The Duluth City Council convened on Monday, May 11, 2026, at 6:00 PM in the Council Chambers. Prior to the formal meeting, the Council held a Committee of the Whole session featuring a presentation on affordable housing funding opportunities. The regular meeting included approval of a 21-item consent agenda, adoption of two regular agenda items, and first readings of five ordinances. Councilors Durrwachter and Tomanek were absent.
So it's high fox. Good evening. Do we want to gather and start uh getting ready for the committee of the whole thing? Are you sitting by yourself? Is it your show? Cool. Okay, can I turn on you? Can you hear me? Okay. Am I good to start? You can go ahead and start if you want to give us your name. Yeah. Thanks for having me tonight. My name is Lena Fancook. I'm the housing a housing planner. Um the planning and economic development. Um planning and academic development department here at the city. Um and tonight I'm here to talk to you about Minnesota Housing's multifamily consolidated request for proposals. Um this is a presentation we give every year to council. So this might be familiar familiar to many of you, but I know we do have some new counselors here. Um, first I'll uh give an overview of the process itself, what the RFP is, why it's important, um, and what your role is in this process. Um that will just uh give context for the most important part, which is um introducing this year's two local applicants that are going through this process. Um I'll give an overview then of those projects. Um then we'll open up um the floor for questions about the process and also about the projects. We do have um representatives from uh those two applications or the applicants here tonight. Dakota Sowell from One Roof Community Housing and Katie Hagland and Caleb Anderson representing UGM and the HRA for the second project. So they'll be here to answer any of your project specific questions and provide any details that I missed in the overview. Okay. So what is the multifamily consolidated RFP? This is one of Minnesota housing's biggest annual funding opportunities for affordable housing across the state. It's also the primary mechanism in which affordable housing is funded and built at scale in our community, which is particularly significant, noting the recent housing study that was done this past year that showed that Duluth needs over 2,000 units of affordable housing by 2030. So this RFP is specifically for affordable residential rental projects. And the application actually combines multiple state funding sources into one single application. So that includes maybe most notably the low income housing tax credits, but also other sources like deferred loans and bridge loans and a variety of other sources as well. Because affordable is often defined differently in different settings. For this context, MHFA is generally only looking at projects that are affordable to at that 60% or below area median income. The RFP is governed by the state's qualified allocation plan. This is a plan that's updated every two years or so and it lays out the state's funding priorities for these resources. So what type of housing and units the state is prioritizing over those cycles, as well as the eligibility requirements and scoring criteria for those applications. It really determines how the funds, these state funds are distributed across the state to all sorts of multifamily projects. This is a very competitive process with the demand for these resources up to five times the actual available resources that the state has. So applications need to be really strong and competitive to have a chance of being selected by the state. In this case, preference is generally given to projects serving the lowest income tenants for the longest periods of time. Over here in the green boxes, you can see what type of housing is eligible through this program. That includes the general rental housing, but also senior housing and permanent supportive housing. And then below that there's a few examples of what applications are scored on. The first few are some heavy hitters for the in this current QAP. If you include permanent supportive housing or housing for people with disabilities, or if you have large family housing, so units with more than two, um two or more bedrooms. But they're also looking at your transit accessibility, walkability, other sustainability measures, a variety of other criteria, but then this last one is also a big one, and it's the financial readiness of projects and the financial feasibility. Also specifically at whether or not there's local investment or yeah, local funds within that project.