Imbolc                                                      Black Mountain Moon

Validation comes at odd points, often years later. In this Atlantic article, the Miracle of Minneapolis, the author, with the aid of Myron Orfield, links the Twin Cities’ blend of more abundant affordable housing and wealth to regional government. Somewhat valid.

Here’s the valid part: “While many large American cities concentrated their low-income housing in certain districts or neighborhoods during the 20th century, sometimes blocking poor residents from the best available jobs, Minnesota passed a law in 1976 requiring all local governments to plan for their fair share of affordable housing.” op cit

The invalid part is this. Even with these kind of laws on the books there are powerful forces that still work against the development of affordable housing. The NIMBY movement can marshal usually white middle and upper-middle class folks against multi-family housing. In Andover, for example, the city council time and again denied applications to build multi-family housing, denials premised in large part on the number of police calls to the two instances of multi-family housing (excluding senior citizen housing). This dynamic plays itself out in wealthy neighborhoods and suburbs across the Twin Cities.

Here in the Denver metro area another force, the market, stands in the way of affordable housing. Rents are high and single family homes are in short supply as well as increasingly unaffordable for new home buyers. This dynamic pushes against the development of affordable housing because normal development is so profitable.

Although some action has been taken in Minnesota and a few other states, the minimum wage is another barrier to affordable housing. Even affordable housing has to be paid for and often folks in the low wage sector: convenience stores, walmart employees, waitresses and bar-tenders, grocery store clerks and baggers, retail workers simply don’t earn enough to afford even reduced cost housing.

Here’s the validation. Back in the 1970’s and early 1980’s I was part of a Twin-Cities wide movement of neighborhood activists who advocated for and built affordable housing. We did this through the creation of Community Development Corporations (CDC’s), neighborhood level organizing and in-depth participation in city political races as well as city council deliberations. Most of the affordable housing in Minneapolis and St. Paul-I can’t speak to the suburbs-would not have been built without this committed core of ground level workers, activists and  community developers alike.

(I chaired the West Bank CDC during its most expansive phase of building in the late 1970’s. See pic.)

On the West Bank, where we built 500 units of affordable housing during my time there, we also pressed this movement further by organizing worker-owned co-operative businesses. We were trying to deal with the wage side of the affordable housing equation as well as reducing the cost of housing to begin with.

These were exciting and productive times with different city and state level initiatives being pushed forward by different groups. This all tailed off in the 1980’s.

“In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.”

The region’s commitment to dispersing affordable housing throughout the metro area has since diminished.” op cit

This decline exactly parallels the rise of Reagan and the subsequent gathering storm of the Moral Majority followed by the Teaparty movement and the war on terror. The way to achieve and maintain gains for the poorest of our citizens are known and replicable. They do require political will at several different levels of our society and this current society has broken faith with the idea of communal responsibility. This is the great evil of our time, worse than wars or Ebola or terrorism because the cost in damaged lives is so much greater.