Council candidate Gordon stresses city’s need for affordable housing

    When Cam Gordon goes door-to-door on his campaign for the Minneapolis City Council’s second ward seat he notices a number of empty lots, and even the occasional boarded-up house or apartment building waiting to be demolished.
    “In the last decade Minneapolis has been able to come up with over $180 million in loans and subsidies for large-scale private development projects,” said Gordon. “At the same time the city has been cutting public services and failing to adequately address our housing crisis,” he said.
    “The new Target store on Ninth and Nicollet alone is taking over $60 million in corporate welfare. That’s over $60 million that won’t go to our public parks, streets, schools, libraries or to help meet the critical need for affordable housing.”
    City planners found that between 1990 and 2000 there was a net loss of about 1,500 housing units in Minneapolis. During that time the population grew by 14,000 people, according to recent census figures. The Twin Cities Family Housing fund reports that there are 68,900 renters with incomes below $10,000 in the metropolitan area, but only 31,200 housing units with rents they can afford. In addition, an estimated 12,000 Twin Cities residents were homeless last year.
    Gordon believes the drop in overall available housing has helped create the Twin Cities’ low vacancy rate, which has resulted in rising home prices and 15 to 20 percent increases in average rent.
    “The Minneapolis housing crisis impacts everyone, homeowners, buyers and renters alike,” Gordon said. “The hardest hit include the elderly, low-to-middle-income families and students. But it is also especially hard on many first-time home buyers,” he said.
    High rent, loss of homes and an increasing city population combine to make it difficult for even the most qualified people to purchase homes in the city. Gordon sees this as a threat to Minneapolis neighborhoods.
    “Home ownership brings pride, commitment and stewardship among neighbors and is central to building long-lasting, livable communities,” Gordon said.          “People who want to own their home are being forced to look outside the city. We need to maintain and improve our current stock of houses and apartments and find innovative ways to encourage new and affordable units to be built,” he said.
    Gordon believe the city should take a multifaceted approach to ward affordable housing,
including the following:
    1. Stop demolishing and start emphasizing maintenance, preservation and renovation.
    2. Focus on in-fill and sell some of the 860 city-controlled vacant lots for new housing.
    3. Require that at least one of every four units in any city-funded housing project be affordable.
Provide incentives and east the process for the private sector to create new housing.
    4. Develop design standards that work for all neighborhoods and support universally accessible, life-cycle housing.
    5. Educate ourselves about housing needs, resources and creative options like carriage housing, co-housing, cooperatives, lease-to-own and targeted homebuyer assistance programs.
    6. Invest in an affordable housing fund to support neighborhood-initiated-and-approved affordable housing projects.
    “It will take homeowners, renters, neighborhood groups, housing service providers, developers, rental property owners, funders, architects, planners and those with housing needs working together to solve the crisis,” Gordon said.