Blog

Update on Bring it Home, Minnesota

by Ben Helvick Anderson, Vice President of Policy and Organizing

I have a big update for you about Bring it Home, Minnesota. It isn’t the news you were hoping for, but we are still fighting, need you to take action – and we will not give up. 

Earlier this week, the Governor and legislative leadership set the budget targets for all of the committees. We needed a high budget target for the housing committee to make Bring it Home, Minnesota possible.  

Housing got a high target, $1 billion for the two-year budget cycle, but there is a catch. They allocated only the part of the surplus that is one-time dollars, meaning it is not projected to be there in the next budget cycle. While the $1 billion budget is historic, we cannot create Bring it Home, Minnesota rental assistance off of one-time dollars. Rental assistance needs ongoing resources to provide rental vouchers for as long as people need them and cannot be funded with this budget. 

This news is a big disappointment and frustrating after all our work. I feel it too, but we are not done with this session and will not give up. 

Because of your organizing and advocacy, we have many outstanding legislative champions who you have convinced of our vision, including the House and Senate Housing Chairs, Rep. Michael Howard and Sen. Lindsey Port. They are committed to creating Bring it Home, Minnesota and are as frustrated as we are about the budget, and are not ready to give up! 

We are working with the Chairs to secure some beginning of the program this year despite the budget limitations. They are fighting to create a new metro sales tax to create dedicated funds for Bring it Home, Minnesota. The current proposal would be for a one-quarter-of-a-percent sales tax with all revenue going to support affordable housing, and 25% of the revenue dedicated to Bring it Home, Minnesota rent vouchers statewide. It’s estimated this could bring in $300 million a year, enough to start making a real difference. They are also in dialogue with us about a smaller pilot if the sales tax fails. These could be first steps forward.  

Please take action here to email your legislators to share your frustration and ask them to support this effort.

I know you are disappointed by this news. We created an amazing amount of momentum this year and moved an issue that was a dream to a top priority of housing legislators. We don’t yet have the power to get everything we want, and we need thousands more people to join us.  

But because of our campaign: 

• The housing budget received its historic increase and has more than doubled since we launched three years ago.  
• The Chairs of the Housing committees see rental assistance as their top priority and are still fighting – and need our help!  
• The lack of rental assistance is now a major issue the media is tracking and writing multiple stories on this year.  

This session does not point to what we did wrong, but to all we are doing right. We just need to do it on a much larger scale. We have built tremendous power, so much that we believed we might win this year, but it wasn’t enough. We need to build more power. Talking with our friends, neighbors, congregations about the campaign. Engaging on social media. Showing up and being vocal. When we launched this campaign, we knew it would take years to build this power, and we won’t give up now.    

AND…we are still in this fight this session. We can still claim something, and we will need your help to do it. Please take action now. Let’s continue this movement together so that all people have a home.