Rochester, Olmsted County join federal housing initiative

ROCHESTER — Rochester and Olmsted County approach to check out options to the area’s expanding affordable housing and homelessness problems with assistance from a federal housing initiative.

The metropolis and county on Friday formally joined Household The usa, an effort by the U.S. Division of Housing and Urban Advancement (HUD) and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to steer funds and technical information to states, communities and tribal nations to offset COVID’s effect on housing problems.

“It can be partnerships like this that make me so optimistic about the upcoming of our community,” Olmsted County Board Chair Mark Thein claimed Friday at a ceremony touting the area’s present-day and long term housing operate.

Olmsted County strategies to include much more than 120 housing models and support 100 people encountering homelessness inside of the future number of several years using component of the $31 million it has acquired in American Rescue Approach Act funding. Rochester is seeking for means to broaden housing possibilities for doing the job class and minimal-cash flow families.

Nearby officers say they are going to use the new software to perform on even far more strategies with neighborhood groups to deal with housing.

“We’ve obtained plenty of do the job in advance,” Rochester Mayor Kim Norton mentioned.

Regional leaders have targeted on housing and homelessness in the latest yrs as extra homeless inhabitants settled around downtown Rochester. Norton said she created it a priority when she found much more people enduring homelessness in downtown skyways in 2019.

Olmsted County officers observed an prospect in 2020 when they made a decision to get a former assisted dwelling setting up in downtown Rochester.

The centre closed previously that calendar year, but opened back up in July as an 18-unit transitional housing facility after the county employed $1 million in federal COVID funding to obtain it. Inside its 1st week, the 105 on Broadway facility took in 15 homeless people and set up a doing work agreement with Catholic Charities of Southern Minnesota to staff members it.

Olmsted County has designed or developed much more than 200 housing units for persons in want of households above the previous a few several years. The Rochester City Council in 2020 allotted $5.1 million in federal CARES Act funding to local community companies, which integrated additional than $400,000 to homeless plans these types of as a working day centre, funding for 105 on Broadway and a warming center by Catholic Charities.