Minnesota Housing outlines 2023 investments, program rollout delays and preservation priorities

Chair Representative Spencer Igoe convened the House Housing Finance and Policy Committee and invited Jennifer Ho, commissioner of the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, to give an agency overview and update on the investments the Legislature made in 2023 and 2024.

Commissioner Jennifer Ho summarized Minnesota Housing’s role, finances and recent activity, saying the agency “equably collaborat[es] with individuals, with communities, and with partners to create, preserve, and finance housing that’s affordable.” She told the committee the agency is a mission-driven finance institution that issues bonds and reinvests earnings from its mortgage lending to support operations and programs across a broad housing continuum from homelessness response to homeownership assistance.

Ho told members that in federal fiscal year 2024 Minnesota Housing had about $1.96 billion in total expenditures and helped more than 73,000 households. She said the agency’s largest dollar activity was mortgage financing through its bank (about $1.2 billion) and that the agency also administers roughly $256 million in federal rental assistance contracts. Ho repeated that many programs created by the 2023 session are “new” to the agency and therefore have taken longer to stand up than money put into established programs.

Why it matters: committee members said the state still faces a large shortfall in housing supply and that one-time infusions are unlikely to close that gap. Representative Mike Howard said the slide showing supply shortages “should guide a lot of our work in our housing committee this year,” and Representative Jim…