Raised fist statues crafted from steel—the emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement—stand above the cars in the middle of conjoining traffic circles in the neighborhood, and the names of those killed by police are written in chalk along the asphalt of Chicago Avenue. Nearby, in Powderhorn Park, an encampment popped up in the summer of 2020, the summer of the uprisings, when more than 200 people were made homeless after they were evicted from a hotel. The park became one of the largest homeless encampments known in the city’s history.
The two came to CTUL separately, after organizers knocked on their doors and told them about tenants rights, and ways they could fight back against unfair landlords. Now, they knock on doors, too. When Perez first came to the city, she visited her sister and thought she might stay for a week or two. But then she decided she wanted to stay in Minneapolis for good. “I liked the area, and I loved the close community,” she said in Spanish, through a translator.
Their experiences made both women want the city to do more to protect renters and make housing affordable. In the past five years, Minneapolis has made national news for many of its reforms, including a unique planning document passed in 2019 that eliminated single-family zoning on residential lots in the city limits. Minneapolis has become a leader for the Yes in My Backyard, or YIMBY, movement—predating by five years New York’s “City of Yes” reforms. Minneapolis aims to use zoning and land use reforms to build 80,000 new housing units by 2040.
The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 exposed massive problems with America’s housing policy, problems that are even worse today, after the recession that followed the Covid-19 crisis.
The places with the most and highest-paying jobs—especially on the coasts—are generally the most expensive places to live. But the shortages have led to increased housing costs across the country. The median sales price of homes in the entire country has nearly doubled since 2010. During and after the pandemic, rural areas and small metros have seen disproportionate increases in home prices, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, leaving families everywhere worse off. Even prices in deindustrialized cities from Buffalo to St. Louis are rising fast.
But with federal policy focused on pushing people into homes, the rental market hasn’t been built up enough to continue to house families who weren’t ready or able to buy their own homes. In cities where homebuying prices increased, so did rents. The number of families who are considered “rent-burdened”—that is, spend more than 30 percent of their income on rents—has soared, according to the center at Harvard, and the rates of those paying more rent than they can comfortably afford have increased fastest for middle-income families. At the same time, evictions and homelessness have increased: The number of people staying in shelters grew by nearly half from 2015 to 2023, according to the center. “Not being able to afford housing is no longer just affecting the so-called poor or the elderly.... But ... it’s creeping into the middle class,” said Susanne Schindler, an architect and historian who is a research fellow at the Harvard center.
The YIMBY movement and the zoning reforms and pro-building movements it inspired are encouraging developments. But that usually means relying on large-scale developers. It’s a private endeavor, not a public one. But the crisis is so big, and affects so many already vulnerable people, that we need a more ambitious solution, one that revives an idea too many people have dismissed as a failure of the past.
Minneapolis: Center of Progressive Reforms
At the same time, the Minneapolis planning department and the University of Minnesota had both been working on projects showing the lasting effects of historical racial segregation in the city. “The University of Minnesota had started a program called Mapping Prejudice, and they had students that were going in and reading restrictive racial covenant deeds and mapping them,” said Meg McMahon, planning director for the city. “[We] were able to utilize some of their research to really help explain to our policymakers that, you know, these historic policies and practices and capitalism and all these other factors have really created pretty segregated communities that really were producing disparate income outcomes for our community members.”
A grassroots group called Neighbors for More Neighbors sprang up to aggressively support aspects of the plan, especially the elimination of single-family housing zoning, and to counter opposition to the 2040 plan. “There were community members … [who] were opposed to the inclusion of duplexes and triplexes,” McMahon said. The group put up signs that said DEVELOPERS WIN, with pictures of bulldozers. “So the Neighbors for More Neighbors group got on their bicycles, and they rode through the whole city, and they mapped where every single sign was, and were able to overlay it with demographic information about the city to show that the neighborhoods that were opposed to the Minneapolis 2040 plan were predominantly white, predominantly wealthy, single-family homeowners,” she continued. In other words, the opposite of groups that might be helped by building more housing.
In the past, nearly every development proposal in the city went through a rigorous approval process, and McMahon said the city had learned that those processes had encountered strong opposition, especially from well-resourced neighborhoods, that resulted in inequality in the ways neighborhoods were developed. Now, the process front-loads public commentary to create a plan with hard-and-fast rules that treat every neighborhood the same and limit the ways individual projects in individual neighborhoods can be challenged or altered. It helps that elected officials in the city are generally pro-housing, and now when neighbors oppose any individual project, their representatives can point to the 2040 plan and say their hands are tied. If a project follows the rules, it’s allowed.
Developers build to make money, and making money requires that rents rise and stay high enough for them to make a profit. They’re not concerned with affordability, and they won’t build if their investments don’t pay off.
And this is precisely the rock upon which reforms like Minneapolis’s often crash. Affordability describes the limit to the kind of YIMBY reforms cities have made and want to make. The goal of zoning reforms and other changes, like removing red tape and limiting permitting requirements and environmental reviews, may entice more developers to build more housing, but it won’t ensure affordability on its own, particularly for low- and middle-income families. “I am a supply skeptic in the sense that I don’t think just building more will automatically bring prices down, especially in certain markets like Boston or New York or San Francisco,” Schindler said. “Prices follow what people can pay, so if incomes are so high in these places, and people are willing to pay absurd amounts for an apartment, that’s what the market is going to charge.”
The clearest solution is to remove the need for a profit, which means the solution won’t be found in the marketplace. Nonprofits across the country are stretching to try to meet the need, but they’ve never been able to operate at the scale of the federal government. That’s how other countries ensure there’s enough housing up and down the income scale to see to it that everyone can get a home—through public housing. In the United States, our relatively brief—and wildly underfunded—foray into public housing is often viewed as a disaster. But could it be part of the future solution, without making the same mistakes that we did in the past?
We Never Fully Committed to Public Housing
Large-scale development intended for people with limited incomes wasn’t entirely new. The Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia had been built by the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers of America in the 1930s to house hosiery workers. And mining companies and other entities had long built workforce housing in the cities and towns where they dominated, so that their workers could live close by. But the large-scale government intervention to guarantee a basic level of housing was new, and it mimicked the design of other programs at the time: It created a floor through which the very poorest couldn’t fall. They wouldn’t be homeless. But the homes were also intended in many cases to be a stepping stone to stability, not necessarily homes forever. In fact, the Trump administration has proposed time limits on public housing and rental assistance based on this idea. “It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner told the Associated Press in July. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.”
It didn’t help that a number of city agencies had been rife with disorder and corruption in the middle of the last century, and some cities, like Chicago, were notorious for building as cheaply as possible to begin with. The developments were also mapped onto existing prejudices and injustices, which led to public housing complexes being built in already racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, and on land near industrial uses that people paying market rates didn’t want to live near. In some cases, building in distressed neighborhoods led numerous neighborhoods to spiral even further into disrepair, and white flight in the 1970s and 1980s left many public buildings in a permanent ghetto.
The disrepair that many city housing authority buildings fell into led to even more disinvestment, until the federal government completely stopped promoting public housing. Rather than reckon with the legacy of public housing and all of its promises and failures, the United States simply stopped building it. In 1998, the Faircloth Amendment passed, named for North Carolina Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth, essentially prohibiting any new public housing units from being built. In the 1990s, the most notorious public housing high-rises in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston were torn down. Federal programs sought to replace them with mixed-income, mixed-used developments spread throughout cities, but the total number of units fell overall, and the redevelopment programs had mixed results.
Amid the YIMBY debates and zoning reforms and arguments for abundance, some policymakers are revisiting and reimaging what public housing could be. The government, this argument goes, should simply build affordable units itself rather than try to convince developers to do it. The challenges would be formidable: to overcome public housing’s past, along with voter reluctance to trust the government to do anything. Then there’s adequately funding such a big building program. But perhaps the largest challenge of all is to define the project in a way that provides housing to a broad enough population that it would create more political support for it and not leave behind the very low-income families who rely on old-school public housing to this day.
Social housing is not a new idea, but progressive policy advocates started focusing on it in the United States in 2018, after the publication of a paper from the People’s Policy Project by Saoirse Gowan and Ryan Cooper. Social housing has taken on many definitions, but at an event on the topic in April, the Center for Joint Housing Studies at Harvard defined it as, fundamentally, housing that is taken off the rental market to be permanently affordable. That can mean that it’s owned publicly or by nonprofits, but in general it’s insulated from the private market. It could also further other goals, like green and fair-labor building practices, racial and socioeconomic equity, and community control. The owning entities would cap rents at an affordable level, usually around 30 percent of a household’s income. Many point to models like those in Vienna, which has owned and developed almost half of the city’s residential housing since it began rebuilding after World War II.
In Minneapolis, social housing is beginning to gain a foothold. CTUL, the renters organization, has advisory committees composed of members who decide what policies to push for at the local and state levels. Perez, Rodriguez, and other members of the group had watched over the years as their rents went up, but their incomes didn’t. They watched as the city transformed zoning laws, and rents still weren’t affordable for many in their community, who were especially vulnerable because they were often new immigrants who didn’t speak English as a first language and were unfamiliar with the cities’ and state’s laws about housing. That led to a shift. “Social housing is more for the community,” Perez said. “We can see a lot of buildings, but no stable housing. We need established, stable housing for everybody, and people can decide where to live.”
A YIMBY Dream
Last year, Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith introduced a bill, with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that would have created social housing in the United States, among other changes. It would have repealed the Faircloth Amendment and allowed for the possibility of new public housing, while also creating funding streams that would allow for the kind of mixed-income developments by both governments and nonprofits to create permanently affordable housing.
The bill did not go anywhere before November’s election. In February, Smith announced she wouldn’t seek reelection, which means the bill would need a new champion in the Senate. Under President Donald Trump, such a program would be even less likely, and already existing housing programs, like Section 8, are under threat by Republicans who want to impose time limits and work requirements on the people who receive those benefits, or to block grant those programs to the states in ways that will reduce funding over time. Popkin thinks that makes it especially important to focus on the low-income population who aren’t served by the private market in any way. “There’s no one else who’s going to make that investment,” she said.
In the second Trump administration, progressives may find themselves in the position they’re often in: defending inadequate programs that already exist from the relentless onslaught of Republican attacks and attempts at defunding and dismantling them. “I don’t think that progressives should be defending the status quo,” Smith said, when I asked her about that tendency. “I think we should be developing ideas that get after the core problems that make housing such a big problem for so many Americans. And I don’t think now is the time to be sort of retrenching and saying, ‘We need to, you know, protect what we have.’ We should be defining a new world.”
Somewhat unusually, however, the authority has a portfolio of 700 “scattered-site family homes,” or houses in neighborhoods around the city. I toured one recently that had taken advantage of the city’s new zoning rules to turn what had been a single-family home into a new unit that will house six families.
Because it’s in a neighborhood full of private homes, it faces different community issues than a taller, high-rise public housing building would. But its superpower is that the new zoning rules could help mute community opposition to the redevelopment. Many of the homes that the authority currently owns around the city need improvements and repairs, and rezoning the lots to house even more families could move more and more of those in need off the waiting lists. But they don’t have easy access to funding, though Smith’s bill would have provided it.
The 2040 plan has been so accepted in city politics that many of the mayoral candidates—the election is in November—are running on its successes and promising to do more. “Minneapolis deserves a future that’s more equitable, more sustainable, and more connected,” the city’s current mayor, Jacob Frey, said in a statement.
State legislators have introduced bills encouraging more cities to adopt zoning reforms, though they haven’t gained enough support to pass. Which is to say, Minneapolis is trying every approach to building more affordable housing, and it’s still not enough. The residents want more and are pushing for their elected officials to protect them even more. And what social housing advocates want is a massive, committed investment from the federal government, one that would acknowledge housing as a need for people and not just a source for profit for developers.
I asked Alexander Deng, a 30-year-old volunteer with Neighbors for More Neighbors, if he’d seen anyone lose out, or the city lose anything, by trying to build more affordable housing and advocate for the changes the city hopes to see more of. “I’m a little scared for the cute little houses and the cute little historic areas in town,” he said. He described how, when he first moved to the city, he’d lived in a building near where single-family homes had dominated. These had since all been bulldozed to make way for big buildings. He was a little sad to see those disappear, but he also recognized that they’d made way for hundreds of new residents. “If people want the cute house and they want a cute yard, then you don’t have to be downtown,” he said. “We have to keep a city as a city where lots of people can live and work and have their full life.”
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