Seven of the candidates for Mayor of Minneapolis participated in an Affordable Housing Forum on October 2, 2017. Part 1 covers the entire event. Soon after sharing the article on social media, Nekima Levy-Pounds responded with an up-date on the issue of problems with the Buy, Build & Rehab Program and the response, or lack of concern, from city leaders.

We have a meeting set for next week with Betsy and the women to discuss the problems with the program. A couple of women came to my office on Friday and showed me some of their paperwork. One woman was forced to take out multiple small second mortgages (7) in order to buy her home. The city can and should do better.” – Nekima Levy-Pounds, Oct. 8, 2017

Stay tuned. It looks like there will be more to report on the developing story of Buy, Build & Rehab. How many people have worked with this program and want to tell us what happened? The information we have suggests the homes in question here are in Ward 4 or Ward 5. I wonder if the Council members or candidates have any more information or support?

One of the reasons we make video of candidate forums is to provide wider access to the events. More than simply cataloging the videos and making them freely sharable, it is important to render them in as short a clip as possible, without cutting any content. To that end, we created a series of 7 videos from the answers to a single round of questions at the forum. These videos were the basis of our discussion in Part 1 that encompassed the entire Forum. The candidate-specific questions crafted by the Forum organizers based on information available from the campaigns were a stroke of genius. When coupled with the open format and suggestion that the candidates engage with the others made the 4th round of questioning a micro-forum lasting near 20 minutes. Obviously I think the immediate future of our our city is worth the investment of 20 minutes, after all I’ve spent well over 10 X that trying to boil it all down so that more people will be able to access information that I think is important to understand before they vote. One result of of questions targeted to each candidate was that it afforded the opportunity to break down the 4th round by candidate, naturally rendering the content in more approachable bites.

 

Nekima Levy-Pounds with Betsy Hodges and Jacob Frey.

Jacob Frey with Betsy Hodges, Answar Rahman, and Al Flowers.

Betsy Hodges,

Raymond Dehn. 

Al Flowers. 

Answar Rahman. 

Tom Hoch.

Sorted by candidate, the responses from Round 4 highlight the main meta-story of the forum – indeed of the campaign – the perceived weakness of Mayor Hodges and how such emboldened many of her opponents to challenge her on property taxes, the definition of gentrification, using the general fund, and the Buy, Build & Rehab program. The latter issue may be Hodges best bet to save face and salvage something from the Forum by working with Nekima to improve the program. Not only because the Mayor was made to listen to constituents, but also because Jacob Frey’s response underscored Levy-Pounds’ main point that so-called city leaders have for too long shrugged off such complaints. Challenges to Mayor Hodges were confrontational or collaborative. The former resulted in conflict and the latter in progress.

 

Thank you for indulging my obsession to find important needles in the haystack of political word wrangling and campaign rhetoric. Before people start thinking that I am picking nits, let me give credit where it is due. When we step back and see the Minneapolis Elections – Mayor, City Council, and Parks Board – in contrast to the Fool’s Game afoot in DC, the distinction between the dogmatic nihilism of greed and the respectful discourse of dissent is as obvious as Trump is clueless. I recognize and applaud the civility and rationality of the campaigns in Minneapolis this year. I want them to become the New Standard. In 2018 and 2020. The Rational Majority.