City/Town: Shevlin

Legislative District: House District 02B

Party: Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party

Candidate responses in italics.

Q1: Housing plays a critical role in economic stability, health, and quality of life for individuals and families. However, disparities in housing continue to affect communities of color, people with disabilities, rural communities, and other historically underserved populations. What meaningful actions should be taken to acknowledge, address, and eliminate housing inequities and advance housing opportunities for all Minnesotans?

We are obligated to one another, and our government is held to the same duty. In House District 2B that obligation is going unmet for several groups at the same time.

Three nations have citizens in this district. Red Lake, Leech Lake, and White Earth all run housing authorities doing serious work with too little capital, while families live in overcrowded and substandard homes. The state should fund tribal housing infrastructure directly and treat tribal housing authorities as sovereign partners who set their own priorities, not as one more applicant in a competitive pool.

Disabled Minnesotans and elders cannot stay in their homes without accessible design and home modification dollars, and they cannot get care at home without a direct care workforce that is paid enough to exist in a rural county. I would raise and index Medicaid reimbursement rates and fund modification grants, because here housing and care are one problem.

Rural communities lose when state housing dollars are scored on criteria built for larger markets. I support rural set-asides and scoring that recognizes a twelve-unit project in a town of 1,200 as a serious answer to local need.

Manufactured home parks are the largest source of unsubsidized affordable homeownership in greater Minnesota, and residents own their homes but not the land beneath them. I support funding for resident-owned cooperative conversion and real protections on lot rent and park sale.

Fair housing and fair lending laws work only when someone is checking. I would fund that enforcement and measure it.

Q2: Supportive housing combines affordable housing with support services that help people who face the most complex challenges to live with stability, autonomy, and dignity. Supportive housing provides better outcomes and is fiscally responsible. What will you do to ensure community members who are unhoused or unstably housed receive the support they need to obtain or keep their own homes?

Rural homelessness is real and mostly invisible. Across seven counties there are almost no shelter beds, so people double up, sleep in cars, stay in campers past the first freeze, or move between relatives until the welcome runs out. Because it does not look like a tent on a sidewalk, it gets counted as something else and funded accordingly.

Four things I would do.

Fund the services, not only the building. Supportive housing works because someone is there. Capital dollars without operating and service dollars produce a building nobody can staff. I would put ongoing money behind service contracts and behind Housing Support rates that cover what providers actually spend.

Pay the workers. The direct care and case management shortage is the binding constraint in northern Minnesota. That means indexed rates and career pathways through our community, technical, and tribal colleges so people can build these careers in the places they already live.

Meet people where they are. I have spent my career in libraries, and libraries are where people show up for the job application, the warming room, and a safe place to sit. Clinics, schools, food shelves, and tribal programs are the same. Put housing navigators and outreach workers in those buildings rather than in a county office an hour of bad road away.

Prevent the loss. Emergency assistance, rent arrears help, and eviction diversion cost less than rehousing and keep kids in the same school.

Providers and tenants here already know what works. My job is to fund it.

Q3: Homeownership is a way to build generational wealth, provide family and household stability, and support community vibrancy. More and more Minnesotans are priced out of owning a home because of rising housing costs, including purchase price, homeowners’ insurance, and property taxes. What steps will you take to increase opportunities for renters and first-time homebuyers to purchase homes, condos, or cooperative ownership models?

This district has two housing markets, and they need different answers.

Around the lakes, prices have outrun local wages. The median home sale in Beltrami County is about $300,000 and in Hubbard County about $310,000, up more than twenty percent in a single year. Lake property in Beltrami went from a median of $290,000 to $437,000 in five years. Our realtors will tell you it now takes two incomes to buy an ordinary house in Bemidji, and that homes over $300,000 off the water sit because first time buyers cannot reach them.

West of there the numbers invert. Clearwater County’s median sale is around $171,000 and Mahnomen County’s is lower. Almost nothing new gets built at those prices, because finished construction cost exceeds what the house will appraise for. The stock ages and shrinks.

Same district, opposite problems, but the state needs both tools.

For the lakes counties, down payment assistance sized to a $300,000 market, community land trusts and Habitat capacity so a home stays affordable for the next buyer, and workforce housing tied to the employers who cannot fill jobs. For the western counties, the State Housing Tax Credit aligned with the Greater Minnesota Workforce Housing Development Program to close the appraisal gap, made permanent, plus serious rehabilitation money. On property taxes, the homestead exclusion shifts burden onto other classes instead of being paid by the state. Fund homestead relief openly and index it.

Q4: In the last several years, bipartisan action to streamline building of new homes and apartments has passed in several states, including: allowing for multifamily buildings in select commercial areas, limiting parking requirements, allowing smaller homes on smaller lots, and more homes per lot in residential areas like duplexes, fourplexes, and accessory dwelling units. What reforms do you support to modernize zoning to both enable homes to be more affordable statewide and improve city tax bases?

I support these reforms and I want them passed.

Allow accessory dwelling units by right statewide. Legalize duplexes and fourplexes where single family is currently the only option. End parking minimums that force a small town to pave land it needs for houses. Permit smaller homes on smaller lots. Allow housing in select commercial areas. Adopt clear timelines and objective standards for approval so a builder is not waiting nine months on a discretionary decision. Several of these passed with bipartisan support in other states, and Minnesota should stop being late.

They will also do less in my district than in a growing suburb, and the reason matters. Zoning is rarely what stops a house from getting built in Bagley, Kelliher, or Mahnomen. What stops it is water and sewer capacity at the end of its useful life, no builder within fifty miles, and a city staff of three people with no planner among them. Zoning reform on its own changes very little north of Brainerd.

So I would pair the reforms with capital for small town water, sewer, and site work, and with funded technical assistance of the kind that already works. MHP’s Housing Institute has proven the model.

I would also write these reforms as permission rather than as a mandate, expanding what a local government is allowed to approve. Give a rural council the tools and a budget and it will build.

Q5: Despite housing being the largest cost in the average household budget, housing receives only a small fraction of the total state budget at just 0.3%. A lack of ongoing reliable funding for housing in Minnesota’s state budget has resulted in an undersupply of stable homes affordable to our workforce, our elders, and our families. In recent years, a constitutional amendment for housing, which would dedicate revenues from a sales tax increase to housing, has gained momentum at the legislature. What revenue options will you champion to more adequately meet our need for reliable funding for homes we can afford?

Housing gets 0.3 percent of the state budget, and then we act surprised by the results. Reliable funding is a choice that I will make in legislation.

Bonding first, because it is available now. I support the full $200 million in Housing Infrastructure Bonds and $100 million in general obligation bonds for public housing, and I will vote for a large bonding bill and work the votes needed to reach the supermajority. Rural Minnesota loses most when a bonding bill fails.

Then, raise revenue from the top. Minnesota lost worldwide combined reporting by a single vote in 2023, which lets large corporations book profits offshore while our towns run levy referendums. I would pass it. I would protect the surcharge on net investment income over one million dollars, repeal the data center sales tax exemption, and require large companies entering a Minnesota market to pay for the utility and community burden they impose.

I would also fully fund and index Local Government Aid and County Program Aid. Freezing the LGA while costs rise pushes the bill onto local property taxpayers, raising the tax on the same families we are trying to house.

On the dedicated housing amendment, I support a permanent, constitutionally protected funding source for housing. I want the revenue side built so it does not land hardest on those households, and I will work with you on that design.

Everyone pays their share, and honest work gets honest pay.

Q6: If you have other housing policy priorities, especially specific to your district’s housing needs, please share them here.

House District 2B covers parts of seven counties and is larger than Rhode Island. What the statewide conversation misses about it:

Seasonal conversion. Lakes country loses year round homes to vacation only ownership every season. I want state tools that help communities keep year round housing available, built with lake associations, townships, and counties rather than around them.

Section 515 rural rental. The federal properties that house our elders and low-wage workers are aging out of their mortgages and out of affordability, and once they convert, they are gone. Preserving them is the fastest way to protect housing, and technical assistance for this should be matched with state preservation dollars.

Seasonal and tribal workforce. Resorts, restaurants, the woods, and processing plants run on workers who cannot find a lease. Workforce housing tied to those employers is economic development.

Heating and housing quality. An old, leaky house in any Minnesota County is an affordability problem every January. Weatherization is housing policy here.

Childcare. Families are choosing between a place to live and care for their kids, and a family losing on both at once leaves the district.

Aging in place. Elders want to stay in the towns they built. That takes modification dollars and home care workers, and without both, we lose people to a facility two counties away.

I will keep asking at township halls and tribal offices where the need actually is, and I will carry the answers to St. Paul.