ReConnect Rondo

ReConnect Rondo incorporated in 2015 with a specific goal: to build a 21-acre land bridge over I-94 between Grotto Street and Chatsworth Street in Saint Paul, capping the freeway trench and restoring a continuous urban surface to the Rondo corridor. The proposal integrates 350 to 1,400 units of new housing, commercial space, and community facilities, organized in part through a community land trust tied to the Fifth Ward. The land trust component is the mechanism by which the project would direct the wealth generated by new development toward the families displaced by the original freeway construction rather than toward speculative investors.

The organization has pursued funding coordination across federal, state, and local sources. It engaged early with MnDOT’s Rethinking I-94 process, which launched formal public engagement in 2023, and has applied for and received planning grants through the federal Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program established by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. The published project cost estimate is $458.9 million.

ReConnect Rondo draws explicitly on the sixty-year organizing record of Rondo descendants: the Rondo Days festival, the Rondo Avenue Inc. archive, and the community’s sustained documentation of the freeway’s costs. The organization’s policy framing connects the land bridge’s community land trust component to the lesson that investment in formerly redlined corridors, without affordability protections encoded from the start, tends to accelerate the displacement the investment nominally intends to repair.