Northside Renaissance: Construction company headed to Cottage Park in Minneapolis.

Byline: Mark Anderson

Stuart Ackerberg is leading his company into a new enterprise this fall, venturing into a part of Minneapolis where his personal connections run deep but his commercial ones don't. Ackerberg, principal in The Ackerberg Group, whose profitable portfolio of commercial real estate development and investment has long been centered in south Minneapolis will begin construction in October on a pair of single-family homes along tiny Cottage Park on the city's north side. He'll be doing the work pretty much pro bono. The Cottage Park groundbreaking will launch a campaign to redevelop housing on north Minneapolis blocks that harbor high concentrations of vacant or boarded properties. Ackerberg joins a phalanx of neighbors, public officials, and nonprofit and commercial groups whose Northside Partnership hatched the redevelopment program. And he does so for personal reasons. "I grew up in south Minneapolis and I've lived here all my life. But my parents are from the north side, they're North High graduates, and some of my fondest childhood memories are of spending time in my grandparents' home on the north side." Like most longtime Minneapolis residents, Ackerberg's image of the north side was marked by the riots that broke out in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., during which many of the businesses on the community's main commercial …