The Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis is home to George Floyd Square. Memorials and murals line the main thoroughfare, Chicago Avenue, lending a vibrant, colorful background for what would otherwise be ordinary neighborhood life. People stop to say hi on the sidewalk or talk on their cell phones as they pace in front of the low-rise, one-story buildings, while the smell of barbecue from neighboring restaurants called Smoke in the Pit and Just Turkey fills the air. The store where George Floyd bought his last pack of cigarettes, Cup Foods, is still here, though it’s now called Unity Foods.

Raised fist statues crafted from steel—the emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement—stand above the cars in the middle of conjoining traffic circles in the neighborhood, and the names of those killed by police are written in chalk along the asphalt of Chicago Avenue. Nearby, in Powderhorn Park, an encampment popped up in the summer of 2020, the summer of the uprisings, when more than 200 people were made homeless after they were evicted from a hotel. The park became one of the largest homeless encampments known in the city’s history.

Powderhorn is a center of activism in a city known for it in recent years. And it’s also home to Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha, or CTUL, a tenants rights organization, where members of the city’s growing Hispanic population fight for more and better housing. Recently, it’s where I met Laura Perez and Alibella Rodriguez, who have been in Minneapolis nine and 23 years, respectively.

The two came to CTUL separately, after organizers knocked on their doors and told them about tenants rights, and ways they could fight back against unfair landlords. Now, they knock on doors, too. When Perez first came to the city, she visited her sister and thought she might stay for a week or two. But then she decided she wanted to stay in Minneapolis for good. “I liked the area, and I loved the close community,” she said in Spanish, through a translator.

Perez decided to rent an apartment in the building where her sister lived. She learned she could have an apartment for $750 a month and a $750 deposit, which she was willing to pay, and she filled out the full application. After she filled it out, though, her sister’s management company realized the sister’s apartment was full of guests. Accusing her of housing too many family members, even though their stay was temporary, the building served her with an eviction notice. That left both sisters scrambling, looking for new apartments for them and their families. Perez and her kids bounced around for years trying to find a good apartment; Rodriguez and her husband lucked out with affordable, small studios in their early years, less than $500 a month, but after they had their daughter, they needed more. Their rent doubled and doubled, and the deposits grew to two months’ rent.

Their experiences made both women want the city to do more to protect renters and make housing affordable. In the past five years, Minneapolis has made national news for many of its reforms, including a unique planning document passed in 2019 that eliminated single-family zoning on residential lots in the city limits. Minneapolis has become a leader for the Yes in My Backyard, or YIMBY, movement—predating by five years New York’s “City of Yes” reforms. Minneapolis aims to use zoning and land use reforms to build 80,000 new housing units by 2040.

But Perez and Rodriguez say it is not enough. There’s still a shortage of affordable housing for families in their community, there’s a rising homelessness problem, and nothing stops corporate owners of buildings from raising rents, charging unfair fees, and kicking families out. “They’re building more buildings supposedly at affordable prices, which isn’t true,” Rodriguez said, through a translator, “because those are amounts that we can’t afford to pay.”

YIMBY: Good, but Not Enough

The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 exposed massive problems with America’s housing policy, problems that are even worse today, after the recession that followed the Covid-19 crisis.

Before the Great Recession, almost all federal housing policy focused on building single-family homes and encouraging homebuying among as many families as possible, both to give them a place to live and as a vehicle for wealth-building. After the crisis, mortgage lending slowed down and, despite a massive bump during Covid, remains lower than it was before the crash. At the same time, more and more Americans born into the millennial generation were growing up, starting families, and trying to buy their first homes. By some estimates, the housing shortage doubled in the years before the pandemic, to 3.8 million units in 2019. The real estate site Zillow estimates that the shortage in 2025 is 4.5 million, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition puts the gap between needed and available affordable housing even higher, at 7.1 million.

The places with the most and highest-paying jobs—especially on the coasts—are generally the most expensive places to live. But the shortages have led to increased housing costs across the country. The median sales price of homes in the entire country has nearly doubled since 2010. During and after the pandemic, rural areas and small metros have seen disproportionate increases in home prices, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, leaving families everywhere worse off. Even prices in deindustrialized cities from Buffalo to St. Louis are rising fast.

At the same time, tightening in mortgage lending practices has meant that fewer and fewer people can buy homes. Last year, the median age for the first-time homebuyer was 38, up from 35 the year before, and nearly a decade older than in the 1980s, when people in their twenties were buying homes. Today’s first-time homebuyers also earn more money and often have help from their parents, which means homeownership is increasingly reserved for the upper-middle-class and upper-income families.

But with federal policy focused on pushing people into homes, the rental market hasn’t been built up enough to continue to house families who weren’t ready or able to buy their own homes. In cities where homebuying prices increased, so did rents. The number of families who are considered “rent-burdened”—that is, spend more than 30 percent of their income on rents—has soared, according to the center at Harvard, and the rates of those paying more rent than they can comfortably afford have increased fastest for middle-income families. At the same time, evictions and homelessness have increased: The number of people staying in shelters grew by nearly half from 2015 to 2023, according to the center. “Not being able to afford housing is no longer just affecting the so-called poor or the elderly.... But ... it’s creeping into the middle class,” said Susanne Schindler, an architect and historian who is a research fellow at the Harvard center.

Because so much of the affordability crisis is attributable to a lack of housing supply, much advocacy in recent years has focused on simply building more. The Yes in My Backyard movement started in California in the 2010s, largely in response to NIMBYism or the reluctance of current homeowners to allow new and denser development in their established neighborhoods, especially in those dominated by single-family housing. YIMBYs wanted to change zoning laws and review processes to make it easier to build new units. In 2016, President Barack Obama’s administration released a tool kit to help local advocates reform their cities’ land use policies, and the movement spread to expensive cities like New York and Seattle.

The YIMBY movement and the zoning reforms and pro-building movements it inspired are encouraging developments. But that usually means relying on large-scale developers. It’s a private endeavor, not a public one. But the crisis is so big, and affects so many already vulnerable people, that we need a more ambitious solution, one that revives an idea too many people have dismissed as a failure of the past.

Minneapolis: Center of Progressive Reforms

Minneapolis might not seem like an obvious site for a big YIMBY movement, but the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area totals more than 3.7 million people, and Minneapolis is the biggest and densest city in Minnesota, with a long history of progressivism in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The YIMBY movement there coalesced around a planning document that a regional authority requires the city to produce every 10 years—what became known as the 2040 plan. In response to community concerns about housing affordability, walkability, and other quality-of-life measures, the city had already eliminated parking minimums that required developers to provide a certain number of parking spaces for each unit of housing and banned new drive-through restaurants, longtime targets of urbanists who want cities to deemphasize accommodations for cars to encourage biking and walking in city centers instead.

At the same time, the Minneapolis planning department and the University of Minnesota had both been working on projects showing the lasting effects of historical racial segregation in the city. “The University of Minnesota had started a program called Mapping Prejudice, and they had students that were going in and reading restrictive racial covenant deeds and mapping them,” said Meg McMahon, planning director for the city. “[We] were able to utilize some of their research to really help explain to our policymakers that, you know, these historic policies and practices and capitalism and all these other factors have really created pretty segregated communities that really were producing disparate income outcomes for our community members.”

With that data in hand, alleviating those injustices became a focus of the 2040 plan. “That was what got folks really interested in saying that … the Minneapolis 2040 plan was really going to center racial equity and create more opportunities in more neighborhoods to unlock the amenities that we had for everyone, and to make those communities accessible to all,” McMahon told me.

A grassroots group called Neighbors for More Neighbors sprang up to aggressively support aspects of the plan, especially the elimination of single-family housing zoning, and to counter opposition to the 2040 plan. “There were community members … [who] were opposed to the inclusion of duplexes and triplexes,” McMahon said. The group put up signs that said DEVELOPERS WIN, with pictures of bulldozers. “So the Neighbors for More Neighbors group got on their bicycles, and they rode through the whole city, and they mapped where every single sign was, and were able to overlay it with demographic information about the city to show that the neighborhoods that were opposed to the Minneapolis 2040 plan were predominantly white, predominantly wealthy, single-family homeowners,” she continued. In other words, the opposite of groups that might be helped by building more housing.

Ultimately, the 2040 plan would allow for duplexes and triplexes on any residential plot by right, and it created even more density along busy thoroughfares and transportation corridors that McMahon said had been traditionally under-zoned anyway. After the plan passed, a nonprofit sued, arguing for environmental review and temporarily halting projects, but the lawsuit was ultimately dismissed.

Building for the Future Requires More

In the past, nearly every development proposal in the city went through a rigorous approval process, and McMahon said the city had learned that those processes had encountered strong opposition, especially from well-resourced neighborhoods, that resulted in inequality in the ways neighborhoods were developed. Now, the process front-loads public commentary to create a plan with hard-and-fast rules that treat every neighborhood the same and limit the ways individual projects in individual neighborhoods can be challenged or altered. It helps that elected officials in the city are generally pro-housing, and now when neighbors oppose any individual project, their representatives can point to the 2040 plan and say their hands are tied. If a project follows the rules, it’s allowed.

The city hasn’t been totally remade by the new reality of the 2040 plan, but the progress has been substantial. 5,692 permits were issued for 10,638 units in 2023, down from the previous four years, and slightly higher but still behind in 2024, with 2,330 multifamily permits issued. The city is still behind on its goal of creating 18,000 new units per year. Many of the new constructions are mid-rises along major transportation corridors, but throughout the city, duplexes and triplexes are also filling a gap that advocates call “missing middle housing,” which allows up to three families to live on a lot that formerly housed one, often in buildings that don’t seem out of place among the lower-profile, older single-family homes in residential neighborhoods. The new apartments helped slow rent growth to only about 1 percent in the city in 2024, compared to 14 percent in the state as a whole, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Land use takes a long time,” McMahon said. “It took us 100 years to develop the community we have today. It’s going to take 100 years to reshape.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and community leaders cut a ribbon at a new affordable housing complex in August.

COURTESY OF MELISSA OLSON/MINNEAPOLIS PUBLIC HOUSING AUTHORITY However, that growth has already slowed—through May 2025, multifamily permit issues were down by half from the previous year. In part, this happened because the costs of construction have gone up, a trend likely to continue as the reality of tariffs under the Trump administration settles in. But another problem is the simple existence of the profit motive: Developers build to make money, and making money requires that rents rise and stay high enough for them to make a profit. They’re not concerned with affordability, and they won’t build if their investments don’t pay off.

And this is precisely the rock upon which reforms like Minneapolis’s often crash. Affordability describes the limit to the kind of YIMBY reforms cities have made and want to make. The goal of zoning reforms and other changes, like removing red tape and limiting permitting requirements and environmental reviews, may entice more developers to build more housing, but it won’t ensure affordability on its own, particularly for low- and middle-income families. “I am a supply skeptic in the sense that I don’t think just building more will automatically bring prices down, especially in certain markets like Boston or New York or San Francisco,” Schindler said. “Prices follow what people can pay, so if incomes are so high in these places, and people are willing to pay absurd amounts for an apartment, that’s what the market is going to charge.”

Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, put it even more bluntly. “It’s hard for me to accept any sort of premise that says, if we just make developers happy, we’ll solve our problems,” she said. “Making profiteers happier does not satisfy the profiteers; profiteers will want more if they get more. And so, this idea that affordability, or the affordable housing crisis, can be solved by happy profiteers, is insane, because you really can’t make a profit off of deeply affordable housing.”

The clearest solution is to remove the need for a profit, which means the solution won’t be found in the marketplace. Nonprofits across the country are stretching to try to meet the need, but they’ve never been able to operate at the scale of the federal government. That’s how other countries ensure there’s enough housing up and down the income scale to see to it that everyone can get a home—through public housing. In the United States, our relatively brief—and wildly underfunded—foray into public housing is often viewed as a disaster. But could it be part of the future solution, without making the same mistakes that we did in the past?

We Never Fully Committed to Public Housing

The idea that the government could and should build housing arose during the New Deal, when the primary motivation was to create a jobs program to get builders back to work. Like many other New Deal spending projects, it became essentially an anti-poverty program. It was meant to help low-income families, especially mothers with children, find safe housing when the marketplace wouldn’t take care of them.

Large-scale development intended for people with limited incomes wasn’t entirely new. The Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia had been built by the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers of America in the 1930s to house hosiery workers. And mining companies and other entities had long built workforce housing in the cities and towns where they dominated, so that their workers could live close by. But the large-scale government intervention to guarantee a basic level of housing was new, and it mimicked the design of other programs at the time: It created a floor through which the very poorest couldn’t fall. They wouldn’t be homeless. But the homes were also intended in many cases to be a stepping stone to stability, not necessarily homes forever. In fact, the Trump administration has proposed time limits on public housing and rental assistance based on this idea. “It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner told the Associated Press in July. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.”

In the beginning, the homes were intended to be self-sustaining, earning enough through rents to keep up with maintenance. Unsurprisingly, homes set aside for those with the lowest incomes couldn’t charge enough rent to provide upkeep. Most of the city agencies that ran the developments couldn’t keep up with needed repairs. Last year, an estimated backlog of needed capital repairs on existing public housing was $70 billion. Congress has never authorized enough funding to catch up.

It didn’t help that a number of city agencies had been rife with disorder and corruption in the middle of the last century, and some cities, like Chicago, were notorious for building as cheaply as possible to begin with. The developments were also mapped onto existing prejudices and injustices, which led to public housing complexes being built in already racially and economically segregated neighborhoods, and on land near industrial uses that people paying market rates didn’t want to live near. In some cases, building in distressed neighborhoods led numerous neighborhoods to spiral even further into disrepair, and white flight in the 1970s and 1980s left many public buildings in a permanent ghetto.

Some developments became synonymous with crime. Pruitt-­Igoe in St. Louis allegedly housed muggers in stairwells waiting to rob residents, and the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago recorded some of the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Cabrini Green, also in Chicago, housed more than 15,000 people at its peak, was described as a “virtual war-zone” by NBC News when it was finally closed in 2010, and was the fictional site of the 1992 horror film Candyman. Jay-Z, who grew up in the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, called his home “Murda Marcyville” in a song.

The disrepair that many city housing authority buildings fell into led to even more disinvestment, until the federal government completely stopped promoting public housing. Rather than reckon with the legacy of public housing and all of its promises and failures, the United States simply stopped building it. In 1998, the Faircloth Amendment passed, named for North Carolina Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth, essentially prohibiting any new public housing units from being built. In the 1990s, the most notorious public housing high-rises in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston were torn down. Federal programs sought to replace them with mixed-income, mixed-used developments spread throughout cities, but the total number of units fell overall, and the redevelopment programs had mixed results.

Instead, helping low-income families find housing has concentrated on housing vouchers, commonly called Section 8, that aid in finding homes on the private market, and tax credits and other incentives at the federal, state, and city levels to encourage private developers to set aside some units in new buildings for families making under the median income. Almost all of those incentives have fallen short. New construction fueled by the tax credits hasn’t kept up with the need, and Section 8 waiting lists both for vouchers and for project-based construction are so long that, in many cities, they’ve been closed. Moreover, these aids rely on the private market. Many of them are funded by development and real estate transactions built for market-rate housing. That means that building affordable units actually relies on market rates going up, so that more money can go toward funding them.

Amid the YIMBY debates and zoning reforms and arguments for abundance, some policymakers are revisiting and reimaging what public housing could be. The government, this argument goes, should simply build affordable units itself rather than try to convince developers to do it. The challenges would be formidable: to overcome public housing’s past, along with voter reluctance to trust the government to do anything. Then there’s adequately funding such a big building program. But perhaps the largest challenge of all is to define the project in a way that provides housing to a broad enough population that it would create more political support for it and not leave behind the very low-income families who rely on old-school public housing to this day.

The Government Can Fix This

To address the stigmas against public housing, advocates for bringing it back say it should be expanded up the income scale and offer mixed-income apartments, in part to keep poverty from being concentrated in certain neighborhoods. This could also ensure that more people become politically invested in the support and upkeep of these developments. It’s also gotten a new name: social housing.

Social housing is not a new idea, but progressive policy advocates started focusing on it in the United States in 2018, after the publication of a paper from the People’s Policy Project by Saoirse Gowan and Ryan Cooper. Social housing has taken on many definitions, but at an event on the topic in April, the Center for Joint Housing Studies at Harvard defined it as, fundamentally, housing that is taken off the rental market to be permanently affordable. That can mean that it’s owned publicly or by nonprofits, but in general it’s insulated from the private market. It could also further other goals, like green and fair-labor building practices, racial and socioeconomic equity, and community control. The owning entities would cap rents at an affordable level, usually around 30 percent of a household’s income. Many point to models like those in Vienna, which has owned and developed almost half of the city’s residential housing since it began rebuilding after World War II.

What makes social housing different from traditional public housing is that it would be meant for a wider range of incomes, up into the middle classes, and could find unique funding streams. Social housing projects exist in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a public entity, the Housing Opportunities Commission, owns more than 9,400 units. Voters in Seattle just passed a payroll tax on employers with employees earning more than $1 million a year. In theory, the promotion of developments that would include the middle class would help the projects be more self-sustaining by being able to charge higher-income families more.

Left, Demolition of part of St. Louis’s massive Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in 1972. Right, A piece of modular public housing was hoisted into place in Minneapolis in 2023.

LEFT: BETTMANN/GETTY; RIGHT: COURTESY OF MINNEAPOLIS PUBLIC HOUSING AUTHORITY In Minneapolis, social housing is beginning to gain a foothold. CTUL, the renters organization, has advisory committees composed of members who decide what policies to push for at the local and state levels. Perez, Rodriguez, and other members of the group had watched over the years as their rents went up, but their incomes didn’t. They watched as the city transformed zoning laws, and rents still weren’t affordable for many in their community, who were especially vulnerable because they were often new immigrants who didn’t speak English as a first language and were unfamiliar with the cities’ and state’s laws about housing. That led to a shift. “Social housing is more for the community,” Perez said. “We can see a lot of buildings, but no stable housing. We need established, stable housing for everybody, and people can decide where to live.”

Critics of the programs that exist now argue that they could lead to focusing solely on the middle class rather than those most in need. Montgomery County’s program relies on a bond issue that could lead to paying back that debt becoming a priority. Many advocates and researchers want the federal government to focus on the long-neglected needs of those already living in public housing, who are now overwhelmingly elderly, disabled, and living on fixed incomes, before trying to reinvent something new. “A lot of the discussion has been focused around Vienna, which is completely different from the United States housing market,” said Susan J. Popkin, a researcher at the Urban Institute who has surveyed and interviewed families living in public housing in Chicago for 30 years. “Our public and assisted housing altogether is about 5 percent of our housing stock right now. That would take a huge cultural change.” If such a change is possible, she said, she hasn’t seen it.

A YIMBY Dream

Last year, Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith introduced a bill, with New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that would have created social housing in the United States, among other changes. It would have repealed the Faircloth Amendment and allowed for the possibility of new public housing, while also creating funding streams that would allow for the kind of mixed-income developments by both governments and nonprofits to create permanently affordable housing.

“The market for housing in this country is not working for many, many people,” Smith said in an interview. “Certainly, it’s not working for people working in low-wage jobs. It’s not working for seniors on fixed incomes, but it’s not working for young people who are trying to get started. It’s not working for families with kids that are trying to find an affordable place to live. It’s not working for a lot of people.”

The bill did not go anywhere before November’s election. In February, Smith announced she wouldn’t seek reelection, which means the bill would need a new champion in the Senate. Under President Donald Trump, such a program would be even less likely, and already existing housing programs, like Section 8, are under threat by Republicans who want to impose time limits and work requirements on the people who receive those benefits, or to block grant those programs to the states in ways that will reduce funding over time. Popkin thinks that makes it especially important to focus on the low-income population who aren’t served by the private market in any way. “There’s no one else who’s going to make that investment,” she said.

In the second Trump administration, progressives may find themselves in the position they’re often in: defending inadequate programs that already exist from the relentless onslaught of Republican attacks and attempts at defunding and dismantling them. “I don’t think that progressives should be defending the status quo,” Smith said, when I asked her about that tendency. “I think we should be developing ideas that get after the core problems that make housing such a big problem for so many Americans. And I don’t think now is the time to be sort of retrenching and saying, ‘We need to, you know, protect what we have.’ We should be defining a new world.”

The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority has nearly 6,000 housing units, much smaller than the housing authorities in New York City or Chicago, but still sizable. The city has 42 high-rise buildings that are what people traditionally think of when they think of public housing. Recently, the city started the largest public housing redevelopment in its history at a development called Spring Manor, where funds are available to build 15 new units and rehabilitate existing ones in the current tower.

Somewhat unusually, however, the authority has a portfolio of 700 “scattered-site family homes,” or houses in neighborhoods around the city. I toured one recently that had taken advantage of the city’s new zoning rules to turn what had been a single-family home into a new unit that will house six families.

It was built from modular units, and the exterior has the long, narrow look of homes made from recycled shipping containers or tiny homes, but stacked side by side, painted blue. The modular units were built off-site, which meant that the neighborhood construction was minimized and was the least disruptive to neighbors it could possibly be. While the block it’s on consists of mostly older single-family homes, it’s next to a community center that faces a broader thoroughfare. It doesn’t look out of place. Representatives from the housing authority told me that residents wanted more storage, bigger kitchens, and more units with four or five bedrooms so that they could house their multi­generational families more easily, thus the housing authority is trying to build more of those. The new apartments still smell like paint, the light floors and bright walls wouldn’t be out of place on design TikTok, and this building, along with others like it, comes with its own property manager and maintenance team, so that any problems can be dealt with quickly.

Because it’s in a neighborhood full of private homes, it faces different community issues than a taller, high-rise public housing building would. But its superpower is that the new zoning rules could help mute community opposition to the redevelopment. Many of the homes that the authority currently owns around the city need improvements and repairs, and rezoning the lots to house even more families could move more and more of those in need off the waiting lists. But they don’t have easy access to funding, though Smith’s bill would have provided it.

This kind of medium-size development in the middle of a single-family housing neighborhood is a YIMBY dream, and it’s probably years away. But this is public housing that is permanently affordable, and it and others like it will serve some of the lowest-income families in the city.

The 2040 plan has been so accepted in city politics that many of the mayoral candidates—the election is in November—are running on its successes and promising to do more. “Minneapolis deserves a future that’s more equitable, more sustainable, and more connected,” the city’s current mayor, Jacob Frey, said in a statement.

Mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, a state senator representing the district including the Powderhorn neighborhood, said he would support rent stabilization—laws that would require landlords to offer to sell to their tenants first, laws that would prevent private equity from buying developments in the city, and direct investment in housing as well. “Minneapolis is in a housing crisis, and Mayor Frey is not doing nearly enough to provide safe and affordable housing for all its residents,” he told me.

State legislators have introduced bills encouraging more cities to adopt zoning reforms, though they haven’t gained enough support to pass. Which is to say, Minneapolis is trying every approach to building more affordable housing, and it’s still not enough. The residents want more and are pushing for their elected officials to protect them even more. And what social housing advocates want is a massive, committed investment from the federal government, one that would acknowledge housing as a need for people and not just a source for profit for developers.

I asked Alexander Deng, a 30-year-old volunteer with Neighbors for More Neighbors, if he’d seen anyone lose out, or the city lose anything, by trying to build more affordable housing and advocate for the changes the city hopes to see more of. “I’m a little scared for the cute little houses and the cute little historic areas in town,” he said. He described how, when he first moved to the city, he’d lived in a building near where single-family homes had dominated. These had since all been bulldozed to make way for big buildings. He was a little sad to see those disappear, but he also recognized that they’d made way for hundreds of new residents. “If people want the cute house and they want a cute yard, then you don’t have to be downtown,” he said. “We have to keep a city as a city where lots of people can live and work and have their full life.”