Construction underway for 90 units of affordable housing in Duluth

NINA MOINI: Well, by this time next year the city of Duluth will have 90 more units of low-cost housing. Last week, city leaders, developers, and housing advocates celebrated the construction of two new apartment buildings in the West Duluth neighborhood. These projects will focus on providing housing for long-term homeless adults and those with disabilities. Nancy Cashman is executive director of Center City Housing, the developer of the projects, and she joins us now on the line. Thank you so much for being here, Nancy.

NANCY CASHMAN: Sure. Thanks for having me.

NINA MOINI: Well, I don't know if you heard the segment we did a few moments ago about mental health and young people, and now we're talking about homelessness. It's really hard to make a lot of things happen in life if you don't have a home base, right, Nancy? How critical is a home for somebody?

NANCY CASHMAN: Well, I think it's a no-brainer that everything is better if you have a home to live in. Folks with behavioral health and mental health issues, and chemical health issues, and just issues from living on the streets and health issues, living on the streets and in shelter and being highly mobile is not a good treatment plan for anyone. So without housing, it's really difficult to take that step forward.

NINA MOINI: How did you identify the need for these 90 units, and how did you decide where to put them and where the greatest need was, among a great need?

NANCY CASHMAN: So there are a lot of different community members who are tracking numbers related to homelessness. And so we've been working with the Coordinated Entry System and the Continuum of Care, and they have about 900 homeless single people on the list that would be eligible for this type of housing in Duluth.

And so the highest-barriered population right now in the Duluth area is single adults, so we talked with the county and the city and just really wanted to be sure that we were developing what was needed for the highest need in the community. And that turned out to be singles, and so we moved ahead with that.

NINA MOINI: Can you explain why that might be?

NANCY CASHMAN: Well, that's a really good question. I think coming out of the COVID, there were a lot of issues with folks during the-- there were a lot of issues with folks not paying their rent and units being really destroyed. And so I don't know if families fared a little bit better. In the past, families and children were the highest group. But now, fortunately, there's been a lot of effort put into dealing with family and with children housing. And I just think the young kids turn 18 and they age into homelessness, and those numbers just don't seem to go away.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And affordable housing and housing is an issue across the state, obviously, homelessness is across the state. This project, I understand, is considered deeply affordable housing. Can you explain what exactly that means, deeply affordable?

NANCY CASHMAN: So the bulk of the units are dedicated and set aside for people who are at 30% of AMI, and/or 50% and below. So it's really people with very, very low incomes who are probably on county assistance or Social Security and don't really have enough money to go into the regular market, for sure. And those costs are part of what keep them out on the streets or in shelters, because if there's not a place to go that they can actually afford to live at, they're never going to get in.

NINA MOINI: Are there other services that are going to be available as well?

NANCY CASHMAN: Yes. So this type of housing really requires, obviously, the affordable housing, the apartment side of it. But the other part of it is the supportive services. You really need to match the services to the population that you're going to be housing. And so these two properties will have pretty comprehensive support services that include transportation, onsite case management.

We'll have a 24-hour desk staff, because often people don't have a problem at 4:00 in the afternoon. They may need some help and support at 2:00 in the morning, so we have staff there that are highly trained. It also neutralizes some of the safety issues that you can have with some folks. There's mental and chemical health supports. We help people develop a housing plan. We connect people really early when they move in to a primary health care provider, so they don't use the emergency room and urgent care, which are so very expensive.

We do a lot of community-building activities to just bring people together and have them have a little fun. A lot of these folks have really lost connection with their families because of their use and the issues that go with it, so we do a lot of family reunification, because once somebody is in a housing situation and their needs are being met, often that door can reopen with children and siblings and parents and all of that.

We also help people clean up issues with the law. A lot of folks come in with nuisance tickets that they owe money on, so we work really hard to get that taken care of. And in our family housing, we do a two-gen model where we have a lot of supports directed at the children, but also at the parents, because we really want to interrupt that generational homeless cycle that we see everywhere.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. What makes it permanent housing? I wonder, if you are at 30% of AMI, you're making a lot less than the median or the average income in the area. So how do you get out of that type of housing?

NANCY CASHMAN: Well, so permanent means permanent. If you become income ineligible, which is rarely a case that happens, we would help people find another place to live that they could afford. Most of these folks, though, really, that isn't what happens for them. When we say high-barrier homeless people, we really mean those that have really not had much housing success at all in their life.

And so we're really dedicated to helping those people really figure out how to have long-term housing, and we're very successful at it. It doesn't mean that we don't get all the behaviors and all the issues that people in a regular market apartment would get with these folks. We just have a lot of trained staff and the ability to try to help people manage through some of those issues.

NINA MOINI: It's a lot of resources, right, Nancy? What are some of the barriers to being able to open more of this type of deeply affordable housing?

NANCY CASHMAN: Well, a barrier has become enough money. We're funded by Minnesota Housing, the state, city, county. These are expensive, so you've got to find all the money. The units obviously need to be subsidized by some kind of subsidy, so you need to go find that, and they're limited. They're not an unending supply of Section 8 vouchers, for example.

And then the supportive services also costs a lot of money, so you need to put a lot of effort into finding those resources, and then you're constantly fundraising. And this is an evidence-based model. It's been proven again and again and again to work and to be effective, and we've seen that ourselves. We have 25 buildings across the state with over a thousand units, not all of them permanent supportive housing, but the bulk of them. And so it's worth the money, I would say.

NINA MOINI: What happens for people, when they are using substances, if there's a relapse? I wonder when you say supportive housing and permanent housing, what makes it work, the model that you speak of? Is it giving people more chances, or being there when someone is not following the rules? What does it look like to really keep people on that path?

NANCY CASHMAN: So we use two-systems housing first, which means you can move in and not agree to being sober or agree to meet with a case manager. And then we use the harm reduction model. So our staff are trained. We're really supporting people and making baby steps. We don't really look at sobriety. We look at their housing.

So if someone's using and they're paying their rent and they're getting along with their neighbors, and they're using in their apartment, we are not going to evict you for that. We'll probably sit down and talk with you about how much alcohol you're consuming, and is this what you want to do and that kind of stuff. But the idea is really not to create a lot of "or else" hurdles, but really help people manage through the issues they have.

And we know people are going to come in and have chemical health issues and behavioral health, so sometimes people have a strong reaction, and we have to help them work through that. And primarily people leave because of threats of violence or violence itself, because we have to keep the community safe.

NINA MOINI: Mm-hmm. And just lastly, Nancy, when will the buildings be open? Are there already occupants for them? I know we were talking about a year or so from now, but what's that going to look like?

NANCY CASHMAN: So the schedule is the construction started this last fall, and so we're expecting that the units, the buildings, will be done December, January, February. You never can put an exact date on it. And then those units will be filled. Other than the criteria to get in, there's not a special population. We do have a property that we're closing. We are replacing those 30 units, because the city can't afford to lose 30 single adult affordable permanent supportive housing units. So yeah.

NINA MOINI: All right, Nancy. Thank you very much for stopping by. Hopefully we can talk to you again when things are open and running.

NANCY CASHMAN: Great. Thank you.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was Nancy Cashman, the executive director of Center City Housing.