Communities Where Everyone Has a Home with Janne Flisrand and Andrea Pickett

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener 

Welcome back to the Living Love podcast. Today, we will be exploring the topic of communities where everyone has a home. This continues our series of season three, looking at “belonging and what it means to feel at home here.” Today, we’re going to the community level.

I’m really grateful to have Andrea Pickett and Janne Flisrand with me today.

I’ll preview the context of what we’re going to do before we get into the conversation. Many communities in the US are facing housing challenges where there’s not enough affordable housing, not enough housing in general. You have rents and mortgage prices getting way out of balance with what people can afford. This is happening overseas too. Plus, there’s homelessness and all the challenges that come with that. It is hard for us to achieve the type of community where everyone has a home. How to solve this is a layered and complex challenge.

Today with me, we have Andrea Pickett who lives in the seacoast of New Hampshire. She’s someone who has lived experience dealing with not having her housing affordable so she can talk from the experience of having to go through that. She now works with the Portsmouth Housing Authority. She’s part of my community that builds the housing, maintains the housing, and interacts with other people going through the challenge of finding affordable housing. She’s going to bring that perspective today, and she has some wonderful insights into how we solve the challenge in terms of getting the voice of people most affected engaged in the policymaking.

We also have Janne Flisrand, who is an old friend of mine from Minneapolis, who has done some tremendous community level work with a volunteer group called Neighbors For More Neighbors (which is a great title.) They have set the vision of wanting secure, abundant homes for everyone in the Twin Cities with Minneapolis-Saint Paul. They everyone to have transit, a community where they have friends and families and neighbors and be able to walk and get to jobs and be able to change their housing as their home needs change. It’s a beautiful image and that applies to everyone: owners, renters, people of all income levels and ethnicities. Janne is someone who also has professionally worked in affordable housing, and was instrumental and very engaged in the city of Minneapolis, passing the 2040 City Plan, which you’re going to hear about. It set some groundbreaking new policies. We’re going to get into how that change happened on the ground.

So I welcome you both.

 

Andrea, can you share a little bit of your story about how you got connected to this issue of affordable housing and finding housing that was accessible to people?

Andrea Pickett

I guess my housing story, like everybody’s, starts from birth, I grew up in a home with not a lot of extra money, and we moved a lot. And then when I moved out, I always had roommates. Fast forward to my early 30s, I had a daughter and became a single mother. I found that having roommates was a perfectly acceptable solution to unaffordable housing when it’s just you and you’re enjoying sort of a communal life where there’s noise and movement and activity at all hours of the day. When you have a baby, you need a different kind of stability. So I ended up applying to live in the affordable housing provided by the Portsmouth Housing Authority. And I was accepted quickly… it was a little bit less than two years after I had put my application in that I was accepted. So that tells you something right there just being two years is quickly… it could have been 10.

Living in this housing, there’s so much to be grateful for, because you can afford your rent, which is one of those base needs that everybody has. And then at the same time, it’s also a trap. It’s very hard to move forward. So while I was living in housing, every dollar and cent that you increase in your income needs to be reported, and then that means that your expenses are going to increase along with it. It’s not just housing, it’s whatever other subsidies you may receive and it doesn’t take long to figure out that it’s not safe to get to the end of the subsidies where you’re no longer receiving them, because the income that you may get is not going to cover the expenses that are left after the subsidies go away.

Early on in living in the Housing Authority, I lost a job, and I was connected with a woman who worked there and invited to apply to work in her department, which was Resident Services. I became a go-to-resident/employee, where I understood intrinsically the experiences of the residents. So when somebody was dealing with an issue that they didn’t quite understand or have experience with, a lot of times I could help navigate that. I found that being a resident and having experience was a superpower in that role, so I worked for the Housing Authority for probably a total of seven years now and I was recently promoted. Part of that was just through consistent advocacy and trying to bring other residents along with me and sharing their voices. I’m very lucky that the Executive Director of the Housing Authority valued that and was able to integrate my opinions into conversations and then also, not always but sometimes, action.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, I think often what happens in the way that we make changes… you have one group of people who are experiencing it and a different group that is managing the programs. They don’t connect well or communicate well because it’s often “outside in” or top down. The policymakers and those people aren’t all in conversations… you have people deciding things for others without enough feedback loops and, and communication, right?

 

Andrea Pickett

Yeah, I took a course called “Getting ahead in a just getting by world,” it was actually offered while I was at the Housing Authority. It talked about how the rules are often made by the middle class, who are coming from a management perspective and they’re often transactional. It’s a bootstrap method of thinking: “Well, you do this, and it will prove to us that you are taking control of your own life. And then we’ll give you that”. But really it’s backwards because the supports are what is going to enable somebody to take control of their lives and move forward.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, I want to invite in you Janne: how is it that you’re seeing the challenges with housing right now, in the challenges to getting to that future vision of a home for all?

Janne Flisrand

Andrea, I really appreciate hearing your story.

The way I started working on affordable housing, I was running a drop in after school program and a very low income neighborhood in St. Paul and kids kept disappearing. And they would be there every day for a few weeks or a few months and then they would stop coming back. When I asked where someone went the story almost always went back to something about their housing stability. There’s one story which, with hindsight, I’m sure they had section 8 vouchers, and their caseworker came and determined that they were overcrowded in the house, there were too many people for the number of bedrooms. So that if they wanted to keep their subsidy, they had to find a different house, or somebody was evicted because they couldn’t pay their rent, or somebody’s house was condemned. That made me realize that I really wanted to make sure that everybody had a stable home. I hadn’t thought so much about that until then, because I’ve always had a stable home.

I was very lucky growing up to have a family that was stable like that and then I worked in subsidized housing, often supporting or administering programs that were awarding subsidy to people building affordable housing. I also did some advocacy. I protested the demolition of public housing in Minneapolis early on.

As I watched every year we were falling further and further behind. We were both dedicating more money every year to subsidized housing while there were more people who needed affordable housing than there had been there before. So it was pretty clear to me that what we were doing wasn’t going to solve the problem, we needed to think about it differently. That’s when I started thinking about how we have a shortage of housing of every type at every level and whenever you don’t have enough to go around for everybody, the people who get pushed out of the people who have the least.

As I looked at those dynamics, I realized we needed to really change. Are we building enough homes? No, we were not. Why weren’t we building those homes? We set up the rules to make it impossible, or very, very difficult to build enough homes and that was done intentionally to keep certain people out of certain places. We also set up rules to encourage people to demolish low income neighborhoods to supposedly “fix them” through redevelopment, which was in fact a displacement process.

So I guess, Beth, what I’m saying is that I started looking at the rules that have two and three and four layers down and noticed that the problems, the crises that, you know, Andrea, you described in your life as having unstable housing, or having to wait two years to find a place to live that you could afford and where your child could sleep soundly every night. That is the system that we designed our system to create and that outcome was exactly what we intended when we created it, although we forgotten that and we don’t remember that it was 100 years ago. But we’ve got what we wanted when we set it up. And now we’re unable to see how to pull it back apart.

Beth Tener 

So often we just focus on the individual story, for example, what happened to this person? And of course, that whole frame like you’re mentioning Andrea about: “Well, they haven’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps,”… you know, all these myths of poverty and things.

So, Janne, what you and your colleagues are starting to do is to take the bigger historical view and the system’s view and try to address it at a different level altogether. Not just even in the argument about “should we build affordable housing in this neighborhood”, and then the people are objecting? So could you talk us through a little more what you did maybe start with Neighbors for More Neighbors…  even tell us about that title? I think that we often talk about “NIMBY”… “not in my backyard”. So this was a flip on that, right?

Janne Flisrand

Yeah. So 20 years after I started working on affordable housing, some friends of mine, it was not me, we’d all been watching many instances where somebody was proposing to build housing. In most cases, it was market rate housing. In most cases, it was an apartment building for rentals. In most cases, it was in a neighborhood that already had, for example, 80% renters. And they would go to the neighborhood, as the city had told them to do to share their plans, and they would get absolutely shouted down and chased away.

My friends, Ryan and John, let’s just say they’re both very active on Twitter at the time, and they chatted a lot in some sort of online chattering group. They were kind of making fun of these people who kept creating new groups that were things like “Protect our downtown Minneapolis skyline views”. So they were just making jokes about other names and at some point, one of them said, “neighbors for more neighbors”, and then they’re like, “wait, wait, wait. That’s actually a good name. That’s not a mean joke name. It’s actually what we stand for.” And so they decided to create Neighbors for More Neighbors. And it was mostly a joke. They created a lot of very satirical art. They published it on Twitter, and it went viral and a couple of weeks later, it was advertised nationally in Slate, and that was kind of how it started.

These two very funny guys were just very good at social media and, and really skewering people who had what they needed and were unwilling to share these really great communities with other people who wanted the same thing. They wanted transit, they wanted an affordable place to live, they wanted to be able to walk to the grocery store, and people just didn’t want to share. So that’s how it got started. It evolved a little bit, right?

So a few months after they started doing these sort funny-but-not-funny posting, they realized that they had enough of a following that when there was a proposal in front of the planning commission. (I’m not sure if the first one was an affordable building or not, but they certainly were more likely to do this when it was affordable than what it wasn’t.) But anytime there was a building in front of the planning commission that was threatened by people saying “we don’t want that in our neighborhood”, they would create an action alert and say, “Hey, contact your planning commissioner, go down to the planning commission meeting, stand up and just say, ‘Hey, I’m a neighbor and I want more neighbors.’ Please approve this building because it will make our city happier, healthier and more affordable.” And then people did it. It’s kind of amazing that they said on Twitter, “show up to City Hall and go and testify in front of these scary people”, but people did it. And it really changed the dynamic at the planning commission. So that’s sort of how we got started as an organization.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, Andrea, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Andrea Pickett

I am early in the process of doing a lot of those same things but haven’t seen those results yet. So when I say early, I took this new position three months ago, so I was sort of given wings within my organization, a whole new platform to do some of this work. I have been trying to figure out who are the unlikely messengers, and where we can sort of move the needle, even just a little with community involvement, because you are really talking about the basis of “not in my backyard”… it’s the vocal minority that shows up and says, “we don’t want this”, and there’s no counter argument. When that’s allowed to continue, then the planning board, all they have to go on and the only political pressure they have is the people who are saying no. So it’s really boxing them in where the only choices they have are either go against what their constituents are asking for, or listen to the people who show up.

Beth Tener 

That’s what we heard here and what Janne and her colleagues started to do was change to say, “Wait, there’s all these people that would support it that just aren’t being activated and alerted, to show up.”

Janne Flisrand

Ethically, it’s smart, or it’s compassionate, to have homes for everybody to live in. But it’s also financially and economically viable and the only way to support a healthy community is to have that economic diversity. I really do think of it as like an ecosystem where if you have all lions, and all of the lions are going to die because lions don’t eat lions, you know? If you want somebody who’s going to work in your stores, you want somebody who’s going to teach your children who’s going to be your police officer, a restaurant worker or a medical provider, those are the people who are in that middle ground housing, that are consistently, at least where I live, where the median area home is selling for, Beth, I think you just said $800,000 was the number you saw this morning, and that’s aligned to what I’m seeing as well. We need to make opportunity because the opportunity, isn’t there.

Andrea Pickett

A thing about this kind of organizing that’s really hard is that it’s structurally hard. The people who are worried about a thing happening across the street from their house… it’s easy to get them to show up at City Hall because it feels very immediate, it’s very close. It’s very scary to them, because change is scary. Then they show up and they’re very opposed and the people who support making space for more people tend to be the people who don’t yet live in the community, the people who have been pushed out, the people who are struggling to find a home, but it’s not as immediate for any of those folks, and partly they maybe got other stuff going on. Partly they didn’t get a postcard in the mailbox, saying that a thing is happening across the street, because it’s not across the street. It’s where they want to live, if there’s a place to live. Partly it’s like a low level… “Well, yes, of course, that’s a good idea. But it’s not something I’m passionate enough about to go down to City Hall.” And so it makes the organizing kind of hard, because it’s easy to turn out opposition to something very proximate, and it’s much harder to turn out support for something that is obviously a good idea.

So I’m now involved with sort of larger scale movements. We call them pro-homes movements. And whenever we do polling, it turns out that, I don’t know, 60-70% of people think “yes, of course, we should build more homes.” But they don’t think that strongly enough that they’re going to go down to City Hall and demand it. And so we need to do something to change the rules so that we don’t make our decisions based on a few who may be very afraid and very concerned about change. And that’s what Neighbors for More Neighbors has shifted doing more of now, and happily as a result of our work there aren’t very many project by project fights. The rules of Minneapolis have been enough changed that most of the time when somebody proposes something, they don’t have to have the planning commission vote. It just goes through and that I think is the right way to go.

Beth Tener 

How did you get that shift to happen, like what were some of the key high points of what unfolded? I know the City Plan was a key part and how they engaged which voices, etc. so maybe you could take us through that part of the story.

Janne Flisrand

There are a bunch of different pieces. And the story could be very long. So I’m going to give you the high points. And then you ask me about the ones you want to dig into a little bit.

Beth Tener 

We’re going to put articles and links and videos in the show notes for so you can dig into this story, because there’s a lot to learn and lots been written about it, which is great. Yeah.

Janne Flisrand

So the very top level in Minnesota, and in particular, in the Twin Cities, state law requires every municipality to create a 20 year comprehensive plan every 10 years and it has to fit with a regional plan. So like, that’s the thing that’s really nice for us that doesn’t exist in a lot of places. But Minneapolis was creating its Minneapolis 2040 plan starting in roughly 2017, and because of who was on the city council, and who is Mayor and who is in the city planning department, instead of just doing a little bit of tweaking and editing in minor ways, they said we need to really rethink this. We need to focus on our vision and our values and because it’s mostly a land use plan, the legal part of it is around the land use. They wanted to rethink zoning and the rules, how do you get approvals to build something new? What are those underlying rules around the zoning and what are those rules around permitting?

So the city created this big opening with their plan. Then at the same time, there are a couple of other things happening sort of below the surface that really made it easier for the city to do that big shift. So one thing is there was a project called Mapping Prejudice and they were creating maps that showed every single racially restrictive covenant in the city of Minneapolis and in the county of Hennepin and they’ve since expanded far beyond, but it really helps people see those long buried, long forgotten, no longer legal, exclusionary practices that we had that created a thing.

Another big thing is that there was a very active crew of bloggers on a blog called Streets.MN, who had been helping people around the community find each other, but also learn about what makes for a healthy city. How do you have good transit? How do you have affordable housing? And so it was really a bunch of very nerdy, wonky people who liked writing about esoteric policy, but were sort of educating their community about a whole bunch of different related topics.

And then comes sort of Wedge LIVE and Neighbors for More Neighbors. John is the founder of Wedge LIVE and he also is one of the founders of Neighbors for More Neighbors. He’d been making public meetings transparent and fun and accessible and enjoyable, on a very hyperlocal basis. He’s just a dude who tweets a lot and sometimes blogs and he started in one teeny tiny neighborhood but had approximately 15,000-20,000 people living in it.

So those things had really created fertile ground for a conversation to look different. When they started the 2040 planning. So which one do you want to know more about?

Beth Tener 

Okay, well, I was really intrigued with Mapping Prejudice. So just to explain what a racial covenant is, as I understand it, is in your records of your house, you could look up your address and go back in time and see that there would be this legal document that has some shocking language of who was excluded right from buying it.

Janne Flisrand

The deed on your house may have legal language that listed a bunch of characteristics about people that were typically racial characteristics, sometimes religious characteristics, and it often said things like, “cannot be rented or sold to a person of any of these different characteristics.” It often included language that if you did rent or sell your home to those people, that then the home would automatically be returned to the person you bought it from, at no cost. So it was a whole bunch of legal stuff that was buried deep, but essentially, it forced racial segregation and religious segregation.

Now, I want to be clear, there were caveats. So if you had a maid who was not white, that was okay, and that was explicitly stated in these covenants as well. So it’s exactly as bad as you can imagine it. So Mapping Prejudice was started from I think a combination of the University of Minnesota and Augsburg. I’m not exactly sure the details about who really got it going. But there were some historians that created a crowdsourced project and it partly was possible because the county had digitized all of the deeds in Hennepin County. And because there was this digitized database, they were able to work with other folks at the university to create an online system where volunteers could sit at their desk asks at home or in a workshop, and review those deeds and identify racial covenants and then double check that the OCR software had found something that was or was not a racial covenant. Then they went through every single deed, (they also had really excellent communications) and so they created an animated map that showed year by year, how they spread across the city and then they told the stories of people living in those different homes.

They were both looking at the macro, at the policy piece, at this esoteric legal thing that people didn’t know existed, andthey were also telling the stories of individuals who, when they moved into a neighborhood, then spurred a sudden rash of racial covenants on their homes, or what happened to them over the course of their lives. So it was a really well done project.

People in Minneapolis like to volunteer. When you have to read these really offensive racial covenants, as part of that volunteering practice, it really touches you in a way that reading about it or watching a TV show often doesn’t. I think that that shifted how a significant number of people in Minneapolis thought about “why does my neighborhood look the way it looks? Why is my neighborhood disproportionately white?” And that realization, I think, helped pave the way. It also really informed the thinking of the planners working in Minneapolis 2040. But their work is still going on. So look up Mapping Prejudice. They’re doing more communities now.

Beth Tener 

Any thoughts on that, Andrea?

Andrea Pickett

Well, you know, I was just feeling grateful that you were touching on the issue of intersectional minority discrimination in housing and the conversation here is about places to live where everyone is welcome. And I think that it’s so important, especially, you know, I shared my story a little bit. You don’t know listening in a podcast, but I’m a white woman, and, you know, it was hard enough. I have intersections that aren’t visible, but it was hard enough to navigate the system as who I am. But when you’re dealing with something where people are actively prejudiced, then you’re further pushed down that ladder. And so it’s just, it’s sad. And it’s harmful to the whole community.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, and that ability to do a project where it’s not just by yourself reading a book about it, but I’m just imagining the way they did this citizen engagement to understand this idea of “we’re making what’s invisible, but what has completely shaped the context of homes and neighborhoods, you know, in people’s lives”… you’re making that invisible, visible. I imagine that anyone involved was going home and talking to their partners and their kids about it. You imagine that rippling through the community – the story and the conversation about these things, because it is hard to get people excited about zoning reform, right? I mean, to realize it’s right in the legal papers of your own home? Yeah, if you have one.

Andrea Pickett

I mentioned that I’m very early in and I’m waiting for successes. But that glosses over that we do have a solid handful of people who are not even necessarily all from within the demographic of people who are struggling to find housing, who are advocates. And in case they listen to this podcast, I just want to say thank you, I’m not going to name you all, because I will forget to name somebody, but you’re appreciated.

Janne Flisrand

Also, there is a national network of people who are doing this kind of stuff. So if you want to do more, or build that movement, reach out, we will help you find people who can help you build that and figure out how to do that. What we’re doing is incredible.

What you said, Andrea, I think is also really consistent. You said not all people who are struggling with their own housing, and certainly when you look at Neighbors For More Neighbors, when you look at the Mapping Prejudice folks or the Streets MN Folks, mostly, we’re not folks who are in a very difficult position with our housing. We tend to be college educated folks with white collar jobs. We tend to have stable housing, a fair number of us have been pushed out of neighborhoods that we want to live in, and we’ve realized that our choice is to move to a different city where we don’t want to live or to move to a neighborhood where we are a gentrifying force pushing other people out. Part of what motivates a bunch of us is that we don’t like either of those choices. We think that those are not the right choices to have. And so we’re fighting to make a third choice and zoning is mostly where we focused our attention.

We haven’t talked about zoning at all yet, really, but it’s wonky and esoteric and the Minneapolis zoning code is more than 1,000 pages long and it’s almost impossible to understand and that’s not something that somebody whose brain is focused on, “How do I have a stable home? How do I make sure my kids got food?”… you’re not going to dive into the zoning code. So there’s a structural reason why we tend to be pretty well off, stable people who are doing this work, trying to change the structure. It’s because we have the space in our lives, to think about sort of second, third, fourth tier sorts of changes, we have the luxury to not worry about our immediate needs. And that’s both good and bad, right? That creates a lot of structural challenges for us, too.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, I think that speaks to, you know, that theme of kinship and collaboration… to get to this future of communities where everyone has a home, every part has to play the part they can play like, right, it’s not just one group that’s going to solve it.

I wondered, Janne, if you could talk about one of the things that intrigued me in the story of Minneapolis is that 2040 plan, and how the city really took the lead on saying we want to get more voices than typically get input into how these plans get made, right? It’s often the people you’re talking about, like you have time and the resources, and you know, are the ones very opposed to things who have the time and energy come to public meetings and give input. So there’s a whole lot of voices that don’t usually get involved in. So can you talk about how they worked that part of it and then where that ended up in terms of the changes?

Janne Flisrand

I would love to. I think that the planners were so amazing and wonderful in how they structured things. They were able to do that because there were elected officials who were willing to budget money for them to be able to do it. These officials were willing to take hard decisions and votes and support them doing that, because it wasn’t something everybody wanted to do. So I want to recognize those folks, but to the planners…

So the planners, it’s a three or four year process to create and pass this plan. It has multiple iterative cycles of feedback and engagement. Very early on, they convened some expert focus groups that were invitation-only. They also convened some community focus groups that were invitation-only. They worked really hard to make sure that they were convening people who don’t usually show up at public meetings.

So that the one that I remember, it was not the only one, but it was Somali business owners. As I understand it, there was a cycle of three different focus group meetings with these Somali business owners, who don’t tend to show up to public meetings. They asked questions that people could actually answer. They didn’t say, “What do you want for your zoning?” They said, “What are you going to need for your business to thrive 20 years from now? What kind of a space do you need for your business? What would help support the goals that you have for your community” and asked them to paint a vision of the kind of city where they wanted to be a business owner.

They also went out to community festivals and did something very similar, although individually focused. The questions they asked were, “think about how old you’re going to be in 20 years. What kind of a house you’re going to want to live in? How are you going to want to get around? What do you want to have in your neighborhood?” They asked roughly 10 questions. They were things that people could latch on to and imagine, envision, and answer. That was so critical, because the plan that they were tasked with creating was about zoning, it’s “how big are the setbacks from the street to your house? How many feet tall can you build a building? Literally, on which block? Can you put a single family home versus a 10 story apartment building” … but people can’t have that conversation. We shouldn’t have to have that conversation to get the kind of community that we want to live in.

So they did a really great job of translating the visions of the hopes and the dreams that people had and going to where people were, whether it was Minneapolis, which has I think the second largest Somali population after Somalia, so they’d go to Somalia Independence Day and ask questions there. And they would go to Juneteenth and ask questions there. And they would go to Pride and ask questions there. And then collected and compiled all of that to paint the vision, and then say, “well, if this is the city that Minneapolitans want to have and to live in 20 years from now, what do we have to do to get there?”

Beth Tener 

I heard you say tha, “people who rent often don’t get input… immigrants, new immigrants, people of color, lower income.” So they were tryig to get there all those voices there to hear from them what the future could look like.

Janne Flisrand

Yeah and they did all of that before they sort of opened the door to universal engagement, right? Because they know when you open the door and say that there’s a public meeting, the people who show up are the people like me… they’re people who have a college degree, they’re people who have thought about this for a long time, they’re people who own a home and they wanted to make sure that they had those historically underrepresented voices, the folks who tend to be pushed out from shaping things when they started, because when you start there, then you can make sure it works for everybody. There were some neighborhoods who were kind of frustrated, they’re like, “We want to be part of this process. We want to have our voices heard”, and they’re like, “it’s going to happen, we promise it’s going to happen. Let us get going, we’re not ready yet.”

Andrea Pickett

One of the things that you’re talking about is just consistently going to the place where the people are, and I appreciate it so much, because it’s not just about practicality. A lot of people in the neighborhoods I serve don’t have transportation, it would be very difficult. But there’s an emotional weight that comes along with engaging in a system that has historically ‘othered’ you. And even if you haven’t personally been historically othered, the structural inequities are so pervasive that you just feel like “I may not matter here. And so why would I go someplace where my voice isn’t going to have an impact?” So that’s really flipping a switch and allowing somebody to say not only does your voice matter, but it matters so much for prioritizing it. So it’s really an incredible way to do it.

Beth Tener 

It is. Andrea I will link to the 2040 plan. It has a lot about the process. But they also use art a lot, like they would have a little animated paper roll that would talk about Mapping Prejudice and the history of racism, and the map like at a street festival. So people can look at the story with art and maps. And I mean, it’s just so creative.

Janne Flisrand

They hired community artists and this was true throughout the process, whether it was a community festival, or later on when they did have big open houses, and they hired artists to help create different ways for people to plug in and both understand what was going on, but also engage.

So one of my favorite ones: they had poets that had manual typewriters and they had a question a prompt. So it might be somebody who’s four years older, might be somebody who’s 94 years old, would sit in the chair opposite the poet, and the poet would ask the question, and the person would give an answer. And then the poet would, on the spot type a poem that captured the essence of that person’s answer and that poem went into the official record.

Beth Tener 

Oh, I love it!

Janne Flisrand

There was another instance where they created a game show. And so they would have three people who are participating in the public meeting be contestants in the game show. Then they would ask people questions like it was a trivia game about Minneapolis 2040 and so it was a way of getting people to share what they think the city would be like or wanted to be like. Then the audience would watch. So they had dozens of different artistic things and it was really fun, and it was engaging. And it really invited children’s voices in but everybody was able to engage in some way, no matter what sorts of things you might have in your life, that would make it hard to engage in public meeting, these art activities made it much easier to share what you thought and what you wanted.

Andrea Pickett

I’m curious, Janne, about the funding for a practice like that, because especially where I am in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there’s a feeling that’s just growing and that we don’t have enough money to be spending on “Extras”. A lot of it comes through the taxes. There’s a scarcity mindset, like I’ve had some of these ideas and wanted to run with them. And it’s not that anybody is objecting to them. It’s just “okay, but where are we going to get the money?”

Janne Flisrand

Yeah. Something I’ve thought a lot about is when and where is the right place for public engagement. I am personally adamantly opposed to having public engagement at the project level. I think that that is a terrible way to make public policy decisions and approving buildings or not approving buildings is a public policy decision. So I actually think we should not have any public engagement around construction projects, or even mostly around like, how do you design a street reconstruction?

This city chose very intentionally to invest, I think it was $100,000, it was a large budget for public engagement around the comprehensive plan. And I think that’s the right place to do it. Because that’s where we’re making a community vision. That’s where you need a lot of voices to be in there. You’re not making a technical decision about “does this site plan follow the intent of the zoning code”, which people can’t really engage in. It’s what kind of a place do you want to live in 20 years from now, help us know what we’re aiming at so we can get us to that city. And it was expensive public engagement, but that vision is the thing that now is guiding every decision, at least in theory, that the city is doing for 10 years. So invest upfront in the vision, really capturing that engaging everybody in that and then implement it but don’t re-litigate every single decision on the implementation.

Beth Tener 

So Janne, I’d love to hear the headlines of what all this public engagement led to, what’s different now? What was the actual change on the ground? And then what has happened since?

Janne Flisrand

So the plan went through a couple of iterations. But the thing that got the headlines is that we were the first city in the country to allow small multifamily buildings, up to three-plexes, on every single lot in the city. So many places have what they call “single family zoning”, and it makes it illegal to have a duplex or an ADU or triplex. Very small, very traditional things. An ADU is an accessory dwelling unit. It’s a mother in law, or a cottage…

 

Beth Tener 

A little apartment on the back that you know, a student can live in.

 

Janne Flisrand

Yep. So it got published as ending single family zoning. But in fact, we didn’t do anything to single family zoning, we just made it legal to do something else anywhere in the city, that got the headlines. Because it’s really challenging this idea that a single family home is the only dignified way to live. It is not. Lots of people live in lots of different kinds of homes and we all need something different at different points in our lives. And if we make it illegal to build that, then people can’t stay in their neighborhoods as they age or when their family gets bigger or smaller. So I was excited about that.

Beth Tener 

And also the framing of it… So you weren’t setting neighborhoods off against each other. You were like all of us have to do something and we want it city wide. That seemed like an important part of the change, right?

Janne Flisrand

It is a very important part of the change. It wasn’t saying which neighborhoods are appropriate places for duplexes. It was saying duplexes belong in Minneapolis everywhere. So we’re going to make it okay and that was really challenging for many parts of our city. There was a really big set of Neighbors for More Neighbors versus the Red Sign People battle… The red sign said, “No bulldoze our neighborhoods. Stop the Minneapolis 2040 plan.”

Anyway, so there was a whole bunch of politics there and that’s part of the story. But that’s not about the outcome, right? The outcome is that we provided the elected officials enough support and backing that they felt like they could vote to legalize small multifamily everywhere in the city. But I want to go beyond that, Beth.

The other thing that I think is more important, we haven’t seen a lot of duplexes or triplexes. And that’s partly because the implementation is in my opinion lacking and doesn’t really allow them to be feasible, even though they are technically legal. We did a bunch of other things on the plan to that, made a bigger difference in terms of housing affordability. It said that we were going to end the parking mandates in the entire city. So now, nobody ever must build a parking spot because the city tells you. Mostly people are building some parking spots but they’re building a lot fewer and we can see that housing is more affordable because of it. We can see old historic spaces being used, because they don’t have to figure out how to knock down another building to build a parking lot and it’s great. So that’s a key issue.

We made another important change that was a really big deal. Along corridors and it’s mostly where transit lines are… it’s mostly where streetcars ran once upon a time before we ripped them all out, but they tended to be busier streets that have some commercial on it. Most of those streets allow for bigger buildings by right. So we “up-zoned” those corridors kind of throughout the city, and that’s really where we’ve seen a lot of housing production is on those corridors. And there are a lot of four or five or six story buildings all across the city. I’m going to use round numbers… but say we had 100,000 homes in Minneapolis. We’ve added 14,000 more homes over the last few years, and we’ve seen that has a really big difference in those homes are mostly on those corridors.

Beth Tener 

That makes sense for climate and a lot of other, you know, car-free living. And then what is it done for prices and equity and you know, the mix of people living in the city?

Janne Flisrand

Well, I want to say, first and foremost, building enough homes is not going to solve all of your housing problems, you have to do three things. If you want housing to work for everybody, you have to have enough homes. Without enough homes, nothing else can work. You also need to have tenant protections. If people can’t know for sure that their rent is going to be stable, if they can’t know for sure that if they follow rules, they can stay as long as they need to. That creates huge problems for people. So you have to have tenant protections. And then third, some people just don’t make enough money to pay for what housing costs. So you need to make sure that people have enough money to pay for what housing costs. And I’m saying that very carefully.

They’re not subsidized housing, I’m not anti-subsidized housing… but you can give people money to pay for housing or you can subsidize the housing. So it’s affordable, both of those things work. But you always have to have enough homes, so you have to do all the three things. I forgot what your question was, Beth.

Beth Tener 

My question was, “Has it affected housing prices and rents and who’s able to live in the city or more people that maybe not would otherwise have been pushed out able to stay?” You know, that’s kind of the bottom line, I’m interested in at this point.

Janne Flisrand

Oh yeah, I can talk about rents… that’s the easiest to talk about because it’s really hard to know, if people got to stay or not, it’s really hard to know if people were able to come back in, but rents are probably a pretty good indicator. So Pew Research did some amazing work in Minnesota and they looked at how rents change in Minneapolis compared to the rest of the state. Rents in Minneapolis went up by 1%, whereas they went up by 14% in the rest of the state… and that’s not inflation adjusted. So that means if you were paying $1,000 in rent, you’re paying $1,010, several years later. And then there’s inflation on top of that. So it had a really big impact on rents.

It also looked at homelessness… homelessness in Minneapolis dropped by more than 10%, whereas it went up by more than 10% in the rest of the state. So if you want to check out that Pew Research, write up about Minneapolis rents. But the only thing that was different than Minneapolis from anywhere else was that we just built a whole bunch of housing.

Now, I will say that it’s slowed down a little bit in the last year, and that’s partly higher interest rates. It’s partly that the Red Sign People, those don’t build us our homes folks, they sued the city to block the 2040 plan, only just the triplex part. They don’t care about the apartment buildings and corridors. They don’t care about the parking, but they sued to block the triplex part. And that created a lot of uncertainty for developers. So the combination of the uncertainty and a judge that said “no, it’s on hold. No, it’s not on hold.” And higher interest rates mean that development is slowed down, and we’re seeing rents tick up again, now that we’re not able to keep building the same we were for a few years there.

Beth Tener 

I want to thank you for sharing that whole story, and Andrea thank you for you being here.

We’re coming to the end of our time, but just wanted to maybe give each of you the final word, anything else you’d like to kind of share from our conversation today are your thoughts on what it takes to create communities where everyone can have a home?

Andrea Pickett

My final thought would be to get involved. No matter where you are on the income scale, or where your housing stability lies, it’s important to make sure that your voices heard. Minneapolis did a really great job of getting public officials out into neighborhoods. but you may or may not live someplace that has elected officials who are going to do that. So you can go to the meetings or you can run the meetings, you can run for office. It’s my pitch: It’s important for people who have the lived experience to be involved. It’s invaluable. But it’s also very important for those people to be supported by the rest of the spectrum of people.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, thank you, Andrea.

Janne Flisrand

So I want to say that showing up makes a difference… find some friends, figure out what you’re going to do and do it. And maybe my most exciting project that has come out of our 2040 work is that the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority has been able to build for the first time in decades, additional public housing units, they hadn’t been able to do that in decades. And they were able to build some six-plexes that are legal because the 2040 plan passed. They built a bunch of them, they’re all the same. They’re across the whole city. They’re in all sorts of neighborhoods and I’m really heartened to be able to see some small wins, right. It’s a lot of work. It’s a real slog to do this kind of work. It’s not actually fun to do zoning work, because it’s so esoteric and I don’t like 1,000 page documents either. But seeing those new public housing units in neighborhoods, when I biked down that street, I can look at that and be like “it was worth it.” There are six families who now have a home that wouldn’t have had that home if we didn’t do all that work.

Beth Tener 

Yeah, I love that story and the visibility of it. And I think for me, in closing, I think I’m just also really inspired by the process, like the different ways that the planners and the community activists and others brought humor and art and people together in creative ways. So that you’re like, “oh, yeah, this is our community. This is our future and we all have a voice in it.”

I think a lot of those lessons can be used in a lot of different ways of engaging people, even in workplaces or communities. Why do we just think it always has to be sitting around a table with flip charts and a PowerPoint? I like that part of the story as well. Eyes to see the past and create a different future.

Thank you both for being here.

Thanks, again for being here today. And I do hope you’ll dig into the show notes. I have a lot of great links there about this story. Andrea Pickett has a TEDx talk about “To eradicate poverty, listen to the people who’ve experienced it” worth watching that we also have links to Mapping Prejudice that site go look at the maps and the story of what they did amazing.

Also, the Minneapolis 2040 plan has a lot of detail in it about the community engagement with the artists and how they got all those voices in there. And then this whole story, Janne has actually been featured in a lot of articles translating what happened in Minneapolis. So I’ll link to some of those other articles in the Atlantic and some other places.

So hope you’ll be here next time, we are going to be talking about what it means to “find a sense of home in a new community.” With me will be Kile Adumene, who was on an earlier podcast. She grew up in Nigeria, in a village environment there and then came to the US as a refugee. So she’s has the experience both of African culture in the village and what it takes to integrate into America. She does a lot of work now bringing together immigrants and others in community in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Elizabeth Romero will also be with us in dialogue. She has a mother who has a mother who is a multiracial immigrant and she was someone who moved 13 times as a kid. So she really understands “how do you come into a new community? And what does it mean to find a sense of home?” And so really interesting insights for those in those questions. And we’ll explore, how do we make our communities more welcoming to newcomers and integrate people in so everyone can feel a sense of hope?

I look forward to seeing you next time. And thanks again for listening.