Edina Neighbors for Affordable Housing

ents have exploded across the country, causing many to dig deep into their savings, downsize to subpar units or fall behind on payments and risk eviction now that a federal moratorium has ended.

Amid a national housing crisis, giant private equity firms have been buying up apartment buildings en masse to squeeze them for profit, with the help of government-backed Freddie Mac. Meanwhile, tenants say they’re the ones paying the price.

“People have talked about ‘missing middle housing’ as being something that American cities could provide more of or support,” St. Paul Planning Director Luis Pereira said in a presentation to the St. Paul city council. “We’re talking about the lower-density scale of that — duplexes, triplexes, townhomes, cottage or courtyard housing options.”

Woodbury, St. Louis Park and Edina have launched programs, and Minnetonka is considering one.

A new report says that localities should build partnerships with courts and organizations to capture more types of data to spot and stop evictions.

The Hennepin County Board of Commissioners recently adopted the Single Room Occupancy Taskforce Report, which lays the groundwork for an aggressive strategy to provide affordable housing for people in the lowest income categories.

The opposition to multifamily housing — and to the people who need to live there — stems in part from decades of local government land-use rules that prioritize single-family housing. Today, however, these rules are increasingly viewed as a major reason that Black and Latino families are essentially shut out of the vast majority of the Twin Cities.

The practice of making tenants post back rent with the court to challenge an eviction on habitability issues is “draconian” and unconstitutional, according to an article in Bench & Bar Magazine, the publication of the Minnesota State Bar Association.

YardHomes, a new public benefit corporation, hopes to boost production of ADUs, and for the time being are specifically building them to house homeless veterans.

To help its housing crunch, Roseau has had to take unusual measures, morphing essentially into a housing developer and bypassing the private sector. Now, the city is building a $6.8 million apartment complex that is almost entirely funded by the public.

With more than 5,700 housing units in Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburbs, Aeon provides a wide range of housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness and those with low incomes — the people who struggle most in a dysfunctional housing market.

After Covid, New York and other cities are weighing whether to convert empty office buildings into affordable housing.

Over the past decade the seven-county metro needed 44,570 affordable houses and apartments, but only a little more than a third of them got built.

A recent analysis found that the Twin Cities metro has the tightest vacancy rate in the entire country for cities over 1 million people.

The debate about rent stabilization is commonly driven by fear and half-truths more than by reasoned assessments of the evidence. Such is the case in conversations across the country, and now in the Twin Cities.