Episode 85: TOD and Affordable Commercial

Unedited Transcript – Episode 85 with Ryan Kelley – includes timestamps for segments of the podcast

There is a great deal of attention and focus, rightly so, on affordable housing in transit-oriented communities. But what about affordable commercial spaces? On this episode of the Mpact Podcast, we speak with Ryan Kelley, Community Development Manager with Hennepin County in Minnesota about the importance of commercial and cultural spaces in the overall community fabric of neighborhoods – and Hennepin County’s innovative efforts to support them.

Kelley tells a story of bringing together local cities to talk about the loss of affordable commercial spaces as an unintended result of redevelopment efforts to build more compact and walkable transit-oriented communities. A typical example: losing locally-owned businesses when tearing down suburban style strip malls to build a mixed use affordable housing project. Drawing on these conversations and using federal pandemic recovery funding, Hennepin County launched a program to support development projects with affordable rental or ownership spaces for locally-owned small businesses. The program also supported emerging developers, business incubators, and community or cultural institutions that offer employment supports.

Listen to the podcast for Kelley’s take on the differences between affordable housing and affordable commercial as well as stories of some of the projects that received support from the county, often as part of an array of funding sources. It’s a fascinating conversation about the places we hope to build and what makes them vibrant – and more accessible to those already there.