The notion behind the Eden Prairie City Council’s Housing Task Force is simple: Eden Prairie is a great place to live in, and all should be able to enjoy it. Formed in 2019 to address lifecycle housing, inclusive and affordable housing, and other housing options in our fair city, the Housing Task Force seeks to encourage construction of new low-to-moderate-income housing developments as well as preserve existing attainable housing options.
“Housing is the foundation for all community life,” said Joan Howe-Pullis, chair of the Housing Task Force. “We want someone who contributes to our community to be able to afford to live here as well. We want people of diverse economic circumstances to be able to stay in the community long term – to share a sense of belonging.
“We began by undertaking a great deal of research into what other cities have done to make their housing affordable, including Bloomington, Edina, Saint Louis Park and Brooklyn Center. We have also interviewed various residents, city staff, developers and business owners to gain a better understanding of how we can best promote diversity to everyone’s benefit.
“From this research we have developed three key categories of strategies that advance our goal: production, preservation, and protection. First, we want developers to include some percentage of affordable housing in the production of new projects. Second, we need to work to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing. Third, we want to ensure that certain protections are included in leasing agreements which guarantee access to safe, clean, and well-maintained housing. When the task force makes its recommendations to the city council and mayor, we will be providing a creative and varied toolbox of strategies that will all work together.”
“When I ran for City Council in 2018, I already had a strong respect for tenants dealing with their landlords,” said Council Member Mark Freiberg, who served on Eden Prairie’s Heritage Preservation Commission from 2013 to 2016 and the Planning Commission from 2016 up until his election. “I have spent 35 years in real estate and mortgage banking. Housing is my background, and housing was the cornerstone of my campaign. And I have a habit of not staying quiet for very long. Within 30 minutes of being sworn in last year, I said ‘I want a Housing Task Force.’
“The nodding heads spoke about approval. I received pushback. But I made sure everyone on the City Council knew the Housing Task Force was inevitable so long as I was there. What they said couldn’t be done became a reality in only three months, and now everyone is in agreement that the Task Force is a great idea. No one was willing to talk about this before, but now the City Council is solving our community’s housing problems before someone else solves them for us.
“A lot of people confuse affordable housing for Section 8, which is only one small aspect of it. What we’re really talking about is getting away from the idea that every new home in Eden Prairie has to cost six or seven hundred thousand dollars. In a city with so little available land, that might mean building more than two single family houses on a single acre, or increasing the amount of multi-family housing that gets built here.
“Our goal isn’t just to make sure new people can afford to move to Eden Prairie. We’re making our city an appealing place for our children to stay in as well. My son grew up in Eden Prairie. He lives in downtown St. Paul right now, as he unfortunately doesn’t see his own hometown as a place he can afford to live in. The Housing Task Force is working hard to create an Eden Prairie that will belong just as much as to the next generation as it does to my own.”
To learn more about Aspire Eden Prairie 2040 and the blueprint it lays out to guide Eden Prairie’s growth over the next two decades, please visit edenprairie.org.
