institutions where there were gaps. They invested where others often did not. Together, those efforts transformed Franklin Avenue into one of the country’s most significant urban Native cultural districts.

The corridor’s strength isn’t accidental.

It is the result of generations of vision, persistence, and community leadership.

A Vision That Has Endured

Standing beneath the bridges, it’s easy to think the biggest challenge is the infrastructure itself.

But one of the most striking parts of the tour was realizing how long the community has been imagining something different.

Over the past 25 years, residents, neighborhood organizations, businesses, public agencies, and community partners have worked together to create plans for the Franklin Avenue corridor and station area. Those plans consistently envisioned safer pedestrian connections, stronger links to transit, welcoming public spaces, vibrant mixed-use development, and a corridor that better connected neighborhoods instead of dividing them.

Reading those plans today is striking. Many of the aspirations expressed twenty-five years ago continue to resonate with the people who live, work, and invest in the corridor today.

Listening to the Community Today

Participants in our community conversation shared frustration about longstanding challenges, including the fencing beneath the Hiawatha bridges, pedestrian accessibility, uncertainty surrounding future public investment in the Franklin Corridor, and the desire for stronger connections between Seward and Ventura Village.

They also shared hope.

Many participants spoke about the importance of deeper collaboration among neighborhood organizations and a more coordinated approach to issues that affect the entire corridor.

Not everyone agreed on every solution.

But there was broad agreement that Franklin Avenue’s future should continue to be shaped by the people who know it best.

Why Conversations Like This Matter

These two opportunities created space to reflect on the experience of the corridor, hear different perspectives, and recognize both the progress that has been made and the work that remains.

It also revealed something important: while conditions have changed over the years, many of the community’s core values remain the same. People continue to care about safety, accessibility, cultural identity, thriving local businesses, welcoming public spaces, and neighborhoods that feel connected rather than divided.

Those shared values matter.

Redesign’s Role

For more than 50 years, Redesign has worked alongside residents, businesses, and community organizations to strengthen Minneapolis neighborhoods.

Sometimes that work takes the form of affordable housing or commercial redevelopment. Sometimes it means supporting entrepreneurs or preserving historic buildings.

And sometimes it means bringing people together.

Creating opportunities for people to walk a place together, learn its history, hear one another’s perspectives, and better understand the ideas that have shaped it over time is also community development.

We’re grateful to everyone who joined us for the conversation and walking tour, and to our partners at NACDI, SCCA, FABA, and SNG for helping create space to learn together.

The walk may have ended at Franklin and Cedar, but the conversations it sparked are part of a much longer story that has been written by this community for generations. And continues every time neighbors come together to listen, learn, and imagine what’s possible.