Housing affordability dashboard measures progress on critical metrics in the MSP region

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Itasca Project released today a Housing Affordability Dashboard for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. The dashboard fulfills recommendations from the Itasca Housing Affordability Task Force Report from September 2020 and "More Places to Call Home," the report from a statewide housing task force that met in 2018.

"It is our hope that by delivering on this first recommendation, we will generate momentum for the region to act now, and to preserve our relative advantage in housing affordability before we reach the levels of unaffordability that burden coastal cities," said Minneapolis Fed First Vice President Ron Feldman.

The 2020 Itasca report found not enough housing is being built in the Twin Cities, and existing housing is too expensive for many residents. Unaffordable housing threatens the vitality and prosperity of the region and worsens racial and economic gaps. The COVID-19 pandemic also emphasizes the need to act. Business and community leaders must work together now before the Twin Cities loses too much ground.

The dashboard sets goals in three housing areas critical to maintaining affordability and the region's prosperity:

• Overall housing production
• New affordable units
• Percentage of Black households that are homeowners.

Achieving these goals will require cross-sector partnerships and bold change.

The distinctive dashboard benchmarks the region against those peers identified by GREATER MSP. This comparison reveals areas where our region is severely under-performing, such as Black homeownership. Additionally, this dashboard provides data broken out by race and income and displays metrics across both time and space. The dashboard, maintained by Minneapolis Fed data scientists, will be updated at least annually, with a handful of metrics updated more often.

The dashboard can be found here: https://minneapolisfed.shinyapps.io/Itasca-Housing-Dashboard/

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is one of 12 regional Reserve Banks that, with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., make up the Federal Reserve System, the nation's central bank. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is responsible for the Ninth Federal Reserve District, which includes Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, northwestern Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis participates in setting national monetary policy, supervises numerous banking organizations, and provides a variety of payments services to financial institutions and the U.S. government.