In lawsuit, Black pastors blame state, regional housing policies for increasing racial segregation

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·6 min read
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When a state advisory committee associated with the U.S. Civil Rights Commission recently reviewed a strategic plan put forward by Minnesota Housing, the state financing arm for affordable housing, the Rev. Alfred Babington-Johnson was there to offer an earful. None of it was flattering.

A prominent voice among Black Twin Cities ministers, Babington-Johnson sued Minnesota Housing and the Metropolitan Council last year, arguing that state and regional efforts to build affordable housing effectively have backfired, increasing racial segregation while concentrating poverty in poor neighborhoods.

“Whether that’s done with proven intentionality, the outcomes clearly indicate none of the disparities go away,” Babington-Johnson said in an interview Wednesday. “The educational gaps don’t close. The economic opportunities don’t materialize.”

His testimony last January followed a similar track, but Babington-Johnson — the chief executive officer of the Stairstep Foundation, which works closely with 100 Black churches — learned last month that most of his comments would not be included in the committee’s official written review, which had evolved over time to include a wide range of housing issues.

“We were blindsided,” Babington-Johnson said.

Beth Commers, the outgoing chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s Minnesota Advisory Committee, struck most of his testimony related to Minnesota Housing during a June 4 review of the draft document, calling it off-topic. All but one committee member, Will Stancil, supported that decision, she said.

Commers noted that rather than focus exclusively on Minnesota Housing, as initially intended, the advisory committee took a stronger look at the lack of statewide zoning standards that might otherwise allow for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in suburban communities dominated by single-family homes.

Commers, who is also interim co-director of St. Paul’s Department of Human Rights and Equal Economic Opportunity, said Babington-Johnson is quoted elsewhere in the report speaking more generally about housing, but the subject of his lawsuit remains undecided before the courts and was not germane to the committee’s housing review.

“Our job is not to push any person’s message forward. It’s to examine the issues,” she said. “We struck one quote regarding his lawsuit against the Met Council. Is it the statewide advisory committee’s role, when the whole report was not even about Minnesota Housing? We didn’t end up examining Minnesota Housing’s effectiveness. The matter was in the court, and it was the court’s to decide, not ours.”

Babington-Johnson was taken aback. He’s been organizing Black churches around social issues under the collaborative His Works United since the 1990s, and never expected his input would be dropped.

“Excluding my claims against (Minnesota Housing) is particularly egregious because the committee pro-actively sought my testimony,” he wrote in a June 12 letter to the commission’s Minnesota Advisory Committee. “Truly addressing civil rights issues means giving voice to complaints and concerns that challenge the status quo and existing institutions.”

John A. Powell, a nationally recognized professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote a 15-page letter to the committee demanding Babington-Johnson’s testimony be included. Law professor Myron Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, submitted a strongly worded letter of his own.

Met Council lawsuit

The flap is the latest outcropping of a racially-charged legal dispute between Babington-Johnson’s Stairstep Foundation and the Twin Cities’ leading public funders of affordable housing.

A year ago, the foundation sued the state of Minnesota, Minnesota Housing and the Metropolitan Council, arguing that state and regional efforts to build more affordable housing across the Twin Cities had concentrated that housing in low-income, high-minority neighborhoods with the fewest resources to help the poor.

The lawsuit maintains that when Minnesota Housing awards low-income housing tax credits to help city-affiliated developers construct affordable housing, those subsidies often land in Minneapolis and St. Paul, core urban areas with generally higher crime rates and less competitive public schools than suburban locations.

Nonprofit developers — many of them predominantly white in their leadership and employee rosters — use these public subsidies to keep themselves afloat financially while building low-income housing in urban areas already overloaded with needs, the lawsuit charges.

For instance, before the light rail connecting downtown St. Paul and downtown Minneapolis rolled into place in 2014, both cities came together to promote new affordable housing along the Green Line’s station stops through a housing initiative called “The Big Picture Project,” whose plans were adopted by each city and then approved by the Met Council.

Subsidized housing developments now front Hamline Station on University Avenue, Victoria Station in Frogtown, downtown Central Station and other St. Paul stops along the Green Line, in areas where poverty already was concentrated. In response to concerns about potential gentrification, the stated goal, in part, was to ensure locals were not priced out of St. Paul neighborhoods if the train raised property values.

But the result, the foundation alleges, has limited opportunity and increased racial segregation in the Twin Cities metro, where more than 40% of all residents currently reside in census tracts that are heavily populated by one race. In tracts that are at least 70% white, there’s now one subsidized housing unit for every 35 residents; it’s one unit for every eight residents in census tracts that are at least 70% non-white.

In Minneapolis and St. Paul, the numbers are even more stark, with as many as one subsidized unit for every four residents in census tracts dominated by people of color.

“If you go back in the history, particularly the Met Council, they used to use their policies to force other communities to include affordable housing in their plans and procedures,” Babington-Johnson said. “Over the years, they’ve receded from that stance.”

Stairstep’s legal complaint, which alleges violations of the Minnesota Constitution’s equal protection clause and the Minnesota Human Rights Act, seeks an injunction prohibiting state and regional efforts “from operating policies that create and perpetuate residential racial segregation.”

The latest

That lawsuit recently survived its first major legal hurdle. Ramsey County District Judge Sara Grewing last month rejected efforts by Minnesota Housing and the Met Council to have the case thrown out for lack of legal standing.

A spokesperson for the Met Council said Friday that it would not comment on pending litigation.

Officials with Minnesota Housing have taken issue with the Stairstep Foundation’s characterizations, noting funding for affordable housing has begun to pick up in the suburbs.

In a letter to the state advisory committee last month, Minnesota Housing Commissioner Jennifer Ho wrote that “in the last several years, 63% of the new rental units in the Twin Cities metro area that have been awarded funds through the Agency’s Consolidated Request for Proposals have been in the suburbs while 37% have been in the central cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.”

Ho has repeatedly said Minnesota needs to “go big” with more resources to create more affordable housing for renters and homeowners in every corner of the state.

That said, “we should not place the burden of accessing opportunity on the backs of lower-income people of color, who have been marginalized and the target of discrimination for generations,” she wrote to the committee in a previous letter in early May.

“For example,” she said, “the only avenue for lower-income parents of color to access well-resourced schools should not be making them move to a white, wealthy community, which may lack other opportunities that they value. Rather, we should invest in disinvested communities and ensure that all schools are well resourced, allowing people to achieve equity in place.”

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