In July 1992, attorneys for the Minnesota Legal Aid Society and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed suit in federal district court on behalf of a group of plaintiffs living in public housing in Minneapolis alleging that the public housing and Section 8 programs in the city perpetuated racial and low-income segregation. The co-defendants in the Hollman v. Cisneros lawsuit offered to enter into settlement negotiations with the plaintiffs, and in April 1995, a consent decree was signed that committed the co-defendants to a series of dramatic policy changes aimed at deconcentrating family public housing in Minneapolis. In 1999, CURA was contracted by the nonprofit Family Housing Fund and the State of Minnesota to conduct an evaluation of the implementation of the Hollman consent decree. The findings of the three-year evaluation are presented in a series of eight reports, which conclude that the implementation of the consent decree produced mixed results with respect to the construction of replacement housing units, the reductions of race and poverty concentration in public housing in the Twin Cities, and the use of special mobility certificates made available by the decree. This report, the seventh in the series, examines the implementation of the Hollman Special Mobility Program. Although more than 700 Section 8 vouchers and certificates were made available to Hollman families each year between 1996 and 2002, to date fewer than 100 have been used. There has been a significant lack of demand for these subsidies, in part because of the very tight housing market experienced by the Twin Cities from 1997 through 2001. The report estimates that the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority contacted between 4,300 and 5,000 families about the program during a five-year period. Only 285 families (roughly 6%) were interested enough to contact the program and begin to search for a home. As of March 2002, only 80 families have successfully leased a unit through the program (a 29% lease-up rate), and most of the program activity has taken place since 2001.

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