As families leave and renters move in, some residents on Grand Forks' north end seek change

Jul. 15—EDITOR'S NOTE: this is the first in a three-part series exploring housing in Grand Forks.

GRAND FORKS — For nearly 70 years, Jerry Severson has looked out from the house where he has resided since 1956 and watched his north-end neighborhood change.

At one time, the neighborhood consisted of single-family houses filled with families, many of whom worked at UND. Many of those houses have since been converted into rentals. Now, he believes, many families hoping to own their first homes in the neighborhood are out of luck.

"This is your $200,000 (house)," Severson said during a tour of his neighborhood with the Herald. "This is what people can afford. Not the stuff they're building that's (around) $400,000 on the south end."

Severson and others in the neighborhood want help from the city to address issues they are seeing and experiencing. Severson hopes for programs and processes that will repopulate the neighborhood with families, such as low-interest loans from the Bank of North Dakota to make it easier for people to buy starter homes. Residents who work on the north end — especially in the manufacturing sector — should be able to afford to live nearby, he said.

The area has been the focus of recent discussions — especially in the wake of a

2019-2021 neighborhood study

and in-depth conversations revolving around

neighborhood schools

.

"I get very frustrated, because since the '90s, I've been fighting this. And they say they're going to do this or they're going to do that, and they don't," he said. "They don't do anything."

Severson isn't the only one who's noticed the shift in ownership throughout the neighborhood. Neighbors Jennifer Tarlin and Mark Hewitt, who live in houses across the street from University Park, reported that as rentals have increased in the area, so too have complaints of noisy renters, unkempt houses and other issues.

"I love my beautiful, welcoming, generally quiet north-end neighborhood," Hewitt told the Herald. "It has mostly been filled with families over the years, but in recent years we've seen our neighborhood being transformed from family homes into 'mini fraternity houses.'"

Among the complaints, witnessed and heard anecdotally by Severson and others: Graffiti, noisy parties, unkempt lawns, excessive numbers of people living in a small home and bonfires left unattended.

"I cannot tell you how many times I've been out with hoses, literally putting out fires," Tarlin said.

Some cases have been unnerving. For example, in 2020, police were called when a

group of young residents climbed onto the roof of their rental house

and yelled racist chants.

Both Severson and Tarlin said they've called the police multiple times over the years. Oftentimes, Severson said, nothing is done.

In 2019, a study began that investigated possibilities along University Avenue, an east-west street that roughly runs from UND to downtown Grand Forks. Commissioned by the Community Foundation and the Knight Foundation, the University Avenue Corridor Study took a deep look at issues in the neighborhood immediately near University Avenue.

Upon its release, the study noted that "we heard a lot from the residents of the corridor that they are genuinely concerned with the upkeep of the neighborhood due to a high number of rental properties. Rental property owners and tenants simply do not take the same level of pride in the neighborhood as the owners of single-family homes."

Hewitt said a lack of accountability is reflective of the landlords and Realtors.

"They snap up a family home, fill it to the brim with students and seem blissfully ignorant of the rude behavior and drinking parties taking place there," he said. "The landscaping quickly dies, and a quick glance reveals which houses are now rentals. Collecting a rental check seems the main focus, but rules of conduct, yard work and concern about outward appearance seem to be nonexistent."

Grand Forks City Council member Danny Weigel says the council has had some discussions about these issues. The noisy party ordinance was changed from a misdemeanor to infraction, which Weigel believes helped decrease the number of parties and noise in the area.

As someone who lives on the north end, but west of the university, Weigel hasn't noticed some of the issues other residents have, though he says this could be a problem in any part of Grand Forks and can fluctuate from year to year. When asked by the Herald, Grand Forks Police Department Lt. Travis Benson also said "it's pretty much the same all over Grand Forks ... there's no noticeable difference that we've noticed amongst calls, amongst types of calls."

Weigel was "born and raised in Grand Forks" and believes one way to reduce the issues in the neighborhood is for residents to get to know their neighbors. Putting a name to a face or gathering as a community can help build rapport, and "we don't like disappointing people we know," he said.

Weigel acknowledges that the north end's neighborhood association has "so many ideas," but he suggests focusing on one concern at a time.

Rentals aren't exactly new for the neighborhood. Severson recalls a time when many homeowners would rent out portions of their houses themselves.

"This area has always rented, but the difference is that the people that owned the structures lived there too," he said. "So they rented out the basement or what have you. So you had control. And now it's a free-for-all."

Over the decades, Severson has worked to create regulations on rentals. Throughout the 1990s, Severson said he worked with longtime city leader Gerald Hamerlik to create a policy so that only four unrelated individuals are allowed to live in a rental house. However, Severson said it often seems that more than four people still end up living in a rental at any given time.

Hamerlik served on the City Council representing Ward 2, the district that includes much of the area around UND, for close to 20 years. According to

past Herald coverage

, one of the topics for which Hamerlik advocated was rezoning the non-campus neighborhoods in order to slow the growth of rental housing in existing single-family houses.

Severson said having help from within the city aided with pushing for regulations. Since his efforts in the '90s, Severson said there hasn't been any more help from the city to address issues that have arisen.

City Administrator Todd Feland said the concerns voiced by area residents are heard by the city, and have been for decades.

The number of rentals in the residential neighborhoods surrounding UND started to spike in the 2000s. At that time, Feland said the university was rebuilding and expanding following the aftermath of the Flood of 1997, leading to more single-family houses being converted into rentals.

"Basically, campus housing spilled over into these neighborhoods," Feland said. "People would purchase the homes and then rent them out, whether it was for their own children or whether it was just seeking an investment opportunity — that really picked up steam in the 2000s, leading up to these mid-2000s and later modifications to try and mitigate some of the concerns that people have due to the transition in rental housing."

In the mid-2000s, the city implemented a rental inspection program along with establishing a rental licensing requirement, which Feland said was in response to concerns expressed by the residents during public meetings at the time.

In the years since those implementations, Feland said the complaints the city often receives now are related to unkempt property, disruptions from parking and other maintenance needs of rentals.

Discussions on rentals haven't been brought forward to the City Council in a "significant" way recently, Feland said, although the topic came up in the University Avenue Corridor Study, which looked at ways to improve and enhance the University Avenue corridor between Columbia Road and downtown Grand Forks, as well as with the

Memorial I and II development projects

and the demolition of

West Elementary Schoo

l.

Housing has been discussed in ward meetings too, including at a recent neighborhood meeting with area residents and the developer of the Memorial Village I and II projects, he added.

A new code is being considered, which Feland said could "generally prescribe" maintenance standards for rental units in neighborhoods.

"A lot of the concerns with the rental units from the neighborhood are they're run down. They're not very well-maintained," he said. "This would create a code that would provide some regulation about how properties are maintained. It's a step further. A lot of times you try to deal with things in more of an informal way, but this would provide a maintenance code in the city code for us to enforce from a building inspections perspective."

The code has not yet been brought to the City Council for consideration.

In addition to the new code being considered, Feland said a fee structure for rental licensing also is being considered.

Feland said there has been progress in some areas identified in the University Avenue Corridor Study — such as adding new streetlights and repaving University Avenue. Also, after a citywide vote earlier this year, construction will soon begin on a

new Valley Middle School

, located just off University Park.

But, he said, there's still work that needs to be done on rentals.

"The toughest part of it is the rental homes. What can we do in that particular area?" he said. "We have made some progress in some areas. In some areas the conversation continues and I know there's frustration on what can we do that would be effective."

For Tarlin, having a collaboration between several entities, including housing agencies, is a step in the right direction.

"My own sense is that none of this will really be addressed effectively until UND, the city, people in the neighborhood and perhaps some of the financial institutions in town can come up with a way to really strategically redirect the way things are going," she said.