This regular meeting of the Duluth City Council (July 28, 2025, 6:00 PM) included a committee-of-the-whole presentation on the 2025 Maxfield comprehensive housing needs analysis, a public hearing on a $725,000 affordable housing grant, public comments, and action on several resolutions and ordinances. Key topics were a housing demand forecast requiring over 6,000 units by 2030, an amended resolution delaying a 24% council pay increase to 2027, tabling of the Transportation Commission ordinance, and adoption of a daycare ordinance amendment.
You don't want to do calling? You don't want to be called on doing the committee of the whole thing. I feel like I'd need more stars. No, it does feel like kind of a big table for sit on the floor. I mean, do these move around? You can get up and pay. Do you have a theater background? Uh yeah, well, I mean I looks in high school musicals. Okay. Good evening. We will begin our committee of the whole with our housing update. If you would start by introducing yourselves, giving us the forest. By giving us your name and uh your title in the city, and then you be can begin. Uh yes, thank you, President Tomick and uh counselors. We are excited to be here. I am Tom Church. I'm a senior housing developer with the City of Duluth. Uh and I'll let Lena introduce herself. And I'm Lena Fancook, I'm a housing planner. Uh and we are here tonight to present the findings of the updated 20 uh 25 Maxfield comprehensive housing needs analysis. Uh we are so excited to be able to be here to share this with you. It's been a long time in the works, as I'm sure many of you know. Um so we've got half an hour tonight. We're gonna try to keep our rambling to 20 minutes and leave 10 minutes for questions, but um feel free to chime in as you have uh comments or questions as well. Um I will also just say this is a fairly high level uh presentation. This is a 200-page report, and we are just hitting the highlights tonight. Um, but there will be many, many chances to learn more about both this report and the city's uh responses to it going forward over the next six months. We'll get to that towards the end. Um but tonight we're gonna start with a couple of the key demographic findings uh from Maxfield. We'll go through their housing demand summary. Uh we'll talk a little bit about about the rental survey findings that they um have published for us, uh, and then talk about the priorities and opportunities that uh seem to stick out based on their analysis. So without further ado, we'll start with this highlight, and that's that Duluth is growing. Um Maxfield finds that we grew by about half a percent uh between 2010 and 2020, uh added about 500 people to our population. They also estimate that we uh have already added 1,300 more people between uh 2020 and 2025. They expect that that's going to uh be repeated between 2025 and 2030, another 1300. Uh and they're showing they're projecting that we will hit uh over 90,000 uh for our population by 2035. Um so that is especially exciting after so many years of uh stagnant uh population. Um another key finding. Oh, I'll come back to this. Um within this, uh I'll just mention the single uh fastest growing subgroup within uh our population is our senior population. Um and so we'll come back to that later in the presentation, but just to highlight. Uh Duluth is also building. Um we have issued 1800 new permits, uh building permits between 2018 and 2024, averaging about 230 each year. Obviously, that waxes and wanes, as you can see from uh the chart in front of you here. Um but we've done a a pretty good job of being consistent in issuing those birding building permits. Uh we even had a banner year back in uh 2024 uh with uh 621 certificates of occupancy being issued. Uh so we are adding housing units. Uh we are doing, I will flag one other uh note from from these findings, which is that we're doing an especially good job of uh issuing permits for single-family detached homes. Uh we're doing that at a rate that we haven't seen since t uh 2002 to 2007. Um there's additional detail about all of these statistics uh buried in the report.