City/Town: Eden Prairie

Legislative District: Senate District 49

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?

Where you live affects where your kids go to school, how long it takes to get to work, your health, and whether your family can build wealth. But those opportunities have never been equally available. Redlining, racial covenants, discrimination, inaccessible housing, and exclusionary zoning have left a lasting legacy. Minnesota still has one of the largest racial homeownership gaps in the country.

We need to build substantially more housing at different price points while addressing those barriers directly. I support first-generation homebuyer assistance, strong enforcement of fair housing laws, accessible housing for people with disabilities, and more deeply affordable housing in communities across Minnesota, including our suburbs.

We should also examine zoning and land-use rules that make less expensive housing types difficult or impossible to build, particularly in high-opportunity communities.

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?

As a county Medicaid leader, I think we need to learn from the failure of Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services program. We spent enormous amounts on services intended to help people find housing, with inadequate accountability for whether people actually became housed.

We should start by listening to people who have experienced homelessness themselves. First and foremost, they need homes. Minnesota is short more than 100,000 affordable and available homes for our lowest-income renters. No amount of navigation can overcome a home that doesn’t exist.

We need more supportive and deeply affordable housing. We also need rental assistance to help people afford the homes that are available. Navigation and wraparound services should then help people overcome barriers to getting and staying housed, including connections to mental health, disability, substance use, employment, and other supports when needed.

I would measure these programs by whether people obtain housing and remain housed, not by the volume of services billed.

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?

The median first-time homebuyer in Minnesota is now 40 years old. We need more attainable homes and help for families trying to buy their first one.

I support down-payment and closing-cost assistance, particularly for first-generation homebuyers. We also need more starter homes, townhomes, condos, cooperatives, duplexes, smaller-lot homes, community land trusts, and other less expensive paths to ownership.

And affordability doesn’t end when you get the keys. Property taxes, insurance, association fees, utilities, and maintenance can turn an affordable mortgage into an unaffordable home. Rising homeowners’ insurance costs are becoming a particular concern and deserve attention from state policymakers.

Homeownership remains one of the most important ways families build generational wealth, which is why both supply and access matter.

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 meaningful zoning reform. We cannot make housing more affordable while making it unnecessarily difficult to build.

I support allowing multifamily housing in appropriate commercial areas, reducing unnecessary parking mandates, making accessory dwelling units easier to build, allowing smaller lots, and making room for duplexes, townhomes, fourplexes, and other “missing middle” housing.

This is particularly important in Eden Prairie and Minnetonka. With Southwest light rail opening, we should build significantly more housing near transit, jobs, and infrastructure taxpayers have already paid for.

I don’t think the State Capitol needs to dictate exactly what every neighborhood looks like. The state can remove unreasonable barriers and establish expectations for housing growth while cities retain meaningful flexibility over how they meet them.

Public investment in affordable housing is important, but we cannot subsidize our way out of a housing shortage.

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?

I support a larger and more reliable state investment in housing. Housing represents only a tiny fraction of our state budget despite being the largest expense for most families.

I support bonding, Minnesota Housing investments, preservation and construction of deeply affordable and supportive housing, and rental assistance such as Bring It Home Minnesota. One-time appropriations alone cannot provide the predictability families, housing providers, and developers need.

I am open to the proposed constitutional amendment and believe Minnesotans should have a serious conversation about dedicated housing revenue. I also want to look carefully at how we raise that money. Sales taxes can disproportionately burden lower- and middle-income families, and affordability matters beyond housing too.

Whatever mechanism we choose, I want substantially greater investment paired with accountability: how many homes we build or preserve, what they cost, how quickly people move in, and whether rental assistance is actually keeping families stably housed.

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

In Eden Prairie and Minnetonka, I hear from parents who wonder whether their kids will ever be able to afford to come back here and from older residents who want to downsize without leaving the community they have called home for decades.

We need more housing choices across a person’s lifetime: apartments for young workers, starter homes and townhomes for growing families, accessible housing for people with disabilities, and condos, cooperatives, and senior housing for people who want to downsize.

Southwest light rail gives us a particularly important opportunity. We should build more housing near stations and along appropriate commercial corridors, including deeply affordable housing and opportunities to redevelop underused commercial properties.

I also want teachers, paramedics, childcare workers, health care workers, and other people who serve Eden Prairie and Minnetonka to have a realistic opportunity to live in the communities where they work.