St. Paul 2023 Autumn Report

The St. Paul MICAH Chapter Virtual Bus Tour was very well attended this year, with over 60 guests and a well-crafted roster of stops, all along the continuum to housing. At almost every point in the tour we saw the impact of the historic legislative actions that were taken this year, as a unified state government invested heavily in shelter, housing, and other services. We also highlighted new and different ways to approach housing, shelter, and community.

We began with longtime MICAH partner, Junail Freeman Anderson, founder of Freedom from the Streets and No More Streets. Freedom has been doing amazing outreach to homeless communities since their founding in 2019. Freedom started before the COVID pandemic working with people in and around shelters in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. COVID and the pandemic lockdown resulted in massive changes for the homeless population in the Twin Cities, and Freedom moved quickly to assisting shelters and encampments, becoming part of the Sanctuary Movement. The Chicago Avenue hotel shelter, the Powderhorn Park encampment, the Logan Park encampment, and one of the Bloomington hotel shelters. In all of these, Freedom worked to help residents organize their camps or shelters and get resources to where they needed to go. As COVID and camps changed, Freedom began to host BBQs in parks in Minneapolis and St. Paul, to give an outside place to gather and to feed people who needed it. This grew with a partnership with St. Timothy Lutheran, a Como Park congregation and MICAH member.

The next stop was Catholic Charities Dorothy Day campus, which has both supportive housing and emergency shelter services. Supportive housing is in the Dorothy Day residence and Higher Ground St. Paul residence, while the Higher Ground St. Paul Shelter provides 274 overnight beds and the St. Paul Opportunity Center provides day services. The campus overall serves over 1000 people a day. They are the largest shelter in Ramsey County, providing more than 55% of the shelter beds for single adults in the county, as well as serving thousands of free meals (over 26,000 in July 2023 alone.) Catholic Charities also does advocacy work, having pushed hard to have many residents in Group Residential Housing keep the majority of their benefits, instead of having to turn them all in to the provider.

After looking at homeless outreach and emergency shelter, we moved to highlight some of the innovative organizing around housing and transit that is happening in St. Paul. We began with Sidney Stuart, the co-director of the East Side Freedom Library, which has organized an East Side Housing Justice campaign, kicked off with a 2019 Housing Justice Summit. With a focus on the deep racial inequities of ownership and renters, the campaign brought together East Side organizations in educational and artistic outreach, as well as supporting the Rent Stabilization campaign. We then heard from Giovonnia Harris, the community organizer for the Greater East Side Community Council. She has been working with a tenant organizing group in her neighborhood. Finally, Paris Dunning from the East Side Area Business Association (ESABA) talked about the Purple People, the pro-Purple Line Bus Rapid Transit group that MICAH and ESABA and the neighborhoods have been working on. Public transit is so important to people who need affordable housing, and small businesses, and neighborhoods. (And we have a lot of fun!)

We then turned to the situation of renters in St. Paul. The MICAH chapter worked hard two years ago to help pass the Rent Stabilization ordinance, which defeated a multi-million dollar ‘anti’ campaign to adopt the strongest rent control policy in the country. Unfortunately, the money power of landlords and developers continued to push hard to weaken the law, and some major loopholes were passed by the City a year after the adoption of the ordinance. Daniel Suitor, a housing attorney at HOME Line. As an introduction, we showed a picture of St. Paul’s City Hall, with the following text:

Welcome to City Hall. A year ago, in this building, the Council rolled back major protections in the City's Rent Stabilization Ordinance, exempting new construction and affordable housing when the voters chose otherwise. City Hall is also home to the Mayor's office. Under his supervision, the Department of Safety & Inspections has chosen not to enforce violations of the Ordinance against landlords breaking the law.

Daniel covered some of the stories of how the city is rubberstamping rent increases, how they are taking landlords filings at face value without checking their data, and how even blatant violations of the law are not being prosecuted by the city. Rather problematic!

After Daniel, we shifted to some more positive coverage of new options for housing ownership. The East Side Community Investment Cooperative is a project raising money to buy property and develop with community control to build a neighborhood that works FOR the neighbors, not against them. Ianni Houmas is a member of the cooperative, as well as the board chair of the Greater East Side Community Council, a member of the St. Paul Planning Commission, and a small businessman. Ianni also talked about some of the things he’d seen on the Planning Commission, such as an increase in Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and the adoption of a new zoning plan that allows building duplexes, triplexes, or quads on any lot in the city (formerly many were reserved for single family structures only.)

We ended the bus tour with some state and federal policy discussions. Madeleine Hammerlund spoke on behalf of the Our Future Starts at Home campaign, which will push a Minnesota Constitutional Amendment to guarantee a right to housing, along with a state sales tax to fund that housing! The money will be distributed according to the plans of community members in committee. After Madeleine, MICAH’s Executive Director Sue Watlov Phillips spoke, emphasizing how well we did this year at the State Legislature, passing record support for shelter and housing. We finally saw the Lead Safe Homes bill signed into law, as well as getting record levels of spending on housing. At the Federal level, Sue talked about the Bring America Home Now campaign, which focuses on housing as a right, health, livable incomes, education, civil rights, and racial equity.

“Best tour we’ve had” commented one of the MICAH regulars, as attendance and quality of presentation were both top-notch. The video of the bus tour is available online as well as the slides.