Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Anoka, we’re the other side of the bridge.

The city’s water chapter draws that line and says why: “Services installed prior to 1970 are likely clay and susceptible to I/I. 45% of houses in Anoka meet this criteria.” That’s about the sewer service under your front yard rather than anything inside the house, but the count under it is the one we care about, because the same table puts 3,398 Anoka houses on the older side of 1970 against 4,128 on the newer side, and the census lands in the same place with a median owner occupied home built in 1970 and a median across all housing of 1973.

The decade table’s where it gets specific, with 840 units built in 1939 or earlier, 383 in the 1940s and 747 in the 1950s, then the 1960s and the 1970s together as the peak at 1,412 and 1,371, out of 7,620 homes in the whole city, which puts 25.9 percent of Anoka up before 1960. The city says it in its own plan too, that “more than 80 percent of Anoka’s housing stock is more than 28 years old, and nearly 9.0% of the housing stock was constructed in 1939 or before” and that “Anoka’s housing stock is some of the oldest in the county,” and its table has the city at 8.9 percent built before 1940 against 2.9 percent for Anoka County.

Owners are in the old end of it as much as anyone, because out of the 4,202 owner occupied homes here 1,358 went up before 1960, which is 32.3 percent of them, and 1,203 of those households have been in the same house since 1999 or earlier. Nobody can tell you from a website whether anyone’s ever had a brush down your trunk line, and we’re not going to try, but we’ll show you what we find once we’ve got the covers off, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and put the covers back on.

72.8 percent of the occupied homes here run on gas heat and 21.6 percent on electricity, and what a house burns tells us nothing about what’s behind the vents, so we’d rather look at your system than guess at it off a table. It’s the same three things at every house, powerful vacuum, compressed air and rotary brush, and all three of them go in every time. We sometimes cut more than two access points in the trunk lines. We never charge for more than two.

Anoka isn’t a subdivision town, because 3,755 of its 7,620 units are a detached house and that’s 49.3 percent, with another 745 attached and 1,018 in buildings of fifty units or more, so we’d rather ask than assume which kind of address we’re coming to.

4,202 of the 7,385 occupied homes are owner occupied and 3,183 are rented, so a bit under six in ten of the doors in this city belong to the person behind them, and 31.2 percent of households here have somebody sixty five or over living in them, with an owner occupied home averaging 2.68 people against 1.85 in a rental. Most of what we get called for is a floor that’s been walked the same way for a long time, a lane worn down the middle of a hallway and a landing at the top of the stairs where everybody turns.

The machine never comes in the house, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction and it stays out in the van, which is how far more water comes back out of the carpet than any portable unit pulls, and in normal conditions a morning clean is dry by the evening.

745 of the homes in this city are single family attached, and the city’s permit table shows zero townhomes and zero duplexes, triplexes or quads built across the nine years from 2008 to 2016, so that side of the stock hasn’t grown at all in that stretch. A dryer run in an attached home has to go further and take more corners than a rambler’s does, and every one of those corners is somewhere lint stops.

The other thing worth saying about Anoka is that the city licenses its rentals and inspects them, because it passed the rental licensing ordinance at its August 15, 2005 council meeting and hired its first full time Property Maintenance Coordinator that same year, so if you look after property here you’ve got an inspection attached to the license.

There’s one limit and we’d rather print it here than have you find out on the day, and in a city where a good share of the units sit in a building rather than a house it’s a limit that comes up. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

Anoka was settled in 1844, incorporated in 1878 and sits where the Rum River meets the Mississippi as the county seat, and the reason the downtown you drive through is 1890s brick is that five major fires hit the city between 1855 and 1884, the worst of them in 1884 taking 86 buildings with it. The plan says “buildings have been constructed in Anoka in every decade since the 1850’s,” and nine properties here are on the National Register, among them the Woodbury House from 1857, Colonial Hall from 1904 and the Anoka-Champlin Mississippi River Bridge from 1929, and that’s the one we drive over to get to you.

The city writes down what the old neighborhoods were called, with Christian Hill east of the Rum River, Swede Town north of Main Street between Fourth and Seventh Avenue, and Slab Town and Frog Town over on the west side, and it says those names “retained their identity through the 1940’s,” so they’re history rather than an address, though Christian Hill and Van Buren are both still designated heritage districts. The Halloween thing is real too, because the city calls itself the Halloween Capital of the World and its own history page puts the first celebration in October of 1920, with one every year since apart from two during the war.

There’s almost no new construction to talk about here, because the city calls itself “essentially fully developed” and says it’s “entering an era of redevelopment,” and its own permit table for 2008 to 2016 adds up to 197 multifamily units and 93 single family houses across nine years. The exceptions are worth knowing about if you’re in one, with 44 new lots at Rum River Shores down on the river and a 16 unit Lennar townhome project at 2nd Avenue and Monroe Street, because a brand new house has had a whole build going on around open ductwork for months before anybody handed you the keys.