[Mpls] Affordable Housing Bandwagon & Heritage Park

[Socialist2001 at cs.com]

Dean Carlson wrote:

<<Build more Affordable Housing -- Bingo!! This really is a City function. 
It's great that Doug Mann is on the affordable housing bandwagon.  Curious that 
he was such a vocal critic of the largest effort ever taken by the City in 
building affordable housing -- Heritage Park.  Now he thinks CPED (note to Doug, 
MCDA no longer exists) can do the job.>>

I criticized the city for demolishing and not replacing housing that is 
affordable to people at the low end of the income ladder, especially those eligible 
for subsidized housing. The city made room for the Heritage Park project by 
evicting tenants of apartments / townhouses owned by the Minneapolis Public 
Housing Authority on the current Heritage Park site. The number of people in the 
city's homeless shelters, especially African Americans, increased sharply 
immediately after the evictions began.

Below is a short excerpt from a pamphlet I published in 1999, The Fight 
Against Urban Cleansing & Gentrification in Minneapolis, which is also published 
online at http://educationright.tripod.com/id41.htm

     In April 1999 Northside Neighbors for Justice began to raise, as its 
central demand, the demand that the city stop the demolition of dwelling units at 
the Glenwood-Lyndale housing projects, and rehab and repopulate all of the 
306 dwelling units there.

      The Hollman consent decree requires the city to replace 770 public 
housing dwelling units that were slated for demolition as part of a redevelopment 
plan for the area. The city demolished 464 of these dwelling units, and an 
additional 192 units adjacent to the "Hollman site" (the Bryant Avenue 
Apartments). Over 900 dwelling units have been lost to this eviction-demolition process, 
but only 47 units have been replaced.

        The city has made a commitment to build or acquire and rehab 74 units 
in some of the city's more affluent neighborhoods by April 2002.  As of July 
1999 only 8 of these units were inhabitable and 4 units were in the process of 
being acquired or constructed.  A small number of the replacement units are 
to be constructed at the site of the public housing projects that were already 
torn down. The rest are to be located in the suburbs.

     It maybe possible for the city to fulfill its obligation to acquire or 
construct the "Hollman" replacement units within the city limits by April 2002, 
but the most optimistic estimate for completion of dwelling units to be 
located in the Suburbs is 10 to 12 years.

     The NNJ's"no demolition" demand has the character of a nonnegotiable 
demand rather than a bargaining chip, even though it was qualified by adding that 
demolition of the Glenwood-Lyndale units might be acceptable after all of the 
replacement units are ready to occupy.  City hall can't get off the hook with 
a mea culpa and a promise to try harder.  

    In addition to the loss of public housing units, other subsidized housing 
options are rapidly disappearing.  Landlords are opting-out of programs 
started by HUD in the late 1960s and 1970s which made privately owned rental units 
available to low-income households for a fixed percentage of a household's 
income.

    At the same time, rents and the market value of housing have risen 
dramatically in most of the city's neighborhoods.  Houses have been selling quickly 
at inflated prices and the vacancy rate for rental housing is estimated to be 
under 2% citywide.

    The Black community has been particularly hard hit by this 
affordable-housing crisis. Covert racial discrimination in the housing market is 
commonplace, according to HUD-sponsored housing-market surveys, which monitor and compare 
the success of Black and White housing hunters.  In most residential 
districts, landlords and real estate agents will readily sign a lease or purchase 
agreement with Whites who present socioeconomic profiles that are very similar to 
the profiles of Blacks who invariably get the brush off. 

   Last April, Carol Johnson, the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public 
Schools provided an often-repeated statistic which indicates the severity of the 
housing crisis for Blacks in Minneapolis: 3400 Minneapolis Public School 
students lived in homeless shelters at some point during the 1997-98 school year; 
2900 of these homeless students were African-American (about 20,000 of 50,000 
MPS students and about 20% of the city's residents are classified as 
African-American).

-Doug Mann, King Field
8th ward city council candidate
www.educationright.com