Minnesota’s facing a massive housing shortage. One hundred thousand homes to be exact. And for Greater Minnesota, this crisis has hit especially hard.
Lynn Allen is a home ownership coach and trainer on the Leech Lake Reservation in north central Minnesota. She said lately, she’s seeing a lot of unmet potential.
“There’s folks that can afford housing. It’s just that there’s no housing,” said Allen.
The housing crisis in her area has pushed some families to double or even triple up into one home. Even when some of the older houses have reached potentially unlivable conditions, they’re still having to make it work.
Minnesota is short of 100,000 homes, according to research by Minnesota Housing Partnership. It’s a crisis that can be traced to the Great Recession during the late 2000s when production slowed and never picked back up. Andrea Brennan, with Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, said increasing the housing supply is even more difficult in rural areas where the costs of building are equal, if not greater than in the metro. But the return may not be as favorable.
“It’s often the case that the costs of building housing is not supported by either the sale price or the rent,” shared Brennan.
Smaller profit margins mean fewer private developers wanting to build new housing in Sandstone, a small town in east central Minnesota. There hasn’t been new housing for 12 years. Sandstone city administrator Kathy George said the dry spell has not only stifled the city’s residents, it stifled the city’s economy.
“Every time we talk to our businesses in town, the biggest problem, they note, is a lack of housing for their employees,” said George. “So it’s very hard to find employees that will stick around if they have to live somewhere else.”
But George said things are finally turning around. Construction just began to convert a historic school building into 32 units of workforce housing. Rehabbing older homes is one way towns like Sandstone are trying to close the housing gap. Meanwhile, in Cass Lake, Allen said her organization, Leech Lake Financial Services, is working to build the community’s capacity to create new housing. They’ve partnered with Leech Lake Tribal College on a construction trades internship. They’re also in the process of building several new homes. Allen hopes these steps can help revive Cass Lake to the place it once was.
Listen to the full story from AMPERS.
Photo credit: Dan Grandmaison
New Affordable Housing Opens in Rosemount