Also see: This is why low-income housing is so costly in the Twin Cities

Lois Bystrom gets depressed just talking about it.

When the rent on her Arden Hills apartment soon jumps by a third, the 76-year-old widow will have to leave her home of the past eight years.

Bystrom, whose checkout-clerk pension already is stretched thin, says she won’t be able to afford living there anymore.

“This is just incredible. I don’t have any extra money,” she murmured as she slumped into a chair. “I never thought at this stage of my life that this would happen.”

Her next move won’t be an easy one. Low-cost housing in the metro area is drying up, to what by some measures is an all-time low.

According to a growing chorus of critics, the problem is that the suburbs — including Arden Hills — are not building housing that Bystrom and renters like her can afford.

“This is a matter of fairness,” said Sue Watlov Phillips, director of Metropolitan Interfaith Council on Affordable Housing (MICAH), a nonprofit advocacy group that recently filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She said government policies have piled more low-rent housing into low-income neighborhoods, concentrating poverty, crime and racial minorities in certain areas.

Suburbs have dodged these inner-city problems by foot-dragging on affordable housing — even though it’s cheaper to build it in the suburbs.

Defenders of the suburbs are fighting back. They argue that putting more low-rent housing in urban areas is necessary, because it gives low-income people access to mass transit and services.

The debate — and the blame — is intensifying as low-cost housing becomes harder to find. The construction of new, “affordable” units slid to a record low in 2013, the latest year that figures are available.

John Duffy, who has developed hundreds of metro-area affordable homes, said there is a new wave of people who can’t afford where they live. “The housing shortage,” he said, “is like a tsunami.”

WHAT IS ‘AFFORDABLE HOUSING’?

Affordable housing is defined as costing up to 30 percent of a household’s income, according to the Metropolitan Council, the Twin Cities regional planning agency.

That means a family of four earning $50,000 annually should pay less than $1,250 a month, and a single person with an income of $35,000 should pay no more than $880 a month.

Affordability is like a teeter-totter, balancing income and cost. If the rent goes down, affordability goes up. If the rent goes up, affordability goes down.

Or — here’s where it gets controversial — rents can go down when government helps pay for the homes.

It is those government-subsidized units that are drying up. About 81 percent of the area’s cities — all of them suburbs — added no tax-subsidized affordable units in 2012, according to the Met Council. In 2013, the number of new affordable units dropped to 721, the lowest number ever recorded by the Met Council.

Since then, the construction has increased slightly. But it’s still a “drop in the bucket” of the 53,000 new affordable units that the Met Council set as a goal by 2020, said Chip Halbach, director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership.

“We are slipping,” he said. “Since the Great Recession, we have really been damaged.”

‘DE FACTO SEGREGATION’

MICAH director Phillips sees housing as a civil right. She said everyone should be able to live where they want to, with access to good schools and jobs. She said affordable housing allows nurses, teachers and police officers to live where they work.

In a complaint filed in November, MICAH charged the Met Council and the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency (MHFA) with concentrating affordable housing in urban areas.

“That means de facto segregation. That is not good for the community, and it’s not good for the region,” said Curt Boganey, city manager of Brooklyn Center, which joined the complaint along with Brooklyn Park and Richfield.

In addition, 15 state legislators wrote HUD in April to support the complaint, which claims the suburbs are home to 75 percent of the metro’s population but only 41 percent of its affordable housing.

In a second complaint filed March 30, MICAH said Minneapolis and St. Paul are deliberately concentrating affordable housing in poor areas. This maintains racial segregation, the complaint says, because 85 percent of the units are in segregated areas or areas “in danger of re-segregating.”

Three Minneapolis neighborhood associations joined with MICAH in the complaint.

The allegations are supported by the work of Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor who researches housing issues.

He said most affordable housing has been built near mass transit stations, which are mostly in the core cities. One example is the $28 million, 108-unit project under construction at the Green Line’s Hamline Station in St. Paul.

The urban affordability boom is forcing minorities to live where they do now — which is one reason segregation is becoming worse, Orfield said.

A report by Orfield called “Why are the Twin Cities so Segregated?” says that since 2000, the number of “severely segregated” schools increased from 11 to 83.

The percentage of low-income black residents living in high-poverty census tracts grew from 13 percent to 19 percent — it’s currently about 4 percent in the comparable cities of Seattle and Portland.

Orfield doesn’t directly blame the suburbs but the policies of the Met Council and state agencies for funneling housing subsidies away from suburbs.

“The white suburbs never reach their goals for affordable housing,” said Orfield. “How are you going to meet your goals without subsidies?”

Other experts say suburbs sometimes do fight affordable housing. Many of them make affordable housing effectively illegal, said Tom Musil, professor of real estate at St. Thomas University.

He said the most common tactic is exclusionary zoning — which permits only homes that only the more affluent — and mostly white — buyers can afford.

Musil said it takes only one regulation — requiring large lots for new homes — to ensure that housing will never be affordable. If a suburban lot is worth $500,000, for example, the homes on that land will never be affordable for most people.

“A lot of communities are anti-growth,” he said.

AGE OF BUILDINGS

Don’t blame us, say suburban and state officials.

While segregation is a problem, public policies have not made it worse, according to the Met Council, the MFHA and city officials.

Instead, they say, suburbs don’t have their share of affordable housing because of the age of their buildings, stronger political resistance and less access to mass transit.

About one-third of the affordable housing in urban areas is affordable because the buildings are deteriorating, according to Alan Arthur, CEO of the nonprofit housing developer Aeon. When buildings age, the rent normally drops, which creates affordable housing.

Suburbs don’t have as much affordable housing because the average age of their buildings is much less than in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Arthur said. Eventually, suburban housing will age, rents will drop, and affordability will equalize, he said.

Meanwhile, the political resistance to construction of affordable housing is stronger in the suburbs.

Professor Musil said that when an affordable project is proposed in the suburbs, neighbors often object, fearing damage to their property values. It happened in February in Vadnais Heights, for example, when the city council rejected a 64-unit affordable project amid a surge of neighborhood opposition.

“If you build it in white neighborhoods, you are going to go to a lot of community meetings,” said Musil.

MASS TRANSIT ACCESS

Suburbs don’t have affordable housing because of a lack of access to mass transit.

Even though building in the suburbs is cheaper, it’s better for low-income people to have housing on bus and train lines, said Jonathan Sage-Martinson, director of the Department of Planning and Economic Development for St. Paul.

St. Paul is clustering its new affordable buildings along train and bus routes. “Look at the math,” he said. “There is a strong correlation between transit and where we have invested.”

Professor Orfield, however, said the need for mass transit is exaggerated.

According to his research, about 80 percent of the people in subsidized housing in St. Paul have cars. That means they could live in the suburbs if they could find housing they could afford.

Likewise, the state says it’s not at fault.

“We think the facts speak for themselves. We are disappointed about the filing of the complaint,” said MHFA Commissioner Mary Tingerthal. She said one-third of its housing money is given to cities and counties — which then decide how to spend it.

“They do their own allocation,” said Tingerthal.

That agency and the Met Council have championed affordable housing for decades, officials say.

The MHFA has not allocated money to poor areas — or the cities which brought the complaint. “Last year we gave no allocation (for affordable housing) to Brooklyn Park or Brooklyn Center. We gave one to Richfield, and it was turned back.”

MET COUNCIL GOALS

Some suburbs welcome affordable housing.

For decades, Woodbury has zoned for affordability. Planners expect that half of the units in the 2,000-acre Phase Two project will be apartments and townhouses — not all of them technically “affordable,” but much cheaper than single-family homes. In addition, the city has worked with Habitat for Humanity to build 73 affordable homes.

“Affordable housing is our responsibility,” said Dwight Picha, Woodbury’s community-development director.

But Woodbury is an exception.

The Met Council issues Housing Performance Scores to rate progress toward meeting affordable housing goals. The worst performers? Sunfish Lake, May Township, West Lakeland Township, Grant, Denmark Township, and Stillwater Township — which all scored in the single digits in a 100-point scale.

The Met Council is trying to close the gap. In April, it announced a program to encourage suburban landlords to accept renters who get federal rent subsidies. In a report issued in December, it set a goal of placing 89 percent of new affordable housing in suburbs by 2030.

The goals would concentrate affordable housing in fast-growing suburbs, including Woodbury, Eagan and Lakeville, which would add more affordable housing than Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

But housing advocates say the Met Council is toothless when it comes to enforcing its housing goals.

Eric Hauge said the agency has good intentions but lousy results. Hauge, the tenant organizer with the advocacy group Homeline, said the Met Council should enforce state rules that require cities to take their share of affordable housing.

“That is why we have the Met Council,” he said.

But in a legal response to the complaints, the Met Council said it doesn’t have the power to enforce affordable housing goals.

That’s in contrast to the power it wields when it comes to sewer systems and highways. In those areas, the Met Council owns the multibillion-dollar projects and can levy fines in the millions to make cities cooperate.

But housing is different. It is not owned by the Met Council, which has no control over the rents set by thousands of private landlords.

All it can do is award grants to cities that create affordable housing. The Livable Communities grants, however, have a small impact — creating or preserving an average of 933 units a year since 1995, compared with the goal of adding 53,000 new units by 2020.

And cities — such as Andover — are free to opt out. They can forgo the grants, which frees them from any obligation to build affordable housing.

As officials argue, Lois Bystrom is waiting.

In her waning days in her Arden Hills apartment, she recalled the impact of a $50 rent increase in September. “Everyone said, ‘Oooo, $50!'” said Bystrom.

But she was stunned to learn in December about the increase taking effect this summer — $269.

In her apartment, she watched as flame-like patterns faded in her fake fireplace.

“There are six women living here who are more than 90 years old,” she said. “We are all in a state of shock.”

Bob Shaw can be reached at 651-228-5433. Follow him at twitter.com/BshawPP.