Meet the former St. Paul mayor working to make homeownership affordable for families

There is life after serving as mayor of St. Paul. Six and a half years after he last occupied the third-floor corner office at City Hall, Chris Coleman has found a new career as president and CEO of Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity.

While the job isn’t as all-consuming as the mayor gig, which Coleman held for 12 years, he said opening doors to homeownership is incredibly fulfilling. Habitat is kicking off construction of 147 owner-occupied single-family, duplex, triplex and fourplex homes at the Heights, a mixed-use development on the 112-acre former Hillcrest Golf Club at the city’s northeast corner.

Eye On St. Paul recently visited with Coleman at Habitat’s Midway headquarters to talk about post-mayoral life and Habitat at the Heights. This interview was edited for length.

Q: How is this job different from being mayor?

A: [Laughs] Completely different. First of all, I get my weekends, by and large. I get my evenings, by and large. You know, mayor, it’s just, it’s all consuming. It is just 24/7. There’s not a lot of getting away. I was thinking about this recently because we were out in Glacier National Park and my wife and I did a three-day backpacking trip where we didn’t bring our phones; we had no contact with the outside world.

And it was the same hike I had done in 2007, when a ranger came knocking at my tent to tell me that the [I-35W] bridge had collapsed. And so, within three hours, I was on a plane flying back to the Twin Cities. My wife was driving the kids back home.

Q: Describe what you do.

A: Well, I get to lead an incredible team, an amazing group of people that are really dedicated to helping support folks on their homebuying journey. What’s great about this job is you are transforming people’s lives. And you’re doing it in such a profound way that it impacts not just the people you’re working with today, but their kids, their grandkids.

Q: Did they approach you?

A: I had just started the journey of, what’s next? I’d left the mayor’s office; I left the governor’s race. And I got a call. They said, “Would you be interested in this job?” I was talking with a friend who had mentioned it to me, and I love Habitat. I love the mission of Habitat. I know the importance of housing.

Q: What is the biggest misperception of what Habitat does?

A: I think there’s a misperception about who we serve. We serve hardworking families that you see every day. They’re working in your schools, they’re working at the airport, they’re driving buses. These are families that are working hard to make ends meet. Given the cost of housing and how crazy it has gotten, it’s getting harder and harder for middle-class families to be able to buy a house.

Our typical family will have $60,000-$70,000 household income, which unfortunately in this day and age isn’t enough to buy a house.

Q: How did Habitat become part of the Heights development?

A: Well, I suspect it had something to do with my old job. I was well aware of that project and its relationship with the Port Authority. I knew that this was going to be a great opportunity to do housing in a big way and I knew that Habitat needed to be a part of it.

Q: Where does the majority of your financing come from?

A: The largest source is our families taking out a mortgage. They have to be able to afford at least 50% of the cost of the home. We also have state funding, we have federal funding. And we happen to be blessed with an incredibly generous community. We got a MacKenzie Scott gift [a philanthropist who is the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos], which was transformational. [In March 2022, Scott gave Habitat for Humanity $436 million, of which Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity received $13.5 million.]

We have an individual who has actually given us [anonymously] more than MacKenzie Scott has given us, who also happens to be our number one volunteer, out almost every day.

Q: It’s not a bad thing to have the Carter name attached to the work you do, is it?

A: It’s funny because of course everybody thinks that Jimmy Carter started Habitat. But he and Rosalynn happen to be our most famous volunteers. Now, our most famous volunteers are Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, who will be out on site with us in September and October.

Q: Could this project be a template for Habitat’s future role in housing?

A: Well, it’s certainly going to teach us a lot about where there might be other opportunities to build. And I would hope that developers might be taking a look at some of the suburban communities where we could potentially be working on larger scales.

Q: Homeownership is really key to accumulating wealth, isn’t it?

A: Well, what homeownership allows you to do is have assets that you can use to help support your children buy their first home. My daughter and my son-in-law just bought their first home. Luckily, my son-in-law’s parents were able to help. But that opportunity has not been available to many of our families.

We’re very focused on racial equity, because there were so many generations of families of color, particularly African American families, who were denied the opportunity to own a home because of redlining and restrictive covenants. We were very intentional about discriminating against people and keeping them from buying or maintaining or owning a home. We have to be as intentional about solving that problem as we were in creating it.