Creating Healthy Communities

Affordable housing is core to a strong economy and a healthy region. Housing is affordable when a family with moderate income or lower pays no than 30% of its monthly income for housing. Increasingly, housing is no longer affordable for many Twin Cities area working families. This lack of affordable housing for people of all ages and incomes creates stresses on families, dampens productivity stifles job growth.

The Metropolitan Council recognizes that durable well-maintained housing is important to community base, livability, and businesses in the region as a whole. The Metropolitan Council supports affordable housing in the region through various programs and initiatives.

Metropolitan Council Determines Housing Needs

Communities in the seven-county metropolitan area are required by state law to plan for "sufficient existing and new housing" to meet their local share of the region's overall need for low- and moderate-income housing. The law also requires the Metropolitan Council to assist communities to accomplish this planning.

As part of the decennial planning cycle, the Metropolitan Council makes an estimate of the region's overall need for new affordable housing units in the upcoming decade (2011-2020), and allocates that need among the region's communities that are connected to the regional wastewater collection and treatment system. Communities are responsible for identifying the amount of land needed to accomplish both their overall forecasted growth and their share of the region's affordable housing need.

Grants Support Communities

The Metropolitan Council, through its Livable Communities program, makes grants to communities to help create and preserve affordable rental and ownership housing throughout the region.

Livable Communities Grant Program For Cities

The Minnesota Legislature created the Livable Communities Act (LCA) in 1995 (see statute.) The LCA is a voluntary, incentive-based approach to help the Twin Cities metropolitan area address affordable and lifecycle housing needs while providing funds to communities to assist them in carrying out their development plans. LCA funds have leveraged millions of additional dollars in private and public investment that has provided new jobs, housing choices, and business growth.

Through funds provided by the Livable Communities Act (LCA), the Council awards grants to participating communities in the seven-county area. The City of Fridley and the Anoka County municipalities listed here participate in the Livable Communities grant program.

• Anoka
• Blaine
• Centerville
• Circle Pines
• Columbia Heights
• Columbus Township
• Coon Rapids
• Hilltop
• Lexington
• Lino Lakes
• Oak Grove
• Ramsey
• St. Francis
• Spring Lake Park

The Council establishes criteria for evaluating proposals and makes grant awards from three separate accounts:

• Local Housing Incentives - Produce and preserve affordable housing choices for households with low to moderate incomes.
• Tax Base Revitalization - Clean up brownfields for redevelopment, job creation and affordable housing in areas already served by transit.
• Livable Communities Demonstration - Support development and redevelopment that demonstrates efficient and cost-effective use of land and infrastructure, and achieves connected development patterns linking housing, jobs and services.