urbanMSP

Prison is currently inaccessible to me as a place to move to, which is fine because I in no way want to live in prison. You're talking about not concentrating poverty, but dispersing immigrant poverty wouldn't be desirable to that immigrant community. There's certainly people that want to live in this neighborhood, so it's not like we're "forcing" them. There IS a special need for housing at this site, Cedar Riverside is the landing point for most (all?) Somali immigrants in our area. By that nature they're going to be incredibly poor, and be incredibly dependent on support services located in this area. They can't speak, read, or write English. Many of them can't read or write Somali, which makes it even harder to teach them English. They certainly can't drive to low wage job, if they had a car. They can't hold any job. They need services provided by the Cedar Riverside Tenants Association, and other organizations that are hyper close to this area.

Restricting the supply of housing in Cedar Riverside does endanger someone's ability to live in Cedar Riverside, because if it's not there they can't live in it. I understand not wanting to concentrate poverty, but you seem to be holding that goal above having an actual workable living solution, rather than some ideal population distribution.

This is affordable housing but it's demand side, not supply side, meaning the government is making it cheaper to build, rather than paying for people to live there (though I'm not sure if you can then use Section 8 vouchers in such a project). Without Section 8 vouchers, these end up being around average priced, which