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Family Housing Fund 2021 Annual Report

Illuminating solutions. Sparking change.

At the Family Housing Fund, we believe every family deserves a place to call home. Working together, we can build a strong, equitable, and resilient housing system that supports access to decent, affordable homes for everyone.

2021 marked another remarkable year for the Family Housing Fund. Together with many partners, we helped families and communities meet their housing needs while grappling with the continued impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, longstanding racial injustice, and the ever-growing housing shortage in the Twin Cities region.

This report features highlights of our work to expand opportunities to decent, affordable homes; increase the affordable housing supply; and activate more housing champions.

Expanding Opportunities

Streamlining Emergency Rent Assistance

"This makes me whole. It made it so my tenant didn't lose her home."

Family Housing Fund partnered with HousingLink, CliftonLarsonAllen, and five local jurisdictions (Dakota, Hennepin, and Ramsey Counties and the Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul) to administer federal Emergency Rent Assistance dollars through the Zero Balance Project in 2021. In this program, landlords initiated the assistance application on behalf of their tenants in order to streamline the process and relieve some of the burden from renters in crisis.

The Zero Balance Project disbursed over $31 million in rent assistance dollars in total, $26.7 million of which were administered in 2021. The program stabilized housing for 4,084 renter households with an average of $7,266 – or 7 months’ worth of rent – for each household.

We are now evaluating the success of the Zero Balance Project and planning to use the lessons we learned to influence permanent changes to the social safety net.

"I personally door-knocked to get my tenants through the Zero Balance Project. The tenants want to be here, and I’m personally invested in making sure they’re able to be successful in our spaces."

Family Housing Fund also assisted Dakota County in administering $3.5 million of rent assistance to families in a separate, tenant-based program.

Preventing Evictions

Throughout 2021, FHFund and our partners continued to work with the Anoka, Dakota, and Ramsey County Courts to prevent evictions and maintain a regional eviction prevention strategy. We continued implementing Court process changes and ensured that renters have access to legal, mediation, social, and financial resources via Court-based “Housing Clinics.” Collectively, the Anoka, Dakota, and Ramsey County Court Clinics helped hundreds of renters avoid eviction. Additionally, mediation partners across the region helped renters and landlords resolve disputes early to prevent eviction actions from being filed.

Improving Tenant Screening and Selection Practices

In partnership with Housing Justice Center and several community partners, Family Housing Fund co-published a report examining the methods and systems used by rental property owners and managers to screen and select tenants: Opening the Door: How Tenant Screening and Selection Works in the Twin Cities and Opportunities for Improvement. The report found that landlord use of tenant selection methods has a significant impact on a family’s ability to access affordable rental housing and offered several recommendations for improvement.

To advance the recommendations of the Opening the Door report, we expanded our efforts to support renters who have been screened out of quality, affordable rental housing. We invested in new and expanding programs that help families resolve the causes of their application denial, improve their “rental readiness,” and find quality, affordable homes.

Increasing Supply

Building Equity in Small Multifamily Ownership

2021 marked the first full year of our Building Equity in Small Multifamily Ownership initiative, a collaborative effort that aims to reduce racial disparities in homeownership and wealth by helping BIPOC homebuyers purchase 2-4 unit homes and build wealth as owner-occupant landlords. In 2021, Family Housing Fund received a $4 million, 2-year grant from the Bush Foundation to match the initial investment made by JPMorgan Chase in 2020. These two grants allowed Family Housing Fund and our partners to establish several new resources to promote the development and community ownership of 2-4 unit buildings across the Twin Cities metro region:

  • Construction loan pool for the acquisition, development, and rehab of 2-4 unit buildings, prioritizing loans to BIPOC developers
  • Duplex construction plans, free-to-access for local developers, to help lower the cost of development
  • Owner-occupant landlord training
  • Down payment assistance loan program
  • Innovative mortgage lending pilot
  • Post-purchase matched-savings program
  • Post-purchase revolving fund for making home repairs or replacements

While the first year of the initiative focused on developing and implementing these programs, four households purchased duplexes through the program in 2021. Importantly, Family Housing Fund and our partners have built up an ecosystem of supports for aspiring homebuyers of small multifamily buildings.

"If I went the conventional route, would I be a homeowner now? Probably not."
One of the first Building Equity homebuyers on closing day with her realtors

ADU Idea Book for Mid-Century Homes

To encourage the development of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), Family Housing Fund worked with a team of architects in 2021 to develop an ADU Idea Book that helps homeowners envision how an ADU can fit into their properties and their neighborhoods. The ADU Idea Book was published early in 2022 and includes architectural designs and sample budgets for six hypothetical ADUs, using real mid-century homes in suburban communities as case studies. We encourage homeowners to use these designs as a starting point for their own ADU projects.

Identifying Opportunities for New Development

Surplus and vacant publicly-owned parcels of land offer unique opportunities for affordable housing development and can be utilized by local governments to add to the housing supply. To help communities identify public lands with the potential for housing development, Family Housing Fund worked with Visible City to create an interactive map of public lands in the Twin Cities region. This map allows users to filter for parcels that meet certain criteria or priorities for government funding, as well as other qualities that may be of interest. We encourage local governments and developers to utilize the map as a tool for increasing the affordable housing supply.

Activating More Housing Champions

Elevating Housing Issues

Throughout 2021, Family Housing Fund worked to elevate housing as critical economic infrastructure, core to recovering from the impacts of the pandemic. As we advocated for housing investments and drew attention to emerging issues, we supported research to add to our collective understanding of the economic imperative of addressing the region’s housing needs. We worked with Wilder Research to explore how the pandemic continued to affect unemployment and housing instability. Together, we developed interactive data tools to identify Twin Cities zip codes with the highest housing cost burden and continued unemployment rates. We learned that the communities who were hit hardest by unemployment at the beginning of the pandemic continued to struggle, and the neighborhoods where families were most at risk of losing their homes are also neighborhoods with high rates of BIPOC households. This research informed our approach to distributing COVID relief funds and highlighted the ongoing need for assistance.

Refreshed Strategic Framework

The Family Housing Fund Board of Directors approved a refreshed strategic plan in December 2021 that offers greater clarity about the solutions we bring, our approach to innovation, and our commitment to racial equity.

Thank You to the Family Housing Fund Supporters

Paul and LaVonne Batalden, BMO Harris, Bush Foundation, F.R. Bigelow Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, Louis and Mary Kay Smith Family Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Minneapolis Foundation, Anthony Morley, Mortenson Family Foundation, Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation, Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, TCF Foundation, Target Foundation, US Bank Foundation, US Bancorp Employee Grant Giving Program, Wells Fargo Foundation

2021 Family Housing Fund Leadership

Officers

  • Chair Alene Tchourumoff, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
  • Vice President & Treasurer John Quincy, John M. Quincy Strategic Consulting
  • Vice President D'Angelos Svenkeson, NEOO Partners, Inc.
  • Vice President Rebecca Noecker, Saint Paul City Council
  • Vice President Andrea Brennan, Community Planning and Economic Development, City of Minneapolis

Directors

  • Jennifer Anderson, Community Reinvestment Fund
  • Nichol Dehmer, YardHomesMN
  • Aarica Coleman, Housing and Redevelopment Authority, City of Bloomington
  • Kizzy Downie, Model Cities
  • William Droste, Mayor of Rosemount
  • Lisa Goodman, Minneapolis City Council
  • Elena Gaarder, Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers
  • Cam Gordon, Minneapolis City Council
  • Danielle Grant, AchieveMpls
  • Laura Helmer, Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative
  • Mitra Jalali, Saint Paul City Council
  • Craig Klausing, Former Mayor, City of Roseville
  • Amanda Koonjbeharry, Tunheim
  • Amy McCulloch, Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation
  • Kayla Schuchman, Planning and Economic Development, City of Saint Paul
  • Amy Stetzel, Corporation for Supportive Housing
  • Jonathan Weinhagen, Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce