ABSTRACT
Minneapolis is a city that prides itself on good government, high-quality public services, and livability. The city is home to a large and active philanthropic community, including an array of civic organizations devoted to enhancing quality of life, leveraging the resources of the disproportionate number of Fortune 500 companies headquartered there, and helping to coordinate the work of the region’s many active community and regional organizations. The issue of livability has been a central concern of the region’s policy elite over the past 10 years. Over this timeframe the concept of livability has been associated with a range of policy initiatives. The common element across them all is a strong focus on equity.
In this chapter I describe two recent livability initiatives in which local government, private, and nonprofit actors have made regional equity a central element. The first is the build-out of the region’s transit system and the equity planning efforts that accompanied it. Grants from HUD’s “Sustainable Communities” program and the foundation-based “Living Cities Integration Initiative” supported equity planning efforts that have endured long beyond the funding. The second initiative examined in the chapter is an organized advocacy campaign to influence the regional planning body, the Metropolitan Council, as it prepares a new housing plan, completes a Fair Housing Assessment, and fashions its development guidelines for the next 20 years. The cross-sectoral collaboration and tension between government bodies, the corporate sector, local philanthropic foundations, and nonprofit advocacy groups are central to how the issue of livability is defined and has been played out in Minneapolis.
