Standing up to protect Prairie Pointe and affordable family housing in Shakopee
On the evening of June 8, 2023, Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative staff and supporters attended an unprecedented meeting held by the Planning Commission for the City of Shakopee.
We attended this meeting after learning that the site for our affordable family housing development—Prairie Pointe—was at risk of being rezoned, which would severely undermine the viability of the project.
Much to our surprise and concern, this threat appeared despite a 6-0 supportive vote by the Planning Commission and a 4-1 supportive vote by the City Council back in 2020.
Prairie Pointe is on its way to providing 42 homes for low-income families in a city where less than 3% of available homes are considered affordable to people making 30% or less of the area median income (AMI).
We firmly believe that Shakopee and the state of Minnesota need this affordable housing because affordable housing makes communities stronger and more resilient. And we intend to defend that position and our plans to make this vision of home possible across the state.
Below are comments made by Beacon leadership on June 8, 2023, which outline Beacon’s perspectives regarding the situation in Shakopee.
Beacon’s remarks prior to the Shakopee Planning Commission Meeting on June 8, 2023
The following remarks were delivered by Heidi Mastrud, Beacon’s Vice President of Advancement and Communications prior to the Planning Commission meeting in Shakopee on June 8, 2023.
Good evening. My name is Heidi Mastrud. I’m the Vice President of Advancement and Communications at Beacon. We are a nonprofit housing developer and a collaborative of congregations that encourages people to live out their values and advocate for affordable housing.
This evening, we will hear from a number of people who support affordable housing in Shakopee. Let me introduce them now –
Pastor Reggie Klindworth, Senior Pastor at Crown of Glory Lutheran Church
Renee Rock, a resident of the City of Shakopee
Jerry Hennen, former Scott County Commissioner, and Shakopee Resident
Anne Mavity, Executive Director, Minnesota Housing Partnership
Jaylani Hussein, Executive Director of CAIR-MN
I am here to address the unprecedented moment we’ve found ourselves in, with the Shakopee planning commission debating tonight whether to recommend to the city council to strip Beacon of our approved planned unit development and attempt to stop us from building Prairie Pointe. These 42 homes, when complete, will offer families affordable homes in a community that offers so much – strong neighborhoods, world-class entertainment, good jobs and schools.
Let me begin by saying “Thank you” to the Shakopee residents and neighbors who have turned out tonight to show future residents of Prairie Pointe that your welcome will be warm. We all deserve neighbors like you.
At Beacon, we believe that affordable homes belong in all communities, but we are standing in one of the least affordable places to live in all of Minnesota. Only 3% of the homes in Shakopee are affordable to people making 30% or less than the area median income – for a family of 4, that’s about $37,000 a year. Prairie Pointe is vital for meeting the housing goals and priorities of the city. The city itself has named that they need to create nearly 550 deeply affordable homes by 2030. Prairie Pointe is the best opportunity to make a real step toward that goal.
When built, Prairie Pointe will fill part of a glaring gap in the City’s housing continuum and provide desperately needed family affordable housing that will make the community stronger.
Beacon owns 19 properties and has 20 years of experience operating them. Our homes have produced positive impacts for youth, young adults, single adults, and families across the metro – in urban and suburban communities.
With that track record in mind, let me say this – housing developers like Beacon must rely on local jurisdictions to keep their word. The city of Shakopee is now considering arbitrarily rezoning the property that we own in an attempt to keep Prairie Pointe out of this community by depriving Beacon of our lawfully obtained zoning approvals. This decision would deny families who are struggling to pay rent today from having a safe, stable, and affordable home in which to raise their children.
We have had a strong working relationship with the city in the past, so we are troubled and confused by the city’s claims that we have shown no progress on building Prairie Pointe. The fact is that since the Shakopee City Council approved Prairie Pointe 4-to-1 in June of 2020, Beacon has not only purchased the land – we’ve also successfully secured commitments in public and private funds for the project – to the tune of $16 million. We’ve engaged residents of the City of Shakopee and Scott and Carver counties through congregational involvement, updated and informed public officials and city staff as to the project’s progress, and invited neighbors to grow their understanding of the need for affordable housing in this very community.
The city has also claimed that we didn’t hold a required neighborhood meeting in advance of our 2020 approval – but this argument doesn’t hold water. We desire to be a good neighbor, and we follow the rules. The city explicitly and in writing waived the need for a neighborhood meeting and implemented an alternative approach due to the unprecedented public health challenge related to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beacon met all of the neighborhood outreach requirements that the city identified leading up to the planning commission and city council approval of our original application. There are no additional neighborhood outreach requirements associated with the planning commission’s recommendation to the city council or with the council’s original approval of our entitlements.
Like many of you gathered here tonight, we are a property owner in the city of Shakopee. Our organization has already committed nearly $1 million to this project. And yet, the city didn’t even extend the courtesy to alert us as the developer to the proposed rezoning before the notice went out to the community, and we have yet to receive the legally required ten-day notice from the city that the meeting is even happening. That the city has failed to follow standard notice and communication processes is deeply troubling.
Accepting the proposal to rezone to B-1 would present an extraordinary challenge to the viability of the project, reducing the total number of homes built, creating an expensive and burdensome need for redesign, and could threaten the funding that has been secured to advance the project. We do not accept the suggestion that rezoning doesn’t compromise the viability of Prairie Pointe. As a developer with 20 years of experience, we have never encountered a situation like this – where a project has been embraced by a community, approved to move forward, then for reasons that aren’t apparent to us, had that same entity attempt to reverse those decisions. We find it problematic that a community could renege on a commitment that helps them meet a need for housing, both profound and urgent.
I will be clear. There is no basis for rezoning and no need for this conversation. Even though this moment is a challenging one, we are sure there is a path forward to break ground next spring and open Prairie Pointe to families in 2025.
Beacon and its collaborative of congregations are committed to ensuring families have the homes that will allow them to thrive. We will not accept the proposal to rezone our land. We look forward to a new day in which Beacon and the City act together as partners in bringing these families home to Shakopee.
Thank you.
Beacon’s official remarks at the planning commission meeting on June 8, 2023
The following remarks were prepared for the Shakopee Planning Commission by Kevin Walker, Vice President of Housing Development at Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative. Due to time constraints, a shorter version of these remarks were delivered during the Public Hearing portion of the meeting.
Prairie Pointe is a family affordable housing development designed to help address unmet housing needs identified in Shakopee’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan.
The project concept was developed after consultations with over a dozen current and former officials, area leaders, and parents with lived experience of housing instability in the Scott and Carver County area. The final design is the product of many hours of negotiations and discussions with Resonate Church, with whom we shared a portion of our purchased site, with leaders, City staff, and reflects neighborhood feedback during the review and approval process.
It reflects attention to site-specific conditions, a City study-supported approaches to City parking requirements and traffic impacts, and expectations for fencing and screening. The strength of our proposal speaks for itself as it received a 6-0, unanimous positive recommendation from the Planning Commission and a supermajority approval from the Shakopee City Council on June 2, 2020, following an extensive process.
Per the staff’s report and consistent with requirements associated with PUD proposals, our design exceeded City design requirements. Per the public record, among the closing comments leading up to City Council approval, the former city mayor said our proposal had triggered the most ‘public input’, for and against, that he had ever received on a development proposal in his 30 years of public service.
Despite this, the Mayor asked if there was an opportunity to table our proposal so a community meeting could be held. In response, our team noted the difficulty in hosting such a meeting during the pandemic and described the impact on our ability to apply for funding in the 2020 affordable housing funding round at Minnesota Housing if we did not have approval in place.
We noted the extensive community engagement that had transpired given the various means that the City had made available to ‘replace the neighborhood meeting’ process under the extenuating circumstances (which included standard 500’ notice, email addresses, and staff phone numbers). We also expressly acknowledged that it was the City Council and Mayor’s call on whether more community processes would be required. The Mayor put it to the Council. In the ensuing discussion, the City Council did not require any further neighborhood engagement and approved the project on a 4-1 vote. Moreover, the City Council did not stipulate any expiration date on our granted entitlements.
Following Council approval, we moved forward and worked with the City to record preliminary and final plans. With City approval in place, we submitted a July application in the 2020 SuperRFP competitive funding process to Minnesota Housing. On December 18, 2020, we closed on the purchase of the property from the Knights of Columbus. We subsequently learned that our 2020 application was unsuccessful.
We also submitted applications in 2021 and the 2022 SuperRFP competitive funding rounds to try to seek the capital funds needed to bring Prairie Pointe to fruition. Our application yielded an award of tax credits in December 2022 from the SuperRFP process. Over the last three years, our vested rights in the property, based on the granted entitlements, expanded from about $46,000 at the time of City Council approval to nearly $1 million in related legal, architectural, environmental, engineering, and financing costs today.
Our application to support a planned unit development designation for Prairie Pointe reflects our project team’s careful attention to guidance from the City’s 2040 comprehensive plan, the parameters and requirements set forth in the city ordinance for approval of a planned unit development.
Our planned development is about 43% more dense than our final plan (and 30% more dense than the proposal we brought through the City entitlements process.) We carefully considered City parking expectations reflected commissioned by the City of Shakopee along with the City staff report, backed by a City-commissioned parking and traffic study, and found our plan, in combination with a shared parking arrangement with Resonate Church, to meet City requirements.
Our site plan reflected creative solutions to stormwater runoff designed to minimize City expenses in processing runoff. As with all PUDs, our proposal exceeds City design requirements.
Consistent with another goal in Shakopee’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which several of you helped create, our proposal uses existing City infrastructure as an infill development while adding an additional property tax base to the City. Beacon has a 20-year track record of developing, delivering, owning, and operating high-quality affordable housing to the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
This success is borne out of the housing stability that our residents experience, the gains in employment and income they find, and the access to healthcare that they gain in connection to safe, stable, and affordable housing.
The strength of our Planned Unit Development proposal before this Commission speaks for itself, as this same body approved our PUD application with a unanimous 6-0 decision in May 2020. This was followed by a supermajority approval by the City Council in June of that year, authorizing the recording of the preliminary and final plats associated with our PUD proposal. Thirteen stipulations were imposed in the two ordinances that adopted the PUD proposal.
We have met all those stipulations and will meet any of those that necessarily await the start of construction. The associated entitlements have been recorded on the property. Consistent with the letter I shared with Mr. Kerski in late January of this year, we’ve secured most of the funds needed to realize Prairie Pointe and are still set to begin construction in the spring of next year.
Since land use approval to the current day, we went on to secure approximately $16 million in funding commitments, including $350,000 from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, $1.4M combined from Scott County and the Scott County CDA, and $11.7 million from Minnesota Housing.
We are set to receive supplemental tax credits that will generate another $750,000 later this month. The balance of the capital gap will be resolved this fall or winter. Consistent with our last message to City staff in January 2023, we are set to start construction next spring.
It is in this context that removal of entitlements from a property owner (without any consultation) seems ‘arbitrary and capricious’. If a liquor store owner were to be told that he could no longer sell alcohol or if a daycare provider were told that she could no longer host children at her building, how can a business function?
Any rezoning legally requires consistency with the Comprehensive Plan. What has changed in the comprehensive plan that renders all the findings of fact that the City found in favor of and in support of this PUD to be null and void?
In the staff report, the Planning Commission is being told that we failed to meet the neighborhood outreach requirements of the current City ordinance, and so approval of our PUD was ‘in error’.
We met all the property owner notice and neighborhood outreach requirements that City staff indicated would apply to our PUD application during the extraordinary times that accompanied the advent of COVID.
Indeed, we’d planned a ‘neighborhood meeting’ at the Knights of Columbus Hall in the spring, but the Knights of Columbus indicated that they could not permit us to hold a neighborhood meeting under the circumstances.
Then-Mayor Mars signed an emergency declaration on March 16, 2023, suspending all regular in-person business. In late March, our staff talked to City staff, asking about any ‘alternative means’ to accomplish neighborhood meetings that would be ‘acceptable to the City’. On April 3, in a follow-up email to City staff, we indicated a tentative plan to broadcast a virtual meeting from the KC Hall for our proposed development where we’d register attendees, take comments, and respond to questions.
We asked if such a forum would meet City requirements. We asked for City guidance and something ‘definitive’ about what we should do. We received a response the same day from City staff. “For the neighborhood meeting, staff will be putting together a PowerPoint or PDF presentation with the materials that were submitted with the application. We will have a spot on the website for people to submit comments and or emails. We [City staff] will be sending letters to neighbors by mail with instructions for providing comments along with a staff phone number.”
On the following Monday, April 6, we asked five specific questions about the City’s “alternative process”: (1) the deadline for any supplemental items; (2) whether the mailings and notifications would be limited to the standard 500’ area; (3) whether this meeting would ‘replace the neighborhood meeting requirement’ and such that we would ‘not need to do our own neighborhood open house, in-person or virtually, and send our own invitation, at a point in the future, correct?’ and (4) whether we could get a copy of the notification being sent to residents and their opportunity to comment; and (5) whether our rezoning and platting application materials, as uploaded to the City e-permits site, were complete and ready for review.
That afternoon, City staff indicated that the supplemental materials submission deadline would be the following day, that notice – which City staff would themselves send out – would be confined to the standard 500’ area and that the meeting the City was organizing would ‘replace the neighborhood meeting’.
How do we know that you will be a quality owner-operator of housing?
Our housing developments are subject to ongoing regular inspections by state and city officials and active oversight by our limited partners. We have long operated in communities with rental housing licensing ordinances like the one Shakopee introduced in April last year. We operate high-quality housing. All our rental licenses on our 19 properties are in good standing, with no sanctions having been incurred on any of them.
Coming out of the pandemic after nearly two years of various eviction moratoriums, we have, along with housing operators across the spectrum, encountered challenges related to staffing.
In a couple of our properties, particularly in neighborhoods with a notable decline in police presence, we have encountered unprecedented challenges. In both cases, we have met with police, shared challenges, and have invited and sought out greater police presence, and reached out to the broader neighborhood and other businesses to design broader strategies to support success. When necessary, we have contracted with private security firms to support the safety of our residents.
In this light, we appreciate that the City of Shakopee enacted a rental housing ordinance in April last year. We are familiar with and accustomed to working in jurisdictions with rental housing ordinances.
We met with Police Chief Tate long before the beginning of the land use application process, we met several times with Scott County Sheriff Luke Hennen, and I presented this project, Prairie Pointe, to a meeting of all the Scott County police chiefs. We look forward to partnering with law enforcement. We are also aware of the City’s required crime-free, drug-free addendum and the crime-free multi-unit housing program as key components to building strong expectations for residents and our property management agent about their responsibilities. We appreciate clarity as it helps us all hold the same vision together.
We envision Prairie Pointe as an important high-quality community asset for the families we will serve. Our service partner, Volunteers of America, and we at Beacon expect to work closely with Shakopee School District to support parents and the children we will serve. We anticipate that our congregational volunteers will participate in after-school Homework Help and tutoring, and we would welcome coordination with neighbors.
In choosing a property management provider for Prairie Pointe, we will choose a professional provider with a track record of responsiveness and responsibility for the property and the families we will serve in it. Our interests and those of the community are aligned – we want a safe, welcoming, secure building for our residents, our residents’ neighbors within the building, and those who live in the area. We know at Beacon that the community is stronger when we can provide housing stability, dignity, and support to our families.
In this vein, we think the best way for individuals to come to know Beacon and know our housing is to visit our existing properties. We would invite you to Audubon Crossing, Creekside Commons, Cranberry Ridge, and/or 66 West. The first three of these are family housing developments, and the last is a youth property. We would be happy to connect interested commissioners, City Council members, or residents on such tours.
As I have tried to show in laymen’s terms and as our counsel detailed in the letter they shared earlier today, we met all legal requirements in this process. We followed all City direction on the process leading up to the City awarding entitlements and land use approvals. There is no basis to take away our entitlements.
That said, the area event that we organized last September, to which we invited immediate neighbors, seems, in the view of local neighbors, to have been inadequate. The fact that the City would propose the draconian action of stripping away our entitlements on spurious grounds shows how strongly staff and Councilmembers have heard community feedback that we should have further discussions of the project. With this in mind, we would be happy to organize a neighborhood meeting to provide additional background and a progress update.
What’s next after the June 8 meeting?
After much discussion, the Planning Commission voted 7-0 to table their decision until their meeting on July 6, 2023.
City staff and Beacon have since agreed to postpone consideration of the rezoning to the August 3, 2023 Planning Commission Meeting to allow Beacon to hold a meeting with neighbors as a gesture of goodwill.
