FAMILY HOUSING FUND

The Family Housing Fund is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide safe, affordable, sustainable homes to families and children in the Twin Cities metropolitan area through ongoing partnerships with the public and private sector. Learn more at www.fhfund.org.

The fund supports the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the Metropolitan Council, and Minnesota Housing in their efforts to preserve and expand the region's supply of affordable housing.

The Fund organizes its priorities under four program initiatives. Each initiative evolved from the Fund’s work over the last 30 years and seeks to match up with current opportunities and challenges that exist in the marketplace and in the communities we serve. The initiatives are: (1) Linking Workforce Housing and Regional Growth; (2) Promoting Successful Homeownership; (3) Ending Homelessness; and (4) Reimagining Affordable Housing.

Linking Workforce Housing and Regional Growth: Promote and preserve a full range of workforce housing choices for all Twin Cities families and link housing policies and programs to other regional systems and regional growth objectives. Minnesota’s economic vitality depends on having affordable, well-located workforce housing that correlates with systems such as transportation, mass transit, and education. The Family Housing Fund invests in affordable housing projects that visibly demonstrate the best practices of comprehensive community development. This includes sustainable mixed-use, mixed-income, higher-density housing along transit and transportation corridors and projects that feature walkable neighborhoods, healthy materials, cost reductions, and energy conservation.

Additionally, by recognizing that it is more cost-effective to preserve rather than to replace existing buildings, the Fund remains a leader in the preservation and stabilization of the region’s supply of affordable housing. In 2009, the Fund, in partnership with Minnesota Housing and the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, received a very competitive national grant award from the MacArthur Foundation in support of the Minnesota Preservation Plus Initiative. Since 1980, the Fund has invested more than $62.3 million toward the construction and preservation of 294 developments containing more than 13,775 units of affordable rental property. The Fund collaborates with the Urban Land Institute Minnesota (ULI MN) and the Regional Council of Mayors (representing 36 municipalities) on a major initiative to encourage economic prosperity by increasing the range of housing options and improving linkages between housing, transportation, and jobs. The initiative spurred the development of the Opportunity City pilot program and an online housing toolbox called HousingPolicy.org Minnesota. Additionally, the Fund, in partnership with the Metropolitan Council, Minnesota Housing, Twin Cities LISC, The McKnight Foundation, and the Urban Land Institute Minnesota, launched the Rethinking Housing initiative to identify and develop innovation in buildings, places, and systems throughout the Twin Cities metropolitan region. (Learn more at www.rethinkinghousingmn.org)

Promoting Successful Homeownership: Promote successful homeownership for low- and moderate-income families, particularly first-time homebuyers, first-generation homebuyers, and communities of color. Through its homeownership programs, the Family Housing Fund works with public and private lenders and nonprofits to help low- and moderate-income families realize their dreams and experience the benefits of long-term ownership. The Fund’s programs assist families before, during, and after the purchase of a house to ensure successful homeownership. Since 1980, the Fund has invested more than $72 million to help produce or preserve 13,144 affordable single family dwellings. Additionally, the Fund has underwritten homeownership counseling programs that have assisted more than 8,000 families.

In 2008, the Family Housing Fund launched the Home Prosperity Fund, a financing tool to revitalize neighborhoods and increase housing opportunities in the metro area. The loan fund enables local nonprofits to create affordable housing initiatives and products and to acquire vacant buildings for repair and resale to responsible new owners. Minnesota Housing, The McKnight Foundation, US Bank, Wells Fargo, TCF Bank, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, and the Pohlad Foundation all made significant contributions to the Home Prosperity Fund totaling $25 million, with the goal to raise $50 million by 2012. In 2009, the Fund formed the Twin Cities Community Land Bank as an innovative tool to help spur land acquisition and site control to help stem foreclosures and meet the changing housing needs in the Twin Cities neighborhoods and communities now and in the future. The Fund works with the Minnesota Foreclosure Partners Council to create a timely, coordinated response to the foreclosure crisis. In Minneapolis, the Fund provided money and leadership to the Northside Home Fund, which focuses on redeveloping boarded homes in six targeted cluster areas in north Minneapolis. In Saint Paul, the Fund partnered with the Invest Saint Paul Initiative, a program to increase successful homeownership in underserved communities, especially recent immigrants and families of color.

In partnership with the Saint Paul and Minneapolis Public Housing Authorities and the Metropolitan Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA), the Fund continues to support Home Ownership Made Easy (HOME), an innovative program of education, counseling, and financial assistance that enables families living in public housing or receiving Section 8 assistance to become homeowners. During HOME’s 19-year history, 450 families have purchased homes.

Ending Homelessness: The purpose of the Ending Homelessness initiative is to support strategies and programs that help individuals and families to break the cycle of homelessness. To combat homelessness, the Fund makes strategic investments to improve the delivery of human services in supportive housing through the Heading Home Minnesota Partners Fund and by supporting state, county, and local plans to prevent homelessness. (Learn more at www.headinghomeminnesota.org.) Since 1980, the Fund has invested more than $42 million to assist 150 projects, which have supplied more than 4,150 units of supportive housing and 1,766 rent subsidies to families and individuals at risk of homelessness. In addition, the Fund works to improve the capacity of supportive housing service providers to deal with chemical and mental health issues among their clients and improve services and outcomes for homeless children through the Visible Child Initiative, a program administered by the Family Housing Fund in partnership with a network of 17 family supportive housing providers. In partnership with Nan McKay and Associates/Learning Evolution and Hart Shegos and Associates, the Fund continued to develop The Asset Manager, a Web-based management training, support, and capacity-building program for owners and property managers of subsidized housing in the metropolitan area.

Reimagining Affordable Housing: The Fund will reimagine affordable housing in the context of larger cultural, political, and social issues. The Fund will play a role as leader and convener in building community support for development, systems change, and innovation in affordable housing as a key component of healthy communities and a healthy metropolitan region. The Fund recognizes that significant social, political, and cultural systems affect the quality and availability of affordable housing. Taking this into account, the Fund has worked to reimagine affordable housing by developing strategies and programs that promote green building practices, focus on the needs of children, address the underlying issues of race and cultural competency, and incorporate the arts and the humanities in its work. Minnesota Green Communities is a collaboration of the Family Housing Fund, the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, and the Enterprise Foundation. The initiative is designed to foster the creation of affordable, healthier, and more energy efficient housing throughout Minnesota. Minnesota Green Communities is by far the largest green building program in the state with more than 3,000 units completed, under construction, or under development. (Learn more at www.mngreencommunities.org.)

Changing the Face of Housing in Minnesota is a partnership that includes the Fund, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH). The program is an intentional, focused effort to improve the affordable housing system by engaging and retaining more people of color at all levels of affordable housing and community development planning processes. (Learn more at www.changingthefaceofhousing.org.)

In addition to these initiatives, the Fund continues to prepare, update, and disseminate user-friendly fact sheets and reports on issues related to affordable housing. The Fund continued to travel the “Home Sweet Home Again” exhibition, and partnered with Minneapolis Public Schools to sponsor an art and poetry competition focusing on homelessness and the meaning of home. (www.fhfund.org/homesweethomeagain.) Additionally, the Fund, along with the Minnesota Home Ownership Center and the Minnesota Foreclosure Partners Council, launched new marketing materials on foreclosure prevention for the “Don’t Borrow Trouble Minnesota” campaign. (Learn more at www.dontborrowtroublemn.org.)