Five15 on the Park - 515 15th Avenue South

Calhoun-Isles, Cedar-Riverside, Longfellow, Nokomis, Phillips, Powderhorn, and Southwest
schmitzm03
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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby schmitzm03 » May 30th, 2014, 1:48 pm

Question: Is it better (for the residents) to disperse affordable housing to locations which lack the access to support services and high quality transit options?
A great many affordable housing residents want to live in these locations. Waiting lists in the suburbs are extremely long. They have far, far better schools, better entry-level job opportunities, are safer, generate better health outcomes, and are just generally considered friendlier places for families to live than poor urban neighborhoods. Access to transit is obviously fantastic if you can get it, but is, in my experience, generally prioritized far below schools and jobs.

You don't just have to take my word for it, though: the Met Council's Housing Need report weighs current supply, expected population growth, access to jobs, and transportation to generate projections of need. (Note that this doesn't even address things like superior suburban schools or current concentrations of poverty and segregation.) It's telling how low the central cities' share ends up being: a combined total of 13 percent. You can check it out here: http://www.metrocouncil.org/getattachme ... c1fb/.aspx
Interesting points, but isn't at least part of the reason Minneapolis and St. Paul only make up 13% of the projected need is because the core cities are only projected by the Met Council to comprise about 15% of future population growth and they already have a significantly greater % of total housing that is considered "affordable" at 60% AMI than the rest of the metro?

In short, I wouldn't say those projections say much at all about households preferring the suburbs. If anything, they are based on the contention that households prefer proximity to jobs, affordable housing, and accessible transit (in fact, the backbone of the projections is precisely these three variables). Skimming through the data tables, Minneapolis appears to have a much higher "job proximity" indicator than essentially any other community with more than 10,000 households; a higher availability of "affordable" housing; and the highest level of transit.

Schools and safety may be another thing, but I'm not so sure that deconcentration of impoverished communities (especially ones comprised primarily of recent immigrants) out of the city and into the suburbs wouldn't just eventually result in new spatial configurations of poverty and segregation. I think this article describes my thinking on this fairly well: http://www.thepolisblog.org/2014/01/hou ... place.html [edit: I want to be clear I am not claiming to have had anything to do with the authorship of the linked post, just that it fits with my own thinking]

To be clear, I do not think I am even close to having answers to these issues...I just don't think it is as simple as saying poverty concentration has negative effects so deconcentration must be good. (Hope I didn't just throw up a straw man?)

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby Tcmetro » May 30th, 2014, 2:34 pm

Well I don't believe that concentrating public housing in one area is the right thing to do, I also don't believe it's fair to locate the needy away from public transit services that connect them to the jobs and schools that can help them move upward in society. This housing is great in that aspect. It is directly served by two light rail lines that connect the neighborhood to all of the biggest job centers, shopping centers, colleges and universities, hospitals, and the airport. From that standpoint, it is much easier for residents of public housing in Cedar-Riverside to access upward mobility and opportunity. If we build public housing in Plymouth, Maple Grove, insert any 2nd ring suburb, etc, etc. how do those residents access the jobs that can help them out. Many suburban locations lack the public transit that can carry these people to the places they precisely need to go. In Eden Prairie, there are no local bus routes, only commuter expresses that are essentially parking shuttles for wealthy suburbanites to go to their downtown offices. Public housing residents who cannot afford cars are thus only able to walk or bike to the retail jobs or to purchase groceries. These people are then isolated in small islands of poverty, and cannot easily access the very opportunity that will help them out.

It is also a fallacy to say that there is only demand for public housing in the suburbs. Minneapolis Public Housing rarely opens the waiting list, and when it does, that list is 10 years long. We need a significant expansion of public housing in general, which is going to require massive public investment in mixed-income communities. The Glenwood-Olson public housing was a good example of what not to do, that is to isolate a low-income community in an area surrounded by highways, railroads, and parks. Cedar-Riverside is at least a better connected neighborhood, and is within walking distance of a lot of jobs and stores.

We need to have limits on where public housing should be built. I think a good rule of thumb would to only build public housing within walking distance of a bus service that operates every 30 minutes or better, and has evening and weekend services.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 2nd, 2014, 10:11 am

Interesting points, but isn't at least part of the reason Minneapolis and St. Paul only make up 13% of the projected need is because the core cities are only projected by the Met Council to comprise about 15% of future population growth and they already have a significantly greater % of total housing that is considered "affordable" at 60% AMI than the rest of the metro?

In short, I wouldn't say those projections say much at all about households preferring the suburbs. If anything, they are based on the contention that households prefer proximity to jobs, affordable housing, and accessible transit (in fact, the backbone of the projections is precisely these three variables). Skimming through the data tables, Minneapolis appears to have a much higher "job proximity" indicator than essentially any other community with more than 10,000 households; a higher availability of "affordable" housing; and the highest level of transit.
I know -- as I suggested, the study is badly oversimplified and ignores a number of important issues in housing placement. But even given a model that is about as friendly to the central cities as you could make it, it produces a housing share for them far lower than the actual share of funding they receive. To give a sense of the scale of spending on these central city projects, Five15 is costing about $52M, virtually all of it public money. The entire metro region's LIHTC budget for 2015 is equivalent (post-syndication) to about $70M.
Schools and safety may be another thing, but I'm not so sure that deconcentration of impoverished communities (especially ones comprised primarily of recent immigrants) out of the city and into the suburbs wouldn't just eventually result in new spatial configurations of poverty and segregation. I think this article describes my thinking on this fairly well: http://www.thepolisblog.org/2014/01/hou ... place.html [edit: I want to be clear I am not claiming to have had anything to do with the authorship of the linked post, just that it fits with my own thinking]
I'd find the ideas in that article a lot more persuasive if we didn't have immediate historic precedent regarding large-scale concentrations of public housing. Public housing residents lived in unbelievable poverty, as bad as anything witnessed in the United States in the 20th century. They had virtually no chance of ever escaping the slums they were born into. And the persistence of this terrible poverty long after the success of civil rights in the South -- despite many attempts to address urban privation and segregation, even by many of the same groups and leaders -- belies the idea that concentration generates political strength. To focus on the support networks that grew up in the slums and ghettos is to miss the forest for the trees: the support networks were undoubtedly a necessary lifeline for many of these people, but the lifeline was necessary first and foremost because society had consigned them to such profound hardship.

As you say, even taking all that as true, that doesn't mean the answer is simply poverty dispersal. But no matter how we structure our affordable housing development, the bulk of our poor, nonwhite population is going to remain concentrated in the central cities -- there just isn't enough money currently available for affordable housing to reverse that trend. The article you posted -- which seems dedicatedly unempirical in this regard -- talks about how dispersal clears the way for gentrification, but as someone noted earlier, that rarely, rarely happens. Much more frequently, poor, distressed neighborhoods remain poor and distressed. And that is certainly the case here: if Minnesota spent every housing dollar it had in the rich city neighborhoods or whitest suburbs, it probably still couldn't truly deconcentrate poverty in North, Frogtown, Cedar-Riverside, and so on, nor could it break up immigrant communities. But it could provide lower-income, nonwhite Minnesotans a lot more opportunity to pursue jobs and schools and in a community of their own choosing.

And at the very least, it shouldn't be using that money to make the problem of concentration worse.
Well I don't believe that concentrating public housing in one area is the right thing to do, I also don't believe it's fair to locate the needy away from public transit services that connect them to the jobs and schools that can help them move upward in society. This housing is great in that aspect. It is directly served by two light rail lines that connect the neighborhood to all of the biggest job centers, shopping centers, colleges and universities, hospitals, and the airport. From that standpoint, it is much easier for residents of public housing in Cedar-Riverside to access upward mobility and opportunity. If we build public housing in Plymouth, Maple Grove, insert any 2nd ring suburb, etc, etc. how do those residents access the jobs that can help them out. Many suburban locations lack the public transit that can carry these people to the places they precisely need to go. In Eden Prairie, there are no local bus routes, only commuter expresses that are essentially parking shuttles for wealthy suburbanites to go to their downtown offices. Public housing residents who cannot afford cars are thus only able to walk or bike to the retail jobs or to purchase groceries. These people are then isolated in small islands of poverty, and cannot easily access the very opportunity that will help them out.

...

We need to have limits on where public housing should be built. I think a good rule of thumb would to only build public housing within walking distance of a bus service that operates every 30 minutes or better, and has evening and weekend services.
Honestly, this sort of reads as transit fetishism to me.


Central cities have always been at the center of transit networks and that hasn't prevented them from generating immense concentrations of poverty. The well-documented disadvantages of living in a distressed neighborhood are not rendered immaterial because someone living there can take a train ride to a better place. I find this approach especially frustrating because it assumes that people with lower incomes have dramatically different preferences than everyone else. Too often I see it used as a convenient defense of the status quo: "Many millions of people opt to live in areas ill-served by transit, but we shouldn't worry about whether low-income families feel the same, because surely they need access to twelve bus lines to thrive."

Yes, transit should be a consideration (although many of these families have access to cars). It is not the only one, and certainly not the most important.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby mplsjaromir » June 2nd, 2014, 10:42 am

The quip about suburban schools being far, far better just shows suburban bias. Its not that the schools are better than in suburbs, it just that the kids in suburban schools have access to many more resources. Low income families are not going to get more resources by osmosis. It not as if the City of Wayzata has a fantastic anti-poverty program, they just don't people in poverty live there.

The fact is that the suburb's reason for existence is so that wealthy individuals could put distance themselves from poor individuals. This nefarious and and anti-social pathology is built into the DNA of the suburbs, building a few token public housing unit is not going to abridge this sentiment. Fetishizing a homogeneous, bland and wasteful suburban lifestyle is the last thing I hope to see our affordable housing policy achieve.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby FISHMANPET » June 2nd, 2014, 10:47 am

You seem to be making the assumption that, given the choice, the community that has grown in Cedar Riverside would prefer to disperse to the suburbs, and I'm not sure that's true either. Certainly there are services for the community that an immediate immigrant with no English ability and even very little knowledge of their native language (preliterate) would want that are most easily provide in a setting like that. I live across 94 from Cedar Riverside in an "average" priced apartment, and there are plenty of East Africans that live in my building, I've even seen a couple in expensive cars, so I think they've escaped the gut wrenching poverty, yet they're still in the neighborhood.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby schmitzm03 » June 2nd, 2014, 3:19 pm

I know -- as I suggested, the study is badly oversimplified and ignores a number of important issues in housing placement. But even given a model that is about as friendly to the central cities as you could make it, it produces a housing share for them far lower than the actual share of funding they receive. To give a sense of the scale of spending on these central city projects, Five15 is costing about $52M, virtually all of it public money. The entire metro region's LIHTC budget for 2015 is equivalent (post-syndication) to about $70M.
Just so I understand, when you say "virtually all of it public money" are you saying that literally almost all of the cost for this development is coming directly out of public coffers? To ask it in another way, are you saying that "virtually all" of the $52M for the project is directly paid by the public and is not, rather, subsidized financing (the latter being significantly different in terms of its actual cost to the public)?

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 2nd, 2014, 3:42 pm

Just so I understand, when you say "virtually all of it public money" are you saying that literally almost all of the cost for this development is coming directly out of public coffers? To ask it in another way, are you saying that "virtually all" of the $52M for the project is directly paid by the public and is not, rather, subsidized financing (the latter being significantly different in terms of its actual cost to the public)?
I was including both direct financing and subsidized financing (although I don't think this is uncommon; the Strib article posted earlier did the same, for instance). My background is legal, not financial, so I'll happily admit I rarely have a precise sense of how much some of the more arcane subsidized financing sources are actually costing. I've also always found that developers play a lot of games with the numbers in this regard; e.g., describing syndication proceeds as private financing, which is only true in the narrowest sense.


Still, I think by any metric this is an unusually large and expensive development, and is relying to an unusually heavy degree on public funding sources. Usually there's at least some purely private financing; this proposal doesn't have any, as best as I can tell.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby schmitzm03 » June 2nd, 2014, 4:20 pm

I think at this point it would be helpful to have a discussion of the facts, just so anyone interested has the chance to know what is actually being done on this project. For those interested, CPED's staff report for the Community Development Committee has a breakdown of the funding: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups ... 116805.pdf

While the staff report indicates that 80% of the funding is private, it seems clear much (if not all...I'm no expert) of the "private" portion is subsidized (e.g., tax exempt housing revenue bonds...which as I understand it would essentially be subsidized financing, right?).

That is to say, while there is a heavy subsidy to this project, I don't think it could be characterized as most of the actual funding, certainly not "virtually all of it public money"...unless "public money" includes publicly subsidized money. In my book, these are substantially different, but what do I know?

Also, it should be noted that by the time final funding was approved the project had morphed so that 50% of the proposed units would have neither income nor rent restrictions.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby Tcmetro » June 2nd, 2014, 4:23 pm

Honestly, this sort of reads as transit fetishism to me.


Central cities have always been at the center of transit networks and that hasn't prevented them from generating immense concentrations of poverty. The well-documented disadvantages of living in a distressed neighborhood are not rendered immaterial because someone living there can take a train ride to a better place. I find this approach especially frustrating because it assumes that people with lower incomes have dramatically different preferences than everyone else. Too often I see it used as a convenient defense of the status quo: "Many millions of people opt to live in areas ill-served by transit, but we shouldn't worry about whether low-income families feel the same, because surely they need access to twelve bus lines to thrive."

Yes, transit should be a consideration (although many of these families have access to cars). It is not the only one, and certainly not the most important.
The cost of operating a car (payments, insurance, gas, repairs) is several hundred dollars per month, whereas a bus pass is maybe 100 dollars per month. This makes a huge difference to public housing residents (who are probably making about 1000 dollars per month or so) which is why living near public transit is important. It doesn't make any sense for the most impoverished citizens to live out in Chaska so they can spend 30% of their income on a car so that they can commute to an entry-level job. Building public housing in suburban areas with little in the way of post-secondary schools or higher-level jobs is just going to isolate poor people and keep them poor. They will not have the access to places to improve their lives, as they will be working to pay for the car that will allow them to access their job.

It isn't transit fetishism, it's a reminder that poor people need to use public transit in order to get around because they can't afford cars. Making sure that poor people can access public transit will improve their quality of life. If public transit wasn't an issue to poor people why would they live at Cedar-Riverside? There are tons of subsidized rentals all over the suburbs too. It's just that a lot of people don't want to live their because they would be isolated and would face ridiculous commute times on low-frequency circuitous bus routes. If you were poor would you rather be able to take a train for 20-30 minutes to your job or spend 2 hours on suburban bus routes that operate infrequently and don't operate for 2nd or 3rd shifts?

The other problem with your argument is that no one is going to live in a market-rate apartment at Cedar-Riverside. There's no demand for such things. This building will help poor people have a place to live near public transit. There are 10000 people on a waiting list for Section 8 housing in Minneapolis, and the MPHA hasn't accepted applications for years.

You're arguments are misguided. Poor people don't want to live in suburban communities where the societies are accepting of the poor, job access is terrible and they become isolated in apartment complexes. Residents in Cedar-Riverside are a walk away from the U and tons of jobs and have created their own community. All of this makes Cedar-Riverside an attractive community to the Somali immigrants because of this support network and nearby opportunity.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 2nd, 2014, 4:47 pm

I think at this point it would be helpful to have a discussion of the facts, just so anyone interested has the chance to know what is actually being done on this project. For those interested, CPED's staff report for the Community Development Committee has a breakdown of the funding: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups ... 116805.pdf

While the staff report indicates that 80% of the funding is private, it seems clear much (if not all...I'm no expert) of the "private" portion is subsidized (e.g., tax exempt housing revenue bonds...which as I understand it would essentially be subsidized financing, right?).

That is to say, while there is a heavy subsidy to this project, I don't think it could be characterized as most of the actual funding, certainly not "virtually all of it public money"...unless "public money" includes publicly subsidized money. In my book, these are substantially different, but what do I know?

Also, it should be noted that by the time final funding was approved the project had morphed so that 50% of the proposed units would have neither income nor rent restrictions.
That all seems accurate to me. I'd still argue that this is almost entirely publicly financed in a broad sense but the government certainly isn't just writing a Bianca Fine a check for $52M. It's more like, a check for $15M, plus it's bearing the risk for the entire development (either because it's making the loans itself or it's guaranteeing them).

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby tab » June 2nd, 2014, 8:15 pm

So does 'publicly financed in a broad sense' include everyone who claims a mortgage interest tax deduction? That's the federal government's largest housing program by far, and it disproportionally benefits people with big mortgages. Unless we turn a blind eye to this federal housing subsidy, then we must agree that the suburbs are almost entirely publicly financed in a broad sense. (And rural communities and neighborhoods in Mpls with high homeownership rates too - not trying to single out the suburbs.)

FWIW - Tax exempt housing revenue bonds are essentially a mortgage, usually with a slightly lower-than-market interest rate, depending on how the bond market is valuing the tax exempt status. At times, taxable bonds have the same or better rates, because financial markets are odd creatures. The primary benefit of tax exempt bonds is that they come with 4% tax credits, which generate much less capital than 9% credits (as the name implies), and which are not part of the region's $70m allocation of 9% LIHTC's.

Yes, HUD provides a benefit to projects by offering insurance and longer amortization schedules, but it also collects fees for this service. I don't know whether HUD's mortgage insurance programs are fully self-supporting or not, but there are payments to HUD from each project to at least partially offset HUD's risk, similar to Personal Mortgage Insurance on a single-family home. Also, HUD has said 'no' to at least one local project based on risk factors it couldn't get comfortable with. There are pros and cons to working with HUD insurance programs, and some affordable housing deals are done with traditional bank financing because it simply works better for the specific deal. The public financing offered by HUD is sometimes helpful, and other times isn't better than the alternatives.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 4th, 2014, 8:25 am

So does 'publicly financed in a broad sense' include everyone who claims a mortgage interest tax deduction?
I hadn't thought of it like that, but I guess it would, wouldn't it? And hey, I'd love to get rid of the mortgage interest tax deduction -- both because of its regressive nature and because it subsidizes sprawling suburban residential patterns -- but in practical terms affordable housing financing is a very different beast with very different politics.
FWIW - Tax exempt housing revenue bonds are essentially a mortgage, usually with a slightly lower-than-market interest rate, depending on how the bond market is valuing the tax exempt status. At times, taxable bonds have the same or better rates, because financial markets are odd creatures. The primary benefit of tax exempt bonds is that they come with 4% tax credits, which generate much less capital than 9% credits (as the name implies), and which are not part of the region's $70m allocation of 9% LIHTC's.

Yes, HUD provides a benefit to projects by offering insurance and longer amortization schedules, but it also collects fees for this service. I don't know whether HUD's mortgage insurance programs are fully self-supporting or not, but there are payments to HUD from each project to at least partially offset HUD's risk, similar to Personal Mortgage Insurance on a single-family home. Also, HUD has said 'no' to at least one local project based on risk factors it couldn't get comfortable with. There are pros and cons to working with HUD insurance programs, and some affordable housing deals are done with traditional bank financing because it simply works better for the specific deal. The public financing offered by HUD is sometimes helpful, and other times isn't better than the alternatives.
This is interesting, I definitely didn't know all of this. I've always found the opacity of affordable housing finance deeply frustrating, so I appreciate the information.


It's always seemed to me that there's at least one other advantage to relying on public agencies for financing (although I'd imagine this would be somewhat more difficult with a large national agency like HUD): that developers can exert political pressure to have their obligations changed or reduced after the fact. I've read about this happening, for instance, as LIHTC developments came out of their 15-year compliance period; I'd find it hard to believe it doesn't also happen for some of the less well-monitored funding sources.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 4th, 2014, 8:38 am

If you were poor would you rather be able to take a train for 20-30 minutes to your job or spend 2 hours on suburban bus routes that operate infrequently and don't operate for 2nd or 3rd shifts?
This is what I mean by transit fetishism: you've framed the question so that quality of available public transit is literally the only consideration. Many of these families either own a car or would like to have one; others would accept a longer commute if it means that their kids can attend a school where 80% of students are at proficiency, instead of 8%. There are lots of jobs in the suburbs for lower-income and entry-level workers, but it's hard for many families to access these jobs because of the lack of accessible housing nearby.

It's weird that you focus so much on proximity to post-secondary education and "higher-level" jobs, since these are two things that manifestly do not help poor families get back on their feet.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby twincitizen » June 4th, 2014, 8:59 am

I guess I fall on the side of WHS & Myron Orfield when it comes to dispersing poverty to suburbs and in-city neighborhoods with good schools. Sure, access to transit is a consideration, but it isn't the only one and far from the most important.

A lot of urbanists like to repeat the "owning a car costs $8,000+/year" to operate & maintain. That may be the average among all Americans, but if you're poor you probably have a ~$3000 beat-up car and cheap liability-only insurance (or none at all). You probably aren't living in the exurbs with a 25-mile commute or doing much recreational driving, and you probably fix the car yourself or know someone who does, rather than bringing it to the dealership.

I'm basically repeating WHS' last comment, but there are TONS of entry-level jobs in the suburbs that are not accessible by transit and will probably never be accessible by reliable all-day transit. Those jobs aren't going anywhere, and many of those suburban communities aren't building the housing that workers of those jobs need.

That said, the urbanist side of me is damn glad this vacant lot is getting developed and setting the stage for future development around the Cedar-Riverside LRT Station. While unfortunate that it adds a significant number of low-income units to an area that probably shouldn't have any more of them...I hope it is a success and a catalyst for future market-driven development in the area.

With regards to affordable housing development in general, unless a project is, say, 40 units or less, I'd prefer that no project have more than 20% affordable units. 80/20 is a great model, and should be the industry standard. Not a requirement for all private development, but for any project receiving any public funding whatsoever (like cleanup & TOD grants or tax-exempt financing). 100% affordable new-construction projects like Greenleaf (Lyndale & 28th) or Longfellow Station (Hiawatha & 38th) should not happen. 80/20 FTW.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby FISHMANPET » June 4th, 2014, 9:25 am

With an immigrant community, the main concern for someone in gut wrenching poverty isn't access to jobs, it's access to services and community. A lot of these people can't get any job, because the don't speak any English. They need to be a part of this community while they learn English (a service that the Cedar Rivers tenant association provides right in this neighborhood). The poverty of a refuge immigrant is totally different than the poverty of an American born citizen.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby WHS » June 4th, 2014, 2:39 pm

With an immigrant community, the main concern for someone in gut wrenching poverty isn't access to jobs, it's access to services and community. A lot of these people can't get any job, because the don't speak any English. They need to be a part of this community while they learn English (a service that the Cedar Rivers tenant association provides right in this neighborhood). The poverty of a refuge immigrant is totally different than the poverty of an American born citizen.
But no one is advocating the forced removal of the Somali community from Cedar-Riverside. The neighborhood already contains a tremendous cluster of cheap and rent-restricted housing, while many suburban (and rich urban) communities are inaccessible to low-income families. Focusing affordable housing in those locales will open up living, employment, and education opportunities that don't currently exist, without endangering anyone's ability to live in Cedar-Riverside if they so choose.

Would you support a similar development in North or in Frogtown? Those aren't immigrant havens like Cedar-Riverside, but they're nonetheless hotspots for large-scale affordable development. I'm not trying to be snarky, just trying to show why the immigration thing sounds a bit like a post-hoc rationalization to me: the main characteristic unifying these big affordable projects isn't the special need for housing at the chosen site, but their being situated in very poor, very segregated areas.

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby FISHMANPET » June 4th, 2014, 3:53 pm

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

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Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby lordmoke » June 14th, 2014, 9:51 pm

I don't know if this news was buried somewhere in the other conversation on this thread, but this is under construction.

schmitzm03
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Posts: 192
Joined: August 23rd, 2012, 6:00 am
Location: Powderhorn, Minneapolis

Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby schmitzm03 » June 21st, 2014, 3:57 pm

They have a hole in the ground and are working on the foundation.
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Nick
Capella Tower
Posts: 2719
Joined: May 30th, 2012, 9:33 pm
Location: Downtown, Minneapolis

Re: Five15 On the Park - (1515 5th Street South)

Postby Nick » June 21st, 2014, 6:11 pm

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Nick Magrino
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