"If You Could Afford to Live Here, You'd Already Be Home!"

Central Community Housing Trust had never broken ground on a project outside of the Twin Cities urban core until this summer—a fact that wouldn’t merit mention if the trust were just any developer of housing. But CCHT serves a special niche in the housing market, and its current work on the Clover Field Marketplace project in Chaska is significant for several reasons: for what it says about a growing gap in the economy, for the shift it represents in Chaska’s approach to economic development, and as a sign of success for some Chaska employers.

“Chaska is one of many suburban communities at risk of losing residents because of increasingly unaffordable housing prices,” CCHT said last fall when it announced a celebration of Clover Field Marketplace, a $22 million mix of retail and residential space that will be part of the city’s larger Clover Ridge development. “Local businesses are especially eager to see the stock of affordable housing increase.”

They tell me, 'Wow, it is more expensive than I thought.' And I am hearing that more from middle managers.

CCHT develops and manages “affordable” rental housing, a term that’s widely understood to mean housing that costs no more than 30 percent of occupants’ gross incomes—and one that’s typically associated with urban inner cities. (To a lesser extent, CCHT works on market-rate housing; its Chaska project, for instance, comprises 117 rental units, 59 of them designated affordable for people who earn 60 percent or less of the area’s median income.) Since it started in 1986, the nonprofit trust has developed more than 1,400 units of housing for low- and moderate-income residents, virtually all in Minneapolis. A few years ago, it expanded its service area to include the whole Twin Cities region and redeveloped the Crane Ordway building in downtown St. Paul.

Then in 2003, it found a motivated partner in the City of Chaska and got involved in Clover Ridge. That might not have happened had the city not taken some heat on the topic of affordable housing from local employers. In particular, Chaska’s city leaders and chamber of commerce had been hearing from executives at Lake Region Manufacturing, which employs nearly 800 people at its Chaska headquarters plant and offices.

The city “enticed industry and manufacturing businesses like ours [to locate here], but it’s outpaced affordable housing,” says Kate Roehl, an executive vice president and co-owner of privately held Lake Region Manufacturing. “We spoke out and said, ‘You can’t bring in this much business without matching housing to jobs.’”