Southside Pride

Anybody who can live on the streets, or bounce from shelter to shelter, and maintain their sanity is a genius and a saint. Why does our society continue to demand genius and sainthood of the lowest income segment of the population? This is never expected of people who have homes to live in.

When there’s no place to live at a price you can pay, it’s almost impossible to live a productive, sane and happy life. It seems like society, instead of paying money to create living units that the significant low-income population can afford, would rather pay large sums of money to put the “non-productive, insane and unhappy” people in jail or to beat them bloody. Maybe the City of Minneapolis has just made a slight improvement in this regard.

On January 10, City Council members attended the Hennepin County Board meeting, which annually hears testimony from homeless people. Not only were they moved by the intolerable conditions of homelessness but by the fact that homelessness is much more widespread now than 10 years ago simply because there is very little housing available for people whose incomes are less than 30 percent of the Metro Median Income ($76,500)—-Housing in the Twin Cities has diminished since 1990, wages have not kept up with the cost of housing, and many communities do not want low-income people living amongst them.

Nevertheless, the City Council went to their meeting on January 31 and did some provocative voting. First they voted to approve the $10 million Housing Trust Fund, which supporters such as Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing (MICAH), Jewish Community Action (JCA), ISAIAH, MN Senior Federation, Family & Children’s Services, MN ACORN, Progressive MN and MPIRG have been working on since 2001. (The HTF will be a part of the City budget earmarked solely for housing; it will be made up of new or existing revenue sources; and it will be administered by an independent commission whose priority will be housing affordable to households earning less than 30 percent and less than 50 percent of the MMI.)

Then at the same time, the City Council voted to divert a $4 million line item—the HRA levy, half of which is committed to affordable housing—to police and public works over the next five years in an attempt to avoid raising property taxes. A fifth of the money for the Trust Fund will be eliminated.

Ninth Ward Councilmember Gary Schiff, who voted to keep the levy, said that although the two votes felt like one step forward and two steps backward, he applauds positive developments made in approving the Housing Trust Fund: The focus will now be on creating housing affordable to households with incomes less than 30 percent of the MMI and, an advisory commission, to search for revenue and determine specific uses of funds, will be in place, composed partly of advocates for affordable housing.

Rev. John Darlington, whose church, Minnehaha United Methodist, is a MICAH member and has ardently supported the Trust Fund, calls the HTF a “symbolic victory” in the sense that it will bring City officials and community activists together to work on affordable housing projects.

The HTF is a step in the right direction. Prioritizing affordable housing will come about more and more as society sees that when a segment of the population is without decent housing, everyone is debilitated. Affordable housing benefits the whole society and in the end is cost effective. Ultimately, aren’t taxpayers willing to pay for things that will benefit them?

Los Angeles, in a time when California faces a $35 billion deficit, approved plans for a $100 million annual Housing Trust Fund in January 2002. Leaders recognized that the housing crisis in the City of L.A. would “remain intractable until we had major production—and that a production program that began to meet L.A.’s needs would have a ripple effect throughout the region.”

Minneapolis MICAH member Patricia Mack suggested that to make up for the $2 million that will be lost from the levy, people buying homes could add a certain amount to their mortgage payments per month. The mortgage company could collect the contributions (tax deductible), or the voluntary taxes, whatever you want to call them, and save the expense of setting up an organization to collect the money. This idea sounds perhaps overly generous, but it’s not nearly as generous as inviting your homeless friends to come and live with you (even if you like each other a lot).