Today, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey joined MPHA staff and residents to highlight a proposed new $2.7 million contribution to MPHA in the mayor’s 2023 budget. This additional $2.7 million dollars will enable the MPHA team to bring five additional deeply affordable family homes online while also making important repairs and improvements throughout its portfolio of family housing scattered across the city. The five homes, which have bedroom sizes ranging from two to five, are in various neighborhoods in South Minneapolis and are currently uninhabited because of a cumulative capital backlog of nearly $1 million. This new investment from the city will allow MPHA to repair these homes and place five new families from its waitlist into stable, deeply affordable units to call home for the foreseeable future.
“We are deeply thankful to the mayor and his administration for further prioritizing MPHA residents in the city’s budget, said Abdi Warsame, Executive Director/CEO of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority. “Thanks to Mayor Frey’s commitment, MPHA will be able to place more families from its waiting list into stable, deeply affordable homes. While our region faces a housing affordability crisis, the mayor continues to make necessary, critical investments in producing and preserving deeply affordable housing in Minneapolis.”
“Because housing is a right, we have transformed our budget process to bake that funding in,” said Mayor Jacob Frey. “People need an affordable home, even and especially when economic times are tight. That’s why we are investing another $2.7 million over the next two years for MPHA emergency repairs and immediate needs. Thank you, MPHA Executive Director Abdi Warsame for your advocacy, MPHA Chair Tom Hoch for your vision, and CPED Director Andrea Brennan for your work – we’re going to do this right.”
Through the agency’s wholly controlled non-profit, Community Housing Resources (CHR), the agency owns and operates more than 700 deeply affordable single-family, duplex and fourplex homes spread across all 13 wards of the city, serving more than 3,100 people. The homes are often referred to as MPHA’s “scattered site” housing. These homes account for more than 80 percent of the MPHA housing available for families with children. Of the residents who call scattered site properties home, nearly 88 percent are black, 85 percent are female-led, and more than half are households of five or more—families with children. And there is a major need for additional units of this type of housing in Minneapolis, as evidenced by the agency’s waitlist of more than 7,500 people seeking deeply affordable and/or public family housing.
These scattered site homes are a critical piece of city infrastructure, as they are a proven tool to provide families a solid foundation for upward mobility. Of the current scattered site heads of household, 19 percent were employed when entering their new home. On average, these residents earned $20,722 a year in income. Today, 67 percent of these residents are employed, earning an average of $36,639 a year, with more than 60 percent of these residents’ earned income increasing while in these homes. Better yet, since 2020, 17 percent of all families leaving scattered site homes have gone on to purchase their own homes.
Preserving this critical portfolio of deeply affordable family housing is a top agency priority. Securing the funding necessary to preserve the agency’s 700 plus CHR homes will provide quality, well-maintained deeply affordable homes for approximately 3,800 families over the next 30 years. This expanded investment from the City of Minneapolis is a step forward towards that goal and creates a new highwater mark in the partnership between MPHA and the city.