Photo courtesy of David Pierini
Anissa Keyes stands in the doorway of her newly purchased Camden Park State Bank building—soon a hub for Black-owned businesses.
Anissa Keyes stands in the doorway of her newly purchased Camden Park State Bank building—soon a hub for Black-owned businesses.
Anissa Keyes is a healer. Literally. As president and therapist at Arubah Emotional Health Services in the Camden neighborhood of north Minneapolis, she helps heal people struggling with trauma, addiction, and other mental health concerns. But last year, she set her sights on a bigger sort of healing: that of her community as a whole. All she needed to do was buy a run-down old bank building first.
Through the years, the stately red-brick Camden Park State Bank building right off I-94 has housed everything from its namesake bank to a boxing gym, mortuary, spa, and post office. But years of neglect were causing tenants to move out, and the building’s future was grim. In this big problem, though, Keyes saw a big opportunity.
“What’s so funny is it was sitting on the market for, like, two and a half years—it was waiting for me,” says Keyes, who paid $2 million for the building and immediately set to work on its transformation.
Keyes has so far invested $150,000 into renovating the bank building—all 20,000 square feet of it. Arubah will take the third floor—the lower levels will house tenants like R. Sullivan Law Office, Snappy Construction, Amina’s Hair Braiding, and Real Life Real Talk massage therapy. Vegan restaurant Heal Mpls and Veganista coffee shop will move into the kitchen space, and the ballroom will likely become an exclusive club for Black professionals. Keyes availed herself of a city program that helps BIPOC business owners buy commercial property—with that assistance, she’ll be able to start rents low and have tenants work up to market rate.
Her goal is to help small business owners build generational wealth. Keyes’s mother came to north Minneapolis as part of the Great Migration in the 1960s: Understanding that business and property ownership would be key to her family’s success, she started a day care and invested in real estate. Keyes has done the same with Arubah, and now she wants to support other Black families in Minneapolis, where racial disparities in homeownership between Black and white residents—a crucial factor in building generational wealth—are wider than in any other U.S. city.
“I’m not creating basketball stars and football stars, right?” Keyes, who has four sons and a daughter, says. “I don’t have to stress about my kids becoming that in order to have something. Nor do I have to push education down their throat like, This is a requirement whether you’re good at it or not, whether you want to be a microbiologist or [not]. I get to say, ‘You get to grow up and be a healthy kid, and I’m going to make sure the playing field is even for you.’ . . . Now the question is: Can I help other people create that for their kids?”
And then there’s the larger vision for the Northside.
“Growing up, it was the spot,” says Keyes of her lifelong neighborhood, where there was always something happening—dance parties, storytelling, drill team practice. “It’s so easy to stay committed to this community, even as it’s going through some serious challenges.”
“The idea is that we take over that corner. We keep taking up space.”
—Anissa Keyes
One of those challenges, notes Keyes, is gun violence. (A couple months before she purchased the bank building, there was a fatal shooting in the first-floor barbershop.) But another is outside ownership—landlords and developers and real estate investors who make money on the Northside but aren’t a part of the community and don’t invest care into it.
“There’s a lot of people outside of our community that own our community,” she says. “That’s a problem, right?”
For instance, Keyes says that the landlord who owned the bank before her wasn’t a part of the Northside community.
A recent study by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs looked at gentrification across the Twin Cities. In it, north Minneapolis residents talked overwhelmingly about a lack of community ownership in the area. This, they said, creates the sense that the community’s future is dictated by the financial interests of outsiders. That feeling is intensifying as a “new wave” of development arrives in Northside—an area that, after decades of municipal neglect, is attracting investors and families who see it as an affordable neighborhood near downtown.
Photo courtesy of City of Mpls
Camden Park State Bank building
So, to Keyes, buying the bank is more than an investment; it’s a reclamation of land. “The idea is that we take over that corner,” says Keyes. “We keep taking up space. We keep collecting it and taking care of it and allowing folks that typically don’t see the value to get with the program.”
And Keyes is far from alone in this work. An ever-expanding number of Black entrepreneurs are increasing their community-owned footprint. Keyes is collaborating with Houston White, for one, who’s working to transform Camden into Camdentown, a hub for fashion and culture. There’s also Kenya McKnight-Ahad, who closed on a Broadway Avenue building where she runs the Black Women’s Wealth Alliance, and Chris Webley, who’s investing in real estate through his collective, New Rules. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So many others, like Keyes’s own mother, have made their mark.
“We get the narrative of, ‘Oh, this is so amazing; you’re such an inspiration,’” Keyes says. “No, we’ve been an inspiration. We’ve been doing amazing things. Black folks in the community—we have for years.”
