Alliance for Metropolitan Stability
Report date
December 2020
What has been most instrumental to your progress?
Our relationships with community-based partners are the foundation of our ability to build power for a strong housing justice movement in the region. We have secured significant tenant protections over the past few years because our deep relationships enable us to quickly organize our communities when opportunities present. Our network has grown, too—between April and September the number of community organizations engaging regularly doubled and the frequency of our meetings doubled as well, a clear indication of the high value of the partnership.
Broadly speaking, our relationships with the Anti-Displacement Policy Network and community partners helped us jointly identify the need to push for tenants’ rights as a central theme in fighting displacement. As COVID created massive employment and intensified housing issues, our relationships enabled us to identify communities’ priorities and to develop strategies to address both emergent and longstanding housing challenges. The work we invested over the preceding years helped lay trust and lines of communication that we have built upon, implementing tenant protections in Minneapolis and securing new tenant protections in St. Paul.
Broadly speaking, our relationships with the Anti-Displacement Policy Network and community partners helped us jointly identify the need to push for tenants’ rights as a central theme in fighting displacement. As COVID created massive employment and intensified housing issues, our relationships enabled us to identify communities’ priorities and to develop strategies to address both emergent and longstanding housing challenges. The work we invested over the preceding years helped lay trust and lines of communication that we have built upon, implementing tenant protections in Minneapolis and securing new tenant protections in St. Paul.
Our relationships with state agency partners and local elected officials enabled us to quickly organize support for the statewide eviction moratorium. We developed a letter to Gov. Walz, and organized signatures by 30 local elected officials to secure an extension to the eviction moratorium without additional exemptions (some exemptions were made in August and the Commissioner had been directed to provide additional loosening options). We partnered with the Attorney General’s office, which informed us that even with the broad moratorium in place it had received more than 1,200 complaints from renters being threatened with unlawful displacement. This support from government officials helped communicate to the governor why it is critical to preserve the eviction moratorium, and has put us in a powerful position to be in ongoing relationship with the Walz Administration on housing issues related to the pandemic and beyond. We have also heard from public partners that our work to influence the Qualified Allocation Plan (the state scoring mechanism for how affordable housing projects get funded) has allowed decision-makers to be much bolder in the changes they have recommended.
The final piece we will mention here is that we came into this grant year with the beginning of a shared narrative and draft policy agenda to build on from the Equity in Place coalition, which is convened by the Alliance and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. During the grant period we finalized these documents and co-created a new draft addendum to the policy agenda to speak directly to the new challenges and opportunities presented by this unprecedented moment. In addition to our policy priorities, we defined our identity, our values and our culture. The upfront work with partners to create these products and sharpen our ideas helped keep us on the same page as new crises emerged and unforeseen challenges and opportunities presented themselves. This allowed us to be both firm in our convictions and flexible enough to pivot to new priorities that furthered our shared goals—without significant tension or the need to slow down to bring everyone up to speed. As crisis hit, we were clear on next steps and united in goals and purpose.
Key lessons learned
We were reminded that well laid plans can always shift, especially when major world events disrupt our communities. We had planned what we called a community of practice to guide this work, but the degree to which there was energy and time for the Anti-Displacement Policy Network to meet frequently and formally didn’t pan out as expected. Other demands on the public sector’s time surfaced, and many of our community organizations were called on to provide for basic needs for their communities in ways they don’t normally do. We want to be clear that we would not call this failure. Much of the work that we had been doing and the relationships we built were vital to our pandemic response and to supporting other critical community needs. Despite our inability to spend time on the more academic aspects of our planned work, we were able to work together very closely to advance tenant protection work in Minneapolis and St. Paul, further our alignment with staff in both cities on housing issues, deepen our relationship with Minnesota Housing, and build stronger connections with the Governor's office.
Broadening, not just deepening, our relationships has been key and we have made progress at multiple levels of government this year. At the state level, we would name Lt. Governor Flanagan and state housing Commissioner Jennifer Ho as new allies who gave us behind-the-scenes advice on how to strategically advance our priorities. These new relationships positioned us to be a partner in influencing the state’s emergency rental assistance. The Attorney General’s office participated in two events on housing stability, sharing expertise on eviction prevention. Hennepin County also consulted with us on how to implement rental assistance in an equitable way. An Alliance staff member and several community partners were invited to serve on a cross-sector implementation committee on citywide tenant protections, which included government staff, developers and landlords. Finally, we both broadened and deepened our relationships with staff at national and local research organizations such as the Urban Institute, PolicyLink, and CURA, shaping their understanding of what research and analysis would be most valuable to the Twin Cities BIPOC communities and renters.
Reflections on inclusive, collaborative or resourceful problem-solving
Collaboration has been the most important element of our progress. Despite the obvious challenges we faced, we have found ways to strengthen our relationships with many partners in the housing field, both in the nonprofit sector and with government allies. Our collaborations look different with our close, longtime community partners than with elected officials or city planning/community engagement staff, but through increased trust in those relationships we have developed a stronger intuition on how to move forward together. It hasn’t just been government allies that have moved the work forward—research organizations have relied on us for our expertise and we’ve developed new partnerships there as well, informing their approach to rent stabilization studies and pandemic-related displacement research. And by tapping into the wisdom and expertise of BIPOC renters and bringing them into direct connection with government agencies that historically haven’t been partners, we were able to begin establishing new relationships, shift some power, and change what is seen as possible in the realm of housing and displacement issues.
Other key elements of Community Innovation
As noted above, a shared understanding of issues and narratives among our community partners, and increasingly our public partners, has strengthened our work. We spent a lot of time early in our Anti-Displacement Network work discussing what are the key drivers of gentrification and displacement in the region, the impact of structural racism on current housing inequities, and the need to take an approach that recognized the importance of centering impacted communities in decision-making. This helped lay the groundwork for healthy working relationships and a responsive infrastructure—even though there were and still are healthy tensions among some of our partners. Finally, it feels important to note that as a network that has been founded on, centered in, and working from a racial justice framework, the growing awareness of the essential necessity of this approach in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the uprisings brought new support for our work and relationships.
Understanding the problem
The pandemic laid bare the dire circumstances of many renters in our community and how little safety net they have when our systems fail. We are proceeding with producing research, tools, and narratives that will provide additional clarity to the field and to the general public about the need to support housing stability. During this period these included:
--Media placements, such as commentaries in the Star Tribune and the Minnesota Reformer on housing equity and stability
--A rental assistance tool designed to support renters who are differently documented
--Tenant Opportunity to Purchase policy studies in partnership with public agencies
--Rent stabilization studies
--Banking study looking at how financial institutions influence the housing market
--Wealth extraction and displacement research to prevent a repeat of the foreclosure crisis in our communities
These research and narrative projects are not only building the knowledge base of community, they are changing the nature of our relationship to public agencies that now have the tools and information they need to advocate for more progressive and supportive housing policies.
--Media placements, such as commentaries in the Star Tribune and the Minnesota Reformer on housing equity and stability
--A rental assistance tool designed to support renters who are differently documented
--Tenant Opportunity to Purchase policy studies in partnership with public agencies
--Rent stabilization studies
--Banking study looking at how financial institutions influence the housing market
--Wealth extraction and displacement research to prevent a repeat of the foreclosure crisis in our communities
These research and narrative projects are not only building the knowledge base of community, they are changing the nature of our relationship to public agencies that now have the tools and information they need to advocate for more progressive and supportive housing policies.
If you could do it all over again...
We would have reinforced the lessons that made us successful during this period: to be prepared for the unexpected, to shore up our relationships among our coalition and with public agencies, to be willing to let go of what was not possible or most urgent, and to look for opportunities to make progress even as we faced bigger challenges than ever before. The irony of this year is that the pandemic, followed by the murder of George Floyd and the uprisings, made life significantly worse for our communities—and yet these events also opened up opportunities to test more progressive policies and make the case for supporting the most vulnerable people. We found our leaders much more open to bold solutions during this time. An eviction moratorium and rental assistance policies were not in the realm of possibility when we planned this scope of work. Similarly, the city of St. Paul’s testing of guaranteed basic income was spurred by the crisis. We are hopeful that the progress we’ve made in this time has shifted the window of what is seen as necessary support of low-wealth residents all the time, not just in a crisis.