Yesterday, MPHA Executive Director and CEO Abdi Warsame testified at the State Senate’s Housing and Homelessness Prevention Committee in support of Senator Omar Fateh’s SF 546, legislation that would send MPHA a one-time cash grant of $35 million to repair the agency’s portfolio of nearly 800 deeply affordable family homes. This legislation is the continuation of an effort that began two years ago, when the agency first sought $45 million in one-time state funding.
Following numerous state and local funding awards in 2023 to support the agency’s work to preserve its family housing portfolio, MPHA returned to the state legislature last year with an updated request. While the agency was unsuccessful in securing additional support from the legislature last year, it did deploy nearly $5 million to repair its deeply affordable family housing portfolio—one of its largest single-year repair efforts ever to this portfolio. Now, MPHA is returning in 2025 with the hopes of securing the remainder of the funding necessary to overcome decades of underfunding from HUD and set the portfolio up to become self-sufficient for decades.
“In partnership with state and local partners, MPHA is driving down the capital backlog for its family housing portfolio,” said Abdi Warsame, Executive Director/CEO of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority. “Together, we are making real progress towards stabilizing the lives of the nearly 800 families living in these homes while also ensuring thousands more families can access the life-altering force of stable, deeply affordable housing for generations to come. But we need help finishing the job, and I thank Senator Fateh for his continued leadership in pursuing a transformational investment in MPHA families and our entire region.”
“Investing in local affordable housing is a top priority of the DFL Senate majority, and continuing this partnership with MPHA is a perfect example of how we can follow through on that commitment,” said Senator Omar Fateh (DFL-Minneapolis). “Public housing residents are our neighbors, and this legislation is a much-needed investment in the stability and success of these residents. The stability of publicly owned housing is critical piece of building a vibrant, livable city.”
Through the agency’s wholly controlled non-profit, Community Housing Resources (CHR), the agency owns and operates nearly 800 deeply affordable single-family, duplex, fourplex, and sixplex homes spread across every legislative district in the city, serving more than 3,300 people. The homes are often referred to as MPHA’s “scattered site” housing. Of the residents who call scattered site properties home, 88 percent are black, 88 percent are female-led, and 60 percent are households of five or more—families with children.
These homes are a proven tool to provide families with a solid foundation for upward mobility. Of the current scattered site heads of household, 24 percent were employed when entering their new home. On average, these residents earned $26,039 a year in income. Today, 55 percent of these residents are employed, earning an average of $43,594 a year, with more than 56 percent of these residents’ earned income increasing while in these homes. And these homes are often only a temporary stop in a family’s journey to economic independence, with families living in CHR homes for an average of six years before moving to new housing. Better yet, since 2020, nearly 14 percent of all families leaving scattered site homes have gone on to purchase their own homes.
These homes are also MPHA’s most sought-after type of unit. In October, MPHA opened its family housing waitlist for the first time in three years. Over the course of five days, MPHA received more than 3,300 applications to secure a spot on the waiting list for these homes. The agency’s family housing waitlist now sits at nearly 4,300 families illustrating the immense need for preserving the agency’s deeply affordable family housing stock.
The portfolio’s current backlog of capital needs stands at $37 million. If left unaddressed, the need becomes $70 million by 2034. Recently, the agency has secured a variety of state and local funding to help address this backlog, driving it down from $45 million in recent years to its current $37 million figure. However, without additional outside investment coupled with MPHA’s annual $2 million invested in portfolio capital repairs, over the next 10 years, the portfolio of homes will end up in worse condition than they are today.
This proposed investment would transform deeply affordable family housing in Minneapolis for a generation. With a $35 million cash investment from the state, the agency would complete work over a four-year span, covering both today’s capital backlog and future capital needs. But most importantly, upon the completion of work over a four-year window, MPHA estimates its deeply affordable family housing portfolio would then become self-sufficient, with annual federal subsidies covering the estimated costs of routine annual capital improvements.
While the agency estimates the capital backlog for its entire portfolio of 6,000 units at $260 million, the ability to resolve $35 million of work over the next four years and subsequently maintain these homes at a far lower capital backlog would mark one of the most significant improvements in the agency’s capital backlog in MPHA history.
2025 MPHA Family Housing Capital Investment Request Presentation
2025 One-Page Fact Sheet
