Even with record-low unemployment, problems of housing and transportation can make it nearly impossible for poor families to get to and keep jobs in the Twin Cities. The efforts of those families to clear the way to better affordable housing throughout the metro area illustrate the power of the law and an organized group of citizens to level inequalities. As changes in the welfare system force more and more former recipients to seek work, and as employers struggling with a tight labor market become desperate for those workers, a longstanding debate over whether the Twin Cities area is doing enough to spread affordable housing beyond the central cities is gaining urgency. Low-income housing is largely concentrated in Minneapolis and St. Paul, while many new jobs are based in suburbs where businesses enjoy cheaper land and tax rates. Public transportation between the two is rare and time-consuming.
Many suburbs resist building affordable housing near posh new developments.
So in 1992, the 14 families and the Minneapolis branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a class-action lawsuit in district court against the city of Minneapolis, Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, Minneapolis Community Development Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The case, Hollman v. Cisneros, alleged the agencies had created and maintained racially segregated public housing, concentrating low-income families and families of color in the poorest, most segregated neighborhoods. The plaintiffs' case against the defendants, who later included the Metropolitan Council, was settled by consent decree in 1995. It required the housing authority to demolish and replace 770 units in Sumner Field and neighboring Glenwood, Lyndale, and Olson public housing developments and relocate residents to other parts of the Twin Cities outside areas of concentrated poverty. The plan also calls for 36 acres of open space with play fields, picnic areas, walking and biking trails, wetlands and other amenities, possible new commercial and industrial uses, and a new parkway boulevard that for the first time would connect north and south Minneapolis.