FORUM Summary: Bringing Unique Voices Together to Talk About Housing Solutions
Minnesota Women’s Press 12/03/2025
Housing attainability is an issue nationwide, as the gap between wages and costs of living widens. It can seem to be a depressing and overwhelming community issue to solve. But as Anne Mavity, executive director of Minnesota Housing Partnership (MHP), put it at our December 1 forum about solutions:
“The point of optimism for me is that human beings have made policies that have tied ourselves up in knots over generations, with all these different rules — and that also means we get to change them. We can be smarter today and adopt new policies that are better reflective of what we need and what we want and how we want our communities to look.”
MHP tracks federal funding and policy changes. The organization’s July report about rental assistance in the state showed that more than 100,000 Minnesota households rely on vouchers, supporting an estimated 177,000 people. Rental assistance is often the only thing keeping low-income families housed. Federal proposals to zero out that funding in the 2026 budget have alarmed local advocates. “That’s one of the most effective tools we have to keep people in their homes,” Mavity says.
#1: Fixing the System Upstream
Financial assistance alone, however, cannot solve a housing market that simply isn’t producing enough units, she added. Minnesota’s development and zoning processes are outdated and counterproductive.
An opportunity of the broken housing system, she said, is that people across income levels and communities are paying attention. “Housing is a top priority in the state,” Mavity noted. “It’s what candidates hear when they knock on doors.”
Mavity suggests that the most meaningful action in 2026 might come through voter engagement rather than legislative spending. “This election is where people can press candidates on what they’re going to do about housing,” she says.
To create long-term funding stability, Mavity said, a coalition of groups is promoting statewide housing constitutional amendment. Modeled after Minnesota’s 2008 Legacy Amendment, the Our Future Starts at Home campaign is working to dedicate three-eighths of one percent in sales tax — generating nearly $500 million annually for 27 years toward filling housing gaps.
In the 2025 legislative session, MHP was part of a network supporting seven bills. This bipartisan work will begin again with a slate of housing-focused statewide legislators ready to support housing solutions. As legislators wrote in an op-ed in March 2025: “Minnesota home sale data shows that the largest share of sales last year came for homes sold for more than $500,000. This is happening for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that in many communities it is illegal or exceedingly difficult to build duplexes, townhouses or anything that isn’t a luxury home. Making matters worse are local policies that dictate luxury materials be used or other regulations that serve to drive up costs.”
To be part of the ongoing effort to increase housing options — partly by encouraging adjustments to regulations to make it easier to develop modular spaces, downtown office conversions, tiny home lots, and more — sign up to the Yes to Homes campaign.
#2: Develop Attainable Housing Stock
For 18-year-old Sha’Micah Hicks, the gaps in Minnesota’s housing system are lived experience. After her family’s home burned in 2017, without renter’s insurance, they did not meet narrow shelter eligibility requirements. Since she was not part of a single-mother–led household, and not escaping an abusive environment, there were few options. Couch-hopping is not considered a dire need, like sleeping on the streets is. “You can’t simply need help” to access resources, she says. “There needs to be a [deeper] problem.”
Transitional shelters are short-term solutions; waiting lists for more permanent housing can stretch on for years. She and her mother are now living on their own in an apartment that is difficult to afford. Her mother could move into a more affordable senior housing space in the spring, after she turns 55, and then Hicks would need to figure out how to afford her own rent somewhere as a new high school graduate.
As a student at High School for Recording Arts in St Paul, in collaboration with Catalyst for Systems Change, Hicks was part of developing a video about the realities of youth living with housing insecurity. Using Minnesota Department of Education data, taken from a particular day in October each year, the video shared that young people experiencing homelessness statewide has increased 32 percent since 2018, impacting at least 10,000 children and youth — and not including additional young people who experience homelessness after data from schools is submitted to MDE in October.
A Developer Motivated to Be Part of the Solution
Emerging developer Adriane Epps described growing up in an unsafe neighborhood; at age 14, he lost his older brother Twoie to gun violence. Epps now runs a housing development firm called TWOIE, which he has turned into an acronym: “The Way Out Is Education.” Not only is he working to develop a portfolio of new attainable homes, but he plans to mentor young people in the trades while he does it.
Epps recently completed his first residential project — a four-bedroom, solar-ready home in south Minneapolis. It took him two and a half years to get city approval to buy the existing lot, and $40,000 of his own savings for pre-development costs, unsure of whether his proposal would be accepted. Many emerging developers, he says, simply can’t afford to take such a risk. “There’s just so much red tape,” he says.
Once the approval was finally received, it took only five months to build the home, which is being sold to a family for $274,000, thanks in part to a City of Lakes Community Land Trust that owns the land and thus makes it more affordable for the home owner.
Epps credits the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund for backing him when commercial banks would not. “They didn’t invest in my project — they invested in me,” he says. He now has three more projects slated for 2026.
As one of few Black developers in Minneapolis, he says he has to “work twice as hard just to get to the starting line.” Still, he’s determined to show what community-rooted development can look like. “I’m living proof,” Epps says. “Give us the opportunity, and we will prevail.”
Working With Students on Solutions
Forum audience member Joe Nathan pointed out that — thanks to Hicks and other students who testified — the Minnesota Housing Agency offers $100,000 grants that high schools statewide can tap into in order to be part of a collaborative house-building project that teaches construction skills in the process. “Three-bedroom homes have been built by high school kids,” he said. This involves “collaborations of school districts, students, parents, and community groups to create these more affordable homes.”
As founder of the Center for School Change, Nathan encourages Minnesotans to “build on the strengths and the creativity of these young people.” He pointed out that people like Hicks have “gone to the legislature and convinced legislators — in some cases, fairly hostile legislators — to build bipartisan support” for housing initiatives. There is more we can do, he said, to work with “the energy of young people who are eager to help make a difference.”
He added that “we have invested enormous amounts of money in shelters. The priority, according to the young people, ought to be permanent affordable housing.” To help do that, Nathan said, we need to make it easier to build.
“Through all kinds of good intentions, we have created an enormous array of red ink and regulations that a number of you have talked about. The point a couple of you have made is so critical — in the next election, we need to have a conversation about what can be reduced and what can be eliminated, so that a number of the creative ideas that have been discussed can flourish.
“There’s enormous creativity, some of which displayed on this platform tonight, that is being stifled by making people jump through enormous hoops.”
#3: Consciously Build Villages
At Agate Housing and Services, seven outreach workers connect each year with nearly 4,000 people, many living in tents, cars, or temporary camps, says executive director Kyle Hanson. Many people experiencing homelessness have lost trust in their community, government, neighborhood, and family. “That broken trust is something that needs to be repaired,” he said.
Teams load vans in the morning before going into the community “so they can offer something tactile: food, socks, gloves, coats.” The first question outreach workers ask is: “What do you need today? That might be as simple as ‘we need some food, water, something warm, a sleeping bag.’”
Reconnecting people to permanent housing, and matching people to the right programs, can often require months of work assembling identification documents. “And you can’t do them in random order, right? You need a birth certificate first so you can get your social security card, so you can get your driver’s license. That takes months, especially if you’re not from here and you don’t have contact with family members back home.” Agate offers mailbox services for more than 1,500 people so that documents have a fixed address for delivery.
He says a new 54-bed shelter has been built and newly opened in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis. Another space was created from an old roadside motel.
Some community meetings can include people who reject resources like this in their backyard. “For there to be voices in the room that say, ‘please do build the building here and tell us how we can be good neighbors’ — it makes a huge difference,” Hanson says.
Moving indoors — into a solo space — also can be traumatizing after living in an outside community. At both new locations, he said, neighbors are doing the small things that matter. “In my 25-year career, this was the warmest welcoming by community,” Hanson said. People are making curtains and bedspreads for the new residents. “They’re putting together move-in baskets for every resident, with a stockpile of cleaning supplies, fresh bedding, towels. If you’re moving from being outside to being inside, you don’t have much to bring with you. That first night in a space can be pretty difficult, right? So the neighborhood actually showed up. All it took was them saying, what do you need?”
A woman at his church is “sewing hand towels with ‘you are loved’ messages for our trans community, for our queer community, in rainbow colors.” Others are making sandwiches to provide lunch for shelter guests, or offering mentoring and resume writing services.
For Others Seeking Intentional Communities
The forum also included the story of Minnesotans seeking to create intentional co-housing spaces, featuring private homes connected through a shared interest in proactively being community — whether that is LGBTQ+ or elders or families.
Becca Brackett, a First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis congregant, talked about the value of “everyone living next door to someone who cares about them. Co-housing is a special type of intentional community founded by a group who want to work cooperatively with each other and create a common lifestyle reflecting their values. They have common meals. Co-housing reduces social isolation and gives a sense of belonging,” she said.
It gives older adults new access to friendships. Families have trusted neighbors to babysit kids, including intergenerational relationships, since so many children are not living near grandparents. Residents can share a lawnmower, garden, BBQ pit, and laundry facilities. Regular happy hours can be hosted in a common area.
An architect and developer can help create resident-designed common spaces that are self-managed, not run under elder care management or other third-party owners. Brackett said there are currently two co-housing spaces in the Twin Cities: Monterey in St. Louis Park and the Twin Cities Family Cooperative in Marcy Holmes neighborhood, but many groups statewide are trying to generate support for developments.
Brackett subsequently shared a story of how the Washington-state–based Village Cohousing Works helps people buy their own manufactured homes by covering upfront costs. Said the nonprofit owner Sarah Ben Olson: “By the time somebody has ended up unsheltered, they’re at the tail end of like 10 years at least of deep poverty. Once they have slept outside, it is so much harder and more expensive to get them permanently housed, and that’s if you use all the best practices — social services, and all the stuff they’re gonna need … because it’s such a traumatic experience. So we looked at it from the angle of, what is the cheapest, quickest and most permanent way we could do anything to impact the situation where we live?
“We decided the best thing we could do is prevent people from ever becoming homeless.”
The forum offered creative and multi-faceted solutions to pervasive issues. The state needs long-term funding, structural zoning reform, and development paths that welcome rather than discourage emerging builders. It needs more attainable permanent housing options, including for young people, with funding streams that don’t evaporate midway through a project.
As Sha’Micah Hicks noted, the goal must be generational change. “We should build something that lasts.”
Thanks to the Wilson Social Justice Fund at the First Unitarian Society Foundation, Minnesota Women’s Press not only has funds to support stories with people who have lived experiences to create deeper understanding of needs and solutions, but some funds to amplify any of these action steps our statewide community expresses an interest in:
Story Development
Being part of storytelling teams to collect, record, and amplify lived-experience housing stories.
Helping to develop a talking-points curriculum for asking candidates about housing priorities.
Using a discussion guide series to talk with neighbors about housing needs and solutions.
Fixing Systems Upstream
Circulating and promoting the Yes to Homes petition to make it easier to build attainable homes.
Being part of building momentum for the proposed Our Future Starts at Home constitutional amendment (sales-tax-based housing trust) to build energy in statewide communities.
Explaining to others how to use the income tax credit to support housing.
Developing Housing Options
Co-designing a mentorship and workforce pathway tied to development projects.
Encouraging and supporting local school districts and community partners to apply for Minnesota Housing Agency grants and engage in mentoring high-school construction and trades programs.
Being Neighborly
Becoming part of a co-housing network to expand outreach and resources for intentional housing groups, and support resident-involved planning pilots.
Helping to coordinate and publicize neighborhood support activities (move-in baskets, meals, sewing, mentoring, mail collection) to support new housing residents leaving housing insecurities.
Find a sign-up sheet here, and we will be in touch in early 2026 for next steps.
Top Honor For The Valiance. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Minneapolis awards The Valiance and UrbanWorks Architecture its highest honor. Learn
