For the better part of the last year, the Minnesota Housing Partnership has been working with a cohort of emerging housing developers to support their ideas and develop their skills to respond to affordable housing needs in Northwest Minnesota.
MHP launched its Emerging Developer Initiative last fall, working to engage with, support, and equip emerging housing developers, thereby increasing the developer capacity in the region. The Northwest Minnesota Foundation has supported the MHP’s initiative, providing more than $140,000 in grant support through two phases.
“We’ve had a lot of successes, a lot of wins through this program,” said Donald Goggleye, community development manager for MHP. “We also identified some barriers and that’s where we come in – we want to work with those folks, to continue to work with them, and help lift them up.”
Eventually, MHP would like to expand the program into other regions of the state.
“We started with Northwest region simply because it has been underfunded for such a long time and there is not a whole lot of new development happening compared to other areas of the state,” Goggleye said.
On June 8th, 11 emerging developers presented to a room of local leaders and community development professionals, sharing the details of their plans to meet housing needs in their community.
The 11-person cohort was the result of community meetings held throughout the region to attract and inform would-be developers; more than 100 people attended those sessions.
Their plans, as detailed in their presentations, included:
- Four-plexes to provide supportive housing options for American Indians. These are scalable models adaptive to different properties that also allows developers to take advantage of construction efficiencies.
- 3D hempcrete-printed homes to support a cluster community to reduce expenses associated with infrastructure. With a sustainable building process, this team hopes to contribute to an eco-friendly environment and build a sense of community through shared space.
- 3-D concrete-printed single-family homes.
- A housing development for the Ogema community, with rentals and ownership opportunities.
- Land trust housing on tribal trust land.
- The development of 40 acres into rental properties, a commercial building, and a child care center.
What’s the problem?
MHP reports that:
- There are more than 5,000 extremely low-income renter households in Northwest Minnesota but out 2,569 available units for that income bracket.
- The percentage of cost-burdened renters in the region (those who spend more than 30 percent their income on housing), grew from 33 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2019.
“Mirroring the state trend, the price of rent continues to rise and incomes are not keeping up, making it increasingly challenging for renters to make ends meet,” MHP reported in this 2021 regional profile report on Northwest Minnesota.
Likewise, home values have risen faster than incomes in the region, with 10 of our 12 counties seeing home values increasing by more than 50 percent from 2000 to 2019.
Developer capacity
Existing developer capacity in the Northwest region is scare, and this housing development gap is a key challenge to ensuring an adequate supply and preservation of affordable housing in rural communities, MHP reports.
For example, only 204 new single-family homes (at any price) were permitted for construction in 2019 in Northwest Minnesota, the lowest of any region in the state.
In addition to this growing affordable housing need, MHP’s research identifies stark racial housing disparities in Minnesota.
For example, if you are a person of color, you are:
- Half as likely to be a homeowner compared to a white counterpart;
- 5 times more likely to be severely cost-burdened
- 6 times more likely to experience homelessness.
“These outcomes are not acceptable,” MHP wrote in its grant proposal to NMF. “But they have been caused by intentional policy and investment decisions, leaving Minnesota’s Native Nations and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities under-resourced and marginalized from power and participation in housing systems. MHP is committed to applying the same level of intention and strategy to dismantle these systems.”
