Alice Hausman, 2022 MICAH Lifetime Achievement Award
By Elaine Tarone
Elaine Tarone, St. Paul chapter, presenting the award to Rep. Alice Hausman.
Alice Hausman was first elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1989, more than 3 decades ago, with major interests in capital investment and bonding. Over those decades, exercising her leadership role on the House finance committee, Rep. Hausman became one of the House’s strongest advocates for bonding and investment in affordable housing.
Prior to the Great Recession and housing crisis in 2008, only $2 million of general obligation bonding was devoted to public housing, but after the housing finance crisis, Rep. Hausman worked hard to increase that amount. During the crisis, she noticed that advocates competed against each other in pursuit of different housing goals with the result, in that critical year, that no funding at all was provided.
Afterward, she gathered the different advocacy organizations in her office and urged them to develop a common agenda for housing advocacy. In 2011, they did exactly that, forming the Homes For All Coalition; as a result, they began to succeed in getting substantial funding for housing. Homes For All now represents 240 endorsing organizations that all vote together on a single agenda for housing across the continuum from shelter resident bill of rights, preventing homelessness, affordable rental housing, to preparing homebuyers.
In 2022, in her final year in office in the Minnesota House, as Chair of the Housing Finance and Policy Committee, Rep. Hausman sponsored HF3244 for a supplemental budget bill which would authorize:
$400 million in housing infrastructure bonds to finance costs of permanent housing that would be affordable to households with incomes at or below 50%AMI, and preference given to households at or below 30%AMI
$100 million in bonds to preserve low-income public housing
better tenant protection, for example, requiring landlords to give tenants advance notice of eviction.
Even in this moment, in the final week of the 2022 legislature, budget numbers have yet to be allocated, but Rep. Hausman continues to respond personally and positively to messages from affordable housing advocates. She richly deserves MICAH’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her long and tireless work for affordable housing in Minnesota.