Ramstad: Minnesota needs affordable housing to be available in more places

In June, a committee assessing fair housing in Minnesota was suddenly attacked by some of the biggest voices in that business.

At issue was something you might have thought was settled long ago: whether subsidized housing for the poor should be spread throughout the metro area or if it should be concentrated in the two cities.

Versions of this fight come up so often in the Twin Cities that I’ve come to see it as another obstacle to fixing the Minnesota Paradox, the name University of Minnesota political scientist Samuel Myers gave to the shameful contrast between the state’s overall prosperity and how badly people of color fared in it over the decades.

I wrote earlier this month that ending the Minnesota Paradox has morphed from a social justice issue to an economic necessity because of demographic change. With the state’s white population in decline for more than a decade, Minnesota’s long-term prosperity depends on the opportunities for, and performance of, its residents of color.

The same demographic change should lead to more integration throughout the Twin Cities and the dispersion of economic opportunity. I see little evidence, however, that people in Minnesota’s affordable housing world are catching on to it.

Instead, they are mired in the fights that were at first won by leaders and residents of white suburbs resisting the anti-discrimination laws of the 1960s. Now, they are dominated by urban leaders and activists groups who say the poor, particularly people of color, should not be forced to leave their neighborhoods to get affordable housing and economic and educational opportunities.

People involved in affordable housing now talk about “centering people instead of geography” rather than segregation and integration. The new terms may obscure or sand the edges off the conflict, but it’s still like the one Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Boishad 120 years ago over differing paths for the advancement of Black Americans, and that Martin Luther King Jr. and Stokely Carmichael echoed in the 1960s.

The outcome for decades in the Twin Cities has been far more subsidized housing built in Minneapolis and St. Paul than the surrounding suburbs, even as the suburbs exploded to account for three-fourth’s of the region’s population.

It doesn’t make sense to go on that way. It’s not logical, not just and not conducive to the well-being of a region that more than ever needs its residents of color to thrive.

Minnesota needs new housing everywhere, but it especially needs affordable housing to be built throughout the Twin Cities region. To my surprise, even now in 2024, many people disagree.

Two professors, both white, at the University of Minnesota — Myron Orfield in the Law School and Ed Goetz in the School of Public Affairs — provide the intellectual firepower in the region’s debate over where and how to create opportunity for the poor, including where they live.

Activist groups, philanthropic organizations, lawyers, elected officials and other policymakers orbit around them in two camps that battle in courtrooms, legislative hearing rooms and various City Council chambers.

Orfield believes communities that integrate by race and wealth, while difficult to create, are ultimately stronger. A former Democratic legislator, he is sharply critical of the way schools, housing development and government agencies evolved in the metro area.

“Particularly in the last 10 years, but really the last 20, we have built a deeply segregated society here,” Orfield said. “We went from a fairly integrated society to a segregated system of schools and a much more segregated system of neighborhoods. And philanthropy and government have supported a series of institutions that exist in the segregated society and they don’t know anything else.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Goetz listened to Minnesotans of color criticize efforts to move them to “opportunity neighborhoods” and came to believe there are times when racial concentration and preference make sense. When I met Goetz for coffee earlier this year, I told him I didn’t think I could write anything that seemed to support segregation.

“To take this position is to open yourself up to claims that you are a closet segregationist,” Goetz said. “I had to get to this position. I was pushed by people who live in these neighborhoods and who looked at me and said, in effect, ‘Why do you look at our neighborhood and assume it’s bad?’ They are not blind to the problems in their communities. But their solution is not to move to a white neighborhood, but to ask, ‘Why can’t our neighborhood be safe?’”

The two professors’ latest clash involved a little-known committee formed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to write a report on the fairness of access to housing in the state. For the better part of a year, the panel took testimonies from more than 100 experts and participants in affordable housing efforts around the state.

After the committee this spring released drafts of its report, Minnesota Housing, the state housing agency, objected to the portrayal that it had concentrated affordable housing in the two cities. Goetz in late May sent a two-page memo that also criticized the idea that affordable housing had been over-concentrated in the two cities.

Not long after that, the committee removed a sentence from testimony by Rev. Alfred Babington-Johnson, CEO of Stairstep Foundation, a Minneapolis nonprofit that has sued Minnesota Housing and the Met Council for not requiring affordable housing to be more widely dispersed. In the sentence, Babington-Johnson said the entities “have become complicit in advancing racial segregation and causing economic disadvantage to vulnerable elements of our society, particularly the Black community.”

The committee voted to take out the sentence because it wanted to remain neutral, Beth Commers, acting chair, said. “Including his argument before the courts decided could have been seen as taking a side,” she said.

Babington-Johnson objected to having his testimony edited, and Orfield did too. “Whose voice really gets to be heard in the arena?” Babington-Johnson said to me later. “When it’s only the privileged voice that says, ‘Oh nothing to watch here’ and that gets to carry the day with the entity that’s supposed to be making sure we stay close to our principles and values, wow, that’s jarring.”

In the final report that came out last month, the committee wrote, “Historically most affordable housing in the state has been built in the urban core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.” It added a datapoint Minnesota Housing sought that “in the last several years” more new rental units have been built in the suburbs than the two cities.

That may be true, but the time frame was imprecise. For the five years ending 2023, 41% of metro-area subsidized homes by unit were built in the suburbs, amounting to 45% of funding.