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T HR OUGH the R O OF What’s to be done about the North’s extreme housing shortage? WRITTEN BY ALYSSA FORD
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n a Wednesday last August, just after breakfast, Duluthian Connor Floerke and his wife, Jenae, put a posting online. The Floerkes planned to rent their Lincoln Park 1-bedroom duplex for $1,000 a month. By lunchtime, they had several dozen calls, texts and emails from people clamoring to be their new renters. Most wanted to sign without even a tour. “That just gives you some sense of the pressure,” says Shaun Floerke, president of the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation and Connor’s dad. “It’s serious out there. Housing is a top-two issue, all across the board.” Northern Minnesota’s housing crisis is intense and intensely personal. “Housing is not like any other issue,” says Jason Hale, director of the Housing and Redevelopment Authority in Cook County. “We spend most of our lives in our homes. It’s where we raise our kids. For most of us, it’s our most valuable possession and our biggest investment.” Hale knows firsthand how tough it can be to find housing in northern Minnesota. After a thorough hunt, Hale found no suitable housing in Grand Marais after he landed the HRA job. So now he commutes an hour each way from Silver Bay. The fortunate ones with stable housing are paying for it like never before. Rent for single family homes grew 27 percent in 2023. The median home price in the U.S. is up 52 percent from January 2020. Hale says he has met many people who are temporarily living in garages, yurts, travel trailers, or cabins without running water. “I’m not talking about unhoused people. I’m talking about working people who come home from a day on the job to an uninsulated garage that they happen to be renting.” Northern Minnesota has danced on the edge of a housing shortage for decades, but the Great Recession effectively pushed the region into
crisis. After the housing market imploded in 2008, the construction industry was half-furloughed until roughly 2015, despite consistent and insistent demand for more housing. During that time, a generation of aging, knee-sore tradesmen stepped into retirement–without enough young tradespeople to take up their tool belts. At the same time, many Boomers have decided to “age in place” in their single-family homes, rather than transition to senior housing. That trend might have something to do with a cultural bias unique to the English-speaking world. Anglophones seem to have a strong distaste for dense, multi-unit housing. In a 2023 YouGov poll, respondents were asked if they would like to live in a four-story-tall apartment building. Continental Europeans overwhelmingly said ‘yes.’ But Britons and Americans both overwhelmingly said “no”–by a margin of 40 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Perhaps not surprisingly, the entire Anglosphere is fighting to adequately house its people. This is not just the United States’s problem. There are housing crises in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia and Canada, too. That said, the shortage is extreme in Duluth. Most developers in Minnesota see the North’s rocky terrain and simply say, ‘yeah, no thanks.’ After all, why should a sensible builder work in northern Minnesota–with its stricter codes, short construction season, ledgerock and supply-chain problems–when there are nice, flat cornfields ready to convert to housing in southern Minnesota? The good news is, Duluth has a new generation of leaders looking at the problem. This cohort includes Hale, Floerke and Sumair Sheikh, the new executive director at the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. Rachel Johnson, president of APEX and Chad Ronchetti, Director of Planning and Economic Development at the City of Duluth, are also new to their jobs. Both Johnson and Ronchetti believe the housing shortage is solvable with the right amount of grit and derring-do. And they’ve got plans. To read more about these two dauntless Duluthians, turn the page.
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