On paper, the cities of St. Paul and Lakeville tie for their lack of affordable housing, and not in a good way. Each city would have to add more than 2,200 units to keep up with demand, according to the Metropolitan Council.

From 2011 through 2013, St. Paul added a total of 370 affordable housing units. During those years, Lakeville added none.

The need for more such housing is acute everywhere, housing advocates say, but not all cities are engaged. St. Paul and Minneapolis are leading production, but a Met Council report released Monday shows they’re unable to keep up with regional demand. And they’re getting minuscule help from the suburbs.

In 2013, the Twin Cities region added 724 affordable housing units — the lowest annual number since recordkeeping began in 1996, and about 30 percent less than the previous low in 2012. Six percent of 13,000 new housing units were considered affordable to families earning 60 percent of area median income for the 13-county metro area, or $49,400 for a family of four.

“It’s not a pretty picture,” said former Hennepin County planning director Gary Cunningham, who chairs the Metropolitan Council’s Community Development Committee.

Lakeville, which continues its housing boom, has company. According to Met Council housing surveys, Maplewood, Apple Valley, Mendota Heights, Afton, Hugo, Lake Elmo and dozens of other suburbs did not add a single unit of affordable housing from 2011 through 2013, despite the growing demand for affordable rentals coming out of the recession. Rosemount and Edina each produced one unit. Blaine built seven.

Daryl Morey, planning director for the city of Lakeville, said his city continues to lead the metro for residential building permits. Two things would have to come together for Lakeville to add affordable units in the midst of a construction boom: a nonprofit or civic-minded developer willing to take a chance on rising land prices, and the appropriate financing. Both are fleeting, he said.

“Affordability is and always will be an issue, and a goal that everybody strives for,” said Morey, who called the cost of land, streets and utilities prohibitive. “You need some financing mechanism to help write down that cost.”

Libby Starling, manager of regional policy and research with the Met Council, agreed.

“There is no central entity deciding where to put affordable housing. These are developers that are finding land, putting together deals. Helping developers put together viable projects in more locations across our region is a challenge and opportunity.”

The Met Council’s 2014 report on “Affordable Housing Production in the Twin Cities Region” spells out the extent of the problem: “Over 53,000 new affordable housing units will be needed across the region by 2020. Given the number of new affordable units added in 2011 and 2012, it would take 47 years … to reach this goal.”

LUXURY BOOM’S IMPACT

Part of the reason the affordable housing numbers are so low is that the types of housing produced have changed.

The boom in luxury housing — apartment buildings with pools, gyms and other amenities — is transforming neighborhoods such as Minneapolis’ Uptown. Meanwhile, “there’s not a lot of production in the townhome market, and there’s not a lot in condos, certainly compared to where we were 10 years ago,” Starling said.

Another reason may be technical. A few years ago, the regional planning agency changed its definition of affordability. The Met Council formerly counted units that were affordable to those with 80 percent of area median income for owner-occupied housing, or 50 percent for rental housing. In 2011, the new threshold for both became 60 percent.

As a result, some owner-occupied units such as condos that were not publicly subsidized were included in counts, but have effectively fallen off the map.

A few suburbs such as Woodbury, Eagan, Inver Grove Heights, Shakopee and Maple Grove have bucked tradition and moved forward with multifamily affordable housing developments or townhouses. Lakeville, which has a small townhome development in the works, plans to break ground next year on a senior housing development.

But for the most part, the difference between the Twin Cities and their suburban neighbors illustrates any number of challenges that housing advocates face. St. Paul, a high-poverty city, is struggling to keep up with widespread demand for low- to moderate-income housing. Many relatively affluent areas aren’t even trying.

Across the region, affordable housing production has fallen every year since 2001, according to the latest Met Council report. In 2013, 66 percent of the new affordable housing built in the region — 457 units — were constructed in Minneapolis.

BUSING IN WORKERS

Cunningham, who spent five years as county administrator in Scott County, says suburbs that reject affordable housing suffer by losing young talent, students and workers.

“The working-class people in those communities end up not being able to live there … ValleyFair had to build its own housing. Mystic Lake had to bus workers in,” he said of two popular tourist draws in the southern suburbs.

“If in fact we don’t resolve these questions, we’re worse off as a community for it,” he said.

Back in the urban core, St. Paul’s efforts may not be keeping pace with demand either, but they do stand out. The city has been aggressive at finding subsidies for affordable housing, such as tax increment financing.

From 1996 to 2012, nearly half of the new housing units built in St. Paul were considered affordable.

The discrepancies aren’t just numbers on paper. They affect where low-income people live and where they send their children to school, issues that have caught the attention of federal housing officials and the nation’s highest court.

“My community is having a hard time finding housing,” said Samakab Hussein, a St. Paul resident and onetime city council candidate active in the Somali community. “A lot of people can’t find a place to live. They’re in shelters.”

But where should that housing go — in the city or the suburbs? Hussein said Somali immigrants aren’t as concentrated as people think. “They’re everywhere in Minnesota,” he said. “You can find them in Willmar, Minn. You can find them in Rochester.”

PREDICTING CHANGE

If more isn’t done to spread affordable housing throughout the metro, the Met Council, the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency and other key agencies involved in federal housing programs could face policy changes from the top down.

Nonprofit affordable housing developers say they’ve made inroads in certain suburbs, but challenges are plenty. Yorkdale Townhomes, affordable housing that went up in Edina a few years ago, was redistricted so that students who live there go to school in the less-affluent Richfield Public Schools district. Community meetings about Project for Pride in Living’s proposed 51-unit affordable housing development on Hopkins’ Blake Road have sometimes been tense.

As for funding, “we have a very limited toolkit available to us,” said Deidre Schmidt, the president and CEO of CommonBond Communities, the largest nonprofit provider of affordable housing in the upper Midwest.

Lakeville and neighboring suburbs partner with the Dakota County Community Development Agency. The agency aims for one workforce-housing development and one senior housing development each year, said Sarah Kidwell, an assistant director at the Dakota County CDA. A 60-unit project is on the horizon.

“We’re actually breaking ground on a senior development in Lakeville next year,” she said. Meanwhile, the 36-unit Keystone Crossing townhomes will open in 2017.

WHERE SHOULD IT GO?

The debate over where to situate affordable housing recently reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which came down hard against Texas’ efforts to put new affordable units almost exclusively in urban, low-income, high-minority neighborhoods.

The court emphasized in Texas vs. the Inclusive Communities Project that integration is a goal of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has indicated that states concentrating too much affordable housing in segregated, low-income areas risk losing federal housing funds.

“The new level of scrutiny is going to be good,” said Paul Williams, executive director of the affordable housing developer Project for Pride in Living and St. Paul’s former deputy mayor.

As rental prices have skyrocketed nationally, advocates say the demand for affordable housing is as intense as ever. What isn’t as clear is what constitutes a success story in the eyes of HUD.

The Twin Cities have made some inroads in spreading around affordable housing. From 1996 to 2012, Shakopee, Maple Grove and Woodbury led the region in affordable housing production, just after Minneapolis and St. Paul.

During that period, Minneapolis added 6,289 affordable units, St. Paul added 3,131, Shakopee added 2,874, Maple Grove 2,297 and Woodbury 2,291.

But the 2014 Met Council report notes that the metro experienced a building boom for many of those years. When considering affordable units as a percentage of all new housing, the focus on the urban core becomes even more obvious.

About 46 percent of St. Paul’s new housing stock was affordable, compared with 31 percent for Shakopee, 29 percent for Minneapolis, 22 percent for Maple Grove and 16 percent for Woodbury.

TOP 10

Twin Cities communities that had the most new affordable housing built in 2013, according to Met Council.

Minneapolis: 457

St. Paul: 58

Maple Grove: 51

Shakopee: 37

Eagan: 27

Inver Grove Heights: 24

Ramsey: 16

Cottage Grove: 10

Woodbury: 10

Coon Rapids: 5

Frederick Melo can be reached at 651-228-2172. Follow him at twitter.com/FrederickMelo.