The Duluth City Council met on Monday, May 12, 2025, at 6:00 PM in the Council Chamber. The meeting included a public hearing, a committee-of-the-whole presentation, public comments on multiple topics, a unanimous consent agenda, and votes on several resolutions and ordinances. The council also debated and amended a resolution supporting the EPA Duluth lab, ultimately passing it with seven amendments covering other federal agencies. A motion to reconsider a prior interim use permit denial failed.
Good evening. We will begin our committee of the whole in one minute. Good evening. Thank you for being here. We will begin our committee of the whole multifamily consolidated request for proposals from the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency. Thank you. Thank you, President D Monic. Thank you, counselors, for having me tonight. My name is Lena Fancook. I am a housing planner with the planning and economic development department here at the city. And tonight, yes, I'm going to be talking to you about the multifamily consolidated request for proposals, a program by Minnesota Housing Finance Agency. Um but hopefully it will provide some context to the importance of supporting our local applicants in this process. MHFA likes to call it a one-stop shop for funding as it combines multiple funding sources for multifamily uh projects uh throughout the state into one uh application process. This includes the low income housing tax credits as well as bonds and deferred loans. Um in this context, MHFA defines affordable as rents that are affordable to households at or below fifty percent area medium median income. So a little bit about the application process. Uh the application process is governed by the state of Minnesota's qualified allocation plan. This is a plan that lays out how low income housing tax credits are distributed to multifamily projects. It includes project requirements, eligibility criteria criteria and state housing priorities. Thus applicants need to put together a really strong application in order to be um considered by the state um and to receive this funding. Thus, preference is given to projects serving the lowest income tenants for the longest periods. Over here in the green boxes, it shows what the eligible housing types are. This includes general occupancy rental housing as well as senior housing and permanent supportive housing. Some examples of scoring criteria laid out by the qualified allocation plan include the transit and walkability access of the project, whether it's in a qualified census tract, if it includes workforce housing, senior housing, permanent supportive housing, and whether it includes innovative construction techniques, those are just to name a few. So the city's role and our housing team's role in this is to facilitate this local support process for applications. For a strong application, Duluth applicants seek local project support from the following entities. They look for a resolution of support from you, City Council. They look for support as well as often pre-commitment HUD funding from community development committee. They look for support from the Affordable Housing Coalition and the Heading Home Advisory Council, as well as if they are seeking supportive housing support, they will look to St. Louis County, and if they are seeking Section 8 rental subsidy support, they will look to the HRA. So where we're at in this process, you can see here high level timeline. In April, we presented to three of these entities. Both applicants received formal support from the Affordable Housing Coalition as well as the Heading Home Advisory Council. And they also received funding as well as funding, or sorry, they received support as well as funding pre-commitment from the community development committee. Today brings us to May 12th, the committee of the whole, where I present to you. And then on May 27th, resolutions of support will come to council to be voted on at that council meeting to support the two applications that are going through this year's cycle of funding. Finally, on July 10th, MHFA application deadline arrives, and then not until December will the MHFA board make those final funding recommendations. So I'm sure many of you, all of you are familiar with the affordable housing demand that we see throughout the city of Duluth, and you've probably seen these numbers before, but just as a refresher, the 2019 Maxfield Research Study found that Duluth could absorb 3,500 additional units of affordable housing by this past year, 2024. Within that same time frame between 2019 and 2024, only about 330 affordable units were added to the City of Duluth. That obviously leaves a large discrepancy of between the demand for affordable units and the actual supply that was added to our city during that time. The demand remains very high for affordable housing. So that leads us. Next slide, thank you. That leads us to why this funding tonight, supporting this funding is so important. You can see on the screen here, there's a table that shows past projects in the city of Duluth that have received this MHFA funding. I'm sure many, if not all of these projects, are very familiar to you. Many of the prominent and successful affordable and supportive housing projects that have come online in Duluth in the recent years were able to happen because of this MHFA funding. If you look at the total development cost column as well as the award column, the award column is what these projects received from MHFA. And if you compare that to what those total development costs for that project, those projects are, you can see that the majority of the funding that made these projects happen happen came from MHFA funding. All of these projects were able to receive millions of dollars in state rep state support.