Jim Stadler called me earlier this month to say he’s got a problem with a neighbor. In this case, the neighbor was a tall ash tree with an ominous crack that could send one of its two main branches crashing into his yard. The tree grows on a property that was foreclosed on last year, so Stadler didn’t know who was responsible for it. Stadler said he couldn’t persuade the city to remove the menacing tree. Unlike the leaning tree of Fridley, whose ownership is still in question, this one was definitely on private property. So he called Whistleblower.

This week I traveled up to the 2000 block of Russell Avenue North, in Minneapolis’s Willard-Hay neighborhood, to see the arboreal menace for myself. It wasn’t hard to find.

Patricia Toussaint saw me taking pictures and came out of her house across the street to see what was going on. She told me the tree began to split earlier this year.

“When it started, it was just a little crack,” Toussaint said. Then she would hear it moving, a sound like a “clunk.” “I’m just scared it’s going to go, clunk, clunk, clunk, SLAM. This is ridiculous. Someone could get hurt.”

I searched Hennepin County property records to find the owner of 2018 Russell Avenue North. It’s the Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation, a nonprofit developer that’s acquiring, renovating and selling foreclosed homes. I sent an email to the president, Carolyn E. Olson, on Tuesday. I didn’t hear back from her, but this morning, I got a call from Stadler. The tree is gone, he declared triumphantly.

I reached Olson at her office this afternoon. She said the organization didn’t know about the cracked tree until my email, so the construction manager was sent out to assess the situation. “Whatever needs to be done will be done,” she said, not sounding overly enthusiastic about talking to me about it. With 207 foreclosed properties in the organization’s portfolio, I can understand how one busted ash tree wouldn’t be at the top of her agenda. Still, one fewer tree is helping Russell Avenue North breathe easier now.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Complaint sagas, Neighborhood nuisances, Property problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.