As cities spar over housing spots, working poor just want a home

If anyone in the Twin Cities knows how hard it is to find affordable housing, it would be Adonaea Chatman.

For three years, she's struggled to find an apartment for herself and two young sons while earning $8-an-hour working at a Minneapolis pizza shop.

"I've been looking since 2011," said Chatman, who for three years has lived with her mother in a St. Louis Park apartment. She very much wants a place of her own and has put her name on waiting lists for public housing in New Brighton, Brooklyn Center, Hopkins, St. Louis Park, Edina, St. Paul and Minneapolis.

"I guess you gotta be patient, and I've been patient so long," Chatman said. "I wish somebody would call me back like, 'Hey! You got it!'"

But in the Twin Cities, the shortage of affordable housing is projected to grow, and through the end of the decade the region is far from meeting the expected demand, according to a draft of a housing plan by the Metropolitan Council.

• More: Read the plan
• Earlier: Race, poverty tied to metro transportation funding

In its first freestanding housing plan since 1985, the council aims to help guide communities as they figure out where their young millennial families, low-wage workers and retirees from the Baby Boom generation are going to live.

The Met Council is expected to vote Wednesday to adopt the 139-page plan, which has stirred controversy about which communities are doing their fair share to provide low-income housing.

The Met Council defines housing as "affordable" if it costs no more than 30 percent of a household's income. To accommodate everyone who needs housing, the region would need 51,000 new affordable housing units through 2020, said Libby Starling, manager of regional policy and research for the Met Council, which analyzed the supply of affordable housing a few years ago.

"The actual construction over the first three years of the decade is less than 3,000," she said. "We are way behind where we need to be."

Starling said the Met Council is not required by state law to create a housing plan as it is for the transit, parks and wastewater it manages. But she said it makes sense to put all the council's housing-related work into a single document to help guide an overall housing strategy for the region.

"We hope that with the adoption of the housing policy plan, more communities, more cities, more neighborhoods will really think about what their mix of housing options is in their neighborhood, in their city, and across the region," Starling said.

But the Met Council's plan to achieve its vision of creating safe, stable and affordable housing choices for people of all ages and different income groups has sparked controversy.

Some communities say they're carrying too much of the burden while other cities sit by.

Three suburbs recently filed a Fair Housing complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center and Richfield allege the Met Council and the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency's policies are promoting racially concentrated areas of poverty.

The council is encouraging too much affordable housing in places that already have racially concentrated poverty, said Myron Orfield, director of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity.

"So they're saying any place that has high frequency transit is going to be rigorously required to build affordable housing," said Orfield, who worked with Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center and Richfield on the HUD complaint.

"And you know, the whiter places, the more affluent places aren't very well-served by transit," Orfield said. "So it basically lets all the affluent, suburban areas, all the white areas off the hook."

But Starling, the Met Council official, said its goals for affordable housing are higher in communities that are still growing and developing and have good access to transportation. She said the agency cannot withhold funding for parks and transit if a community doesn't meet its housing goals.

"The Council is perpetually at a point where many people think we have too many sticks and many people think we have not enough sticks," she said. " As long as those two perspectives are in balance, we figure we're in about the right place."

The three suburbs' complaint to HUD points out that Brooklyn Park, a suburb in the northwest corner of the Twin Cities metro area with a population of approximately 77,800, is undergoing rapid demographic and economic transition, much more quickly than the metropolitan region as a whole. Its nonwhite population grew from 41.7 percent in 2007 to 50.6 percent in 2012, while the share of families under the poverty line increased from 8.4 percent to 11.3 percent during that time. Meanwhile, the share of rental units increased from 25 to nearly 31 percent.

The percentage of nonwhite students in the city's public schools reached 79 percent in the 2014 school year, up from 59 percent in 2007 and about 29 percent in 1997.

Simultaneously, the number of students receiving free or reduced price lunches has spiked to 65 percent in 2014, up from 27.3 percent in 1997.

Kim Berggren, director of community development for Brooklyn Park, said the Met Council has set a goal of 1,506 affordable housing units for the city by 2020, which she said is too high. She said city officials are concerned that the goal goes against Brooklyn Park's strategy of creating an economically diverse and sustainable city.

"I think the complaint really is about raising awareness about the growing regional disparities and making sure that the state and the Met Council are thinking hard about the policy decisions they're making," Berggren said.

The question regional planners must consider, she said, is whether their decisions exacerbate such disparities or help stabilize the region over time.

Brooklyn Park is trying to shore up its housing, which is largely considered affordable because it is inexpensive.

"So this area was pretty hard hit in the foreclosure crisis," Emily Carr, a development project coordinator for the city, said during a recent drive through a neighborhood of single-family homes. "You can see a lot of split levels, ramblers, housing stock that might need to be updated at some point."

For two years, Carr ran the city's foreclosure recovery program, which kept hundreds of properties from turning into the blight that corrodes blocks and neighborhoods.

"Some of the worst of the worst housing, the private market can't take care of it and so there's a role for the city to play in preserving and maintaining the housing stock," she said.

One example of the city's efforts to preserve housing stock is a Hartkopf Park rambler that was completely renovated with money from foreclosure recovery program, made possible by federal, state and local funding.

"The bathroom in the basement I don't think had ever been cleaned or maintained at all," Carr said. "There were no shower doors, there was lots of mold, and in the bathroom the tiles were falling off the shower."

Now that the house has been nicely restored, the city has imposed a 30-year rental restriction to keep it owner-occupied.

Brooklyn Park has also encouraged new construction of more expensive housing, including about 300 townhomes completed in 2008 and 2009.

"One of the things that came out of some of the research and the studies that the city did was that we needed to diversify the type of housing product," Carr said.

There was demand, she said, for "newer housing style in an older neighborhood."

To foster more community spirit and encourage people to move-up to their next home in Brooklyn Park, the city has renamed 31 neighborhoods.

Adonaea Chatman said she's not concerned about the concentration of poverty in Brooklyn Park. To her, it's home. She grew up there.

"I'd rather live there than anywhere else right about now," she said. "I'll choose that over north Minneapolis any day. It's the suburbs."

Chatman is hedging her bets. She's on a waiting list for Section 8 subsidized housing in Edina, a city where 88 percent of residents are white and there are no concentrations of poverty.

In Edina, where most of the focus is on senior housing, there are 901 affordable housing units, senior planner Joyce Repya said. But the city is looking for ways to create more.

"Many people are unaware of the fact that Edina does have affordable housing and we have had since the '70s," she said.

Repya said Edina's on track to achieve its goal set with the Met Council of creating 212 more affordable units by 2020.

Unlike Brookyn Park, which is still growing and has six new neighborhoods still undeveloped, Edina is a first-ring suburb that's fully built out.

On a tour of the city, Repya explained the biggest threat to affordable housing in her city.

"We're having a lot of homes that are affordable that are being purchased," she said. "They're being torn down and new, large, expensive homes are being built in their place."

While Brooklyn Park sees a role for government in keeping housing from sliding into disrepair, Edina officials are trying to ensure that the roaring demand for land doesn't completely price out lower-income people.

The Oak Glen development built in 1981 combines Section 8 housing with market-rate townhomes that are tucked among trees and a pond.

Repya, who has worked for the city for 25 years, thinks there is less community resistance to affordable housing than in years past because residents understand that the people who need it might be their nurses, police officers and teachers.

For Chatman, the mom who hopes to make a home for her two- and three-year-old sons, receiving a call from Oak Glen might be like winning the lottery. She signed up a while ago, while working in department stores at Southdale mall. But there is a waiting list of five to 10 years.

The Met Council plan aims to make sure others are not in the same predicament, one that Chatman hopes to escape soon.

"Everybody should have a roof over their head to live. That's how I feel," she said. "It shouldn't be a long waiting list ... to have your own place instead of living off your family members."