Raise Your Voice

We advocate for housing policies at the national level through action alerts and by attending the annual Habitat on the Hill D.C. Here are our current national priorities: 

• HOME Investment Partnership (HOME) and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)  are resources accessed through partnerships with local communities to develop new homes and ensure housing affordability for Habitat clients. With increasing land and construction costs and stagnating wages, these resources are vital in providing access to homeownership for working-class families. 

• AmeriCorps has a long history at Twin Cities Habitat, and the service of AmeriCorps members is vital to our mission. We seek increased funding to recruit and support members as they serve onsite and within the Habitat office to engage volunteers, build and renovate homes, and share Habitat’s work with communities across the Twin Cities region.

• The Homeownership Supply Accelerator would establish a new source of flexible financial assistance to regrow the nation’s stock of starter homes. Twin Cities Habitat could use this for property acquisition, new construction or rehab, helping reach a wide range of communities across the nation and narrow gaps for populations facing the greatest barriers to homeownership. 

• Tax policy will be a key focus of Congress this year, which we see as an additional opportunity to uplift our work.

  • We support a permanent extension of the New Markets Tax Credit program, a vital resource that incentivizes development in low-income neighborhoods using tax credits. This provides critical funding needed to complete projects, grow our housing stock, and stabilize communities.

  • The Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA) would provide a federal tax credit to build and rehabilitate homes for lower and middle-income families. Twin Cities Habitat could utilize the NHIA to support the financing of new construction or rehab. New solutions like this one are badly needed to contend with skyrocketing housing costs and the affordable housing crisis.

  • We support protecting the tax-exempt status of charitable nonprofit housing providers and restoring a charitable deduction for non-itemizers to ensure our organization, and other nonprofits like ours, can continue our work going forward.  

We advocate for housing policies at the state level through action alerts, hosting Habitat on the Hill MN, Red Blue Build, meeting with legislators, and more. For the 2025 legislative session, our priorities are:  

• Reforming Homeowners Associations in a way that better protects homeowners. HOAs create and enforce rules for the communities in which they operate. While they provide benefits to residents, they can also cause challenges in a way that calls for better regulation. Last session we helped secure funding for a working group to inform recommendations, and this year we look forward to advocating for these reforms. They include increased transparency, reasonable standards for fines and foreclosure actions, dispute resolution services, and increased consumer protections.

• Investing $44.66 million into The Heights for the construction of new affordable homes on St. Paul’s Greater East Side. In Partnership with JO Companies and Sherman Associates, this project will build over 1,000 new units, 147 of which will be homeownership units developed by Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity. Due to the size of this project, public investment is essential, and direct funding from the state will be needed to fund our gap at a scale we likely would not achieve otherwise.

• Replenishing the First-Generation Homebuyer Downpayment Assistance program that was successfully passed in the 2023 session with a $100 million investment. This supports down payments for first-generation homebuyers whose parents have never owned a home or lost a home due to foreclosure. This program has been very successful in supporting consumer choice, closing the racial homeownership gap, and helping more families achieve homeownership. To help it reach more homebuyers, we are advocating for $25 million in FY26 and $50 million the next year and beyond.

• Investing $4 million into Homeownership Education, Counseling, and Training. This program helps organizations like ours provide financial coaching, pre-purchase counseling, homebuyer education, and foreclosure prevention assistance, particularly for households of color.    

• We also support: 

  • Reducing barriers to building more homes by improving development processes and diversifying the kinds of housing that can be built statewide. 

  • Adopting a constitutional amendment for housing that will provide a dedicated, ongoing stream of funding to address our state’s affordable housing crisis.

  • Increasing funding for housing infrastructure bonds to develop housing across the entire continuum.    

We advocate for housing policies at the state level through targeted action alerts, meeting with councilmembers, events with coalition partners, local grassroots advocacy support, speaking at hearings, and more. 

During Twin Cities Habitat's 2025 Budget Cycle, we advocated for: 

• Investment in the Affordable Homeownership Preservation Grant   

  • In partnership with Minneapolis’s Regulatory Services, our A Brush with Kindness home repair program helps resolve open housing citations for low-income homeowners. This program prevents homelessness by preventing the displacement of residents and preserving our affordable housing stock. 

  • Our main priority this year was advocating for $295,000 in ongoing funding to continue this partnership in order to preserve affordable housing and prevent displacement of homeowners.  In December, the City Council voted to approve an amendment to increase it to $295,000 in one time funding. We will continue to advocate for preserving this funding in future budget cycles. 

• We also advocate for: 

  • Investment in city-funded programs that support new development. Programs like Minneapolis Homes Financing provide Twin Cities Habitat with essential funding to support the development and affordability of newly constructed homes. 

  • Investment in foreclosure prevention funding. Twin Cities Habitat works to provide counseling services to families experiencing financial hardships and those facing foreclosure, and cities and counties are valuable partners in helping us provide these resources.  

  • One-time investment requests for large developments such as The Heights in St. Paul. Learn more about our work at The Heights. 

Check out what our team pursued during past budget cycles and what they achieved: 

• Read about 2023 City Budget Outcomes 

• Read about Twin Cities Habitat’s 2022 Local Priorities