Community Based Research Graduate Student Project Spotlight

Fact sheet: Housing and Race in Minneapolis

Through the Kris Nelson Community-Based Research Program, Jack Gramlich (MPP '24) has supported the research and advocacy goals of the Make Homes Happen Coalition over the last year. Together, Jack and his community partner worked to produce a fact sheet that visualizes key insights on racial disparities in the Minneapolis housing market, which supports the project's broader research goal of evaluating the City's progress on meeting its housing goals.

My community partner, the Make Homes Happen Coalition, focuses on racial disparities in the…

Report submitted to the Minnesota ERASE Campaign (End Rental Arrears and Stop Evictions). ERASE is an effort to ensure that the historic aid enacted by Congress reaches the lowest-income and most marginalized renters it is intended to help. We are working to eliminate rental indebtedness caused by the pandemic, prevent evictions, and create support for long-term policy changes to end housing instability and homelessness. Co-convenors of the campaign include ACER (African Career Education Resource); Housing Justice Center, and MHP (Minnesota Housing Partnership).

Introduction…

Over the past several months, CURA has completed research projects lead by CURA Director Dr. Edward Goetz and Senior Research Associate Dr. Brittany Lewis. Each project is related to affordable housing. An excerpt from “Seeking Closure: The Lowry Grove Report” by Dr. Goetz starts the roundup, followed by three projects lead by Dr. Lewis, “The Brooklyn Center Housing Report,” “Searching for Stability,” and finally “The Brooklyn Park Housing Project.”

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Seeking Closure…

Contributing Authors: Dr. Shana Riddick, Arundhathi Pattathil, Keelia Silvis, Peter Schuetz, Yue Zhang, Justin Baker

Project Funders: Brooklyn Park Economic Development Authority, City of Brooklyn Park; Hennepin County; and State of Minnesota, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency.

In July of 2016, the Minneapolis Innovation Team, in partnership with HOME Line, published a report on Evictions in Minneapolis, which was inspired by Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted. The Innovation Team’s report found that 50% of tenants in the 55411 & 55412 zip codes were evicted…

CURA senior research associate Dr. Brittany Lewis and graduate research assistant Molly Calhoun’s North Minneapolis evictions research was recently published in “Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice.” 

Abstract: Single Black mothers face the highest risk of eviction in the United States. In North Minneapolis, a community manufactured to contain undesirable populations through housing discrimination, decades of urban disinvestment, and unfair lending practices, the situation has become further exacerbated by the rise in distressed-property investment and disproportionate…

In May of 2019, the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) held a multimedia release event for “The Illusion of Choice: Evictions and Profit in North Minneapolis” research project that included a presentation, a video telling the stories of tenants and landlords in North Minneapolis, an art installation with photos that explore the phases of eviction, and an illustrative simulation developed with the Juxta Art Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) team called the “Social Service Runaround.” Evictions are a social crisis in North Minneapolis caused by decades of…

Single Black mothers face the highest risk of evictions in the United States. In Hennepin County, close to 50% of all eviction filings take place in two zip codes in North Minneapolis, despite the fact that they contain just 8% of all rental units in the city. Driven by community feedback, The Illusion of Choice: Evictions & Profit in North Minneapolis project aims to answer the question of why and how evictions are taking place from the perspectives of tenants and landlords themselves. CURA believes this is central to the successful development of public policy solutions and new programmatic interventions for those tenants negatively affected by evictions, as well as…

CURA researchers and research projects were well represented at the recent Urban Affairs Association (UAA) conference in Los Angeles, April 24-27, 2019. In addition to the sessions below, Dr. Brittany Lewis was asked to participate on an activist scholarship panel by Professor Lisa Bates from Portland State University.

Sessions presented by CURA researchers:

• Gentrification and concentrated poverty by Professor Edward G Goetz, Anthony Damiano, Dr. Brittany Lewis, and Molly Calhoun
• Typologies of Fear in the…