On Friday, February 23 the Center for Urban & Regional Affairs (CURA) announced the findings of their research on gentrification in Minneapolis & St. Paul. They confirmed what everyone in the Twin Cities already knows: gentrification is happening here. Their research showed that neighborhoods in North, Northeast, and Phillips / Elliot Park in Minneapolis, along with the Hamline-Midway, West Side, West 7th, and Frogtown neighborhoods in St. Paul have gentrified. The researchers made a point to emphasize that they used a conservative measure of gentrification, based on data that ended in 2015. It is therefore likely that gentrification is happening in more communities than just those specifically highlighted by this study.

 

Aside from confirmation that gentrification is happening in the Twin Cities, we were gratified to see that their research validates many of the specific claims and arguments Defend Glendale & Public Housing Coalition has been making for years.

 

Last week we published a fact-sheet on Area Median Income (AMI) housing that showed how so-called “affordable housing” that is tied to AMI would be too expensive for the low-income populations that currently live in public housing. Similarly, CURA’s research on the Frogtown-Thomas Dale neighborhood in St. Paul showed that “affordable” AMI housing built in that neighborhood was prohibitively expensive for most residents currently living there. Even housing set at 30% AMI (often branded as “deeply affordable housing”) was not affordable for about half of the families living there.

 

This is why we must protect public housing from the current plans to privatize and disperse public housing in Minneapolis. Public housing is the only truly affordable housing in the Twin Cities. It is the height of hypocrisy that many of the same politicians and non-profits that love to  talk about the need for more affordable housing are complicit in the current plans to eradicate the most affordable housing stock in the Twin Cities.  We also need these politicians to take action on rent control and to stop the exorbitant rents that low-income and working class families are paying. Many who do not live in public housing pay more than 50% of their income for rent, especially those who live in neighborhoods right by the lightrail. The lightrail, and the development that follows in its wake, is intensifying gentrification and the displacement of people of color out of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

 

To read the CURA study in its entirety, please visit;

http://gentrification.umn.edu/