As the city continues plans to revitalize a six-block area west of downtown, residents living on the fringe of that neighborhood share similar concerns about crime, run-down housing and other issues.

Since Mayor Dave Munson stepped up police and property inspection efforts last summer, residents have met the plan with guarded optimism.

Later this month, a task force will begin focusing the city's vision of tidy neighborhoods lined with commercial, mixed-use and spared historical buildings...

After the city announced the revitalization plan and news of stepped-up policing spread, landlord Gill Ristesund said offers on his West 14th Street property dwindled...Yet, property values typically increase in neighborhoods surrounding a revitalization, said Joel Kotkin, an urban historian with New America Foundation, a nonprofit public policy research institute.

But Misty Thu is worried that problems will just shift to other neighborhoods...She said her home has been broken into four times, and cash and gifts were stolen. She has also come home to find a man sleeping in her living room, she said...

But trends suggest that Thu's neighborhood and others in central Sioux Falls could soon change, Kotkin said.

Midwestern cites have a market for mixed-use buildings in redeveloped neighborhoods, Kotkin said. But plans that designate low-income areas have failed.

"For cities to prosper, they must change, which ultimately people will be displaced," he said. "It's the way cities and economics function..."

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