Ramstad: It’s not easy building affordable apartments in the Twin Cities. These developers got it done.

Willy Boulay and Mike Hudson have a grand vision for building affordable apartments for people with below-median incomes that are as nice as market-rate properties.

Their first buildings, one in Minneapolis that opened in May and another about to open in St. Paul, live up to their plans. Both have fitness centers, balconies on most units, roof decks, solar arrays, EV chargers, community rooms, even indoor playgrounds they tested themselves.

“The slide will support guys over 30,” Boulay said as he and Hudson took me through Canvas, their 161-unit project in northeast Minneapolis. It gets its name from all the original paintings purchased from neighborhood artists to fill halls and other common areas.

The seven-story building cost $71 million and is open to renters of all ages who make 60% of average market income, a level sometimes known as workforce housing. Hennepin County and the city of Minneapolis provided subsidies in the form of tax-exempt bonds and tax credits that will discount rents for 40 years. It’s a typical form of financing for affordable housing to help cover the difference between it and market-rate homes.

As of last week, Canvas had just two vacancies. Well, plus one big one on the ground floor.

To get the project approved, their firm, Broadway Street Development, had to comply with the desires of City Council members for buildings in a so-called “production” district, designated to create employment-focused developments.

As a result, the ground floor was built with 18-foot ceilings and about half of it, around 23,000 square feet, was set aside for commercial use. Perhaps a microbrewery with a taproom will lease it, or a commercial production studio, or a small industrial business that isn’t too disruptive to the hundreds of residents above.

In all, it’s taken four years to build an affordable housing complex for about 400 people in a city, metro area and state that badly need tens of thousands more housing units of all kinds. Things can’t keep going like this. At too many steps along the way, lawmakers and regulators impose rules and ideas aimed at solving more problems than simply getting housing built.

“There’s always, obviously with municipalities, negotiations over density,” Hudson said. “This project was supposed to have more units than it ended up with. The city pushed us for more commercial or industrial space.”

Boulay added, “There’s just a lot of competing interests. … There’s the neighbors who saw this as a grass field for 20 years and said it shouldn’t be affordable housing. There’s the city that says, ‘Well, your rent should be lower,’ and then we say ‘Well, can you help pay for that with a subsidy?’ We’re trying to please a lot of different parties.”

Although there are barriers to building affordable housing, the big narrative about multifamily housing development in Minneapolis is the city built enough over the last decade to hold rent increases below the skyrocketing level seen in much of the rest of the country.

It’s been a feather in the cap of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who, as a City Council member first and then mayor, was a big advocate for multifamily construction. And Gov. Tim Walz, campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House this fall, mentioned Minneapolis’ housing successes again and again as he touted Democrats’ goal to build 3 million new homes nationwide in the next four years.

At an issues seminar hosted by the Twin Cities Housing Alliance on Wednesday, Frey joined other mayors, developers and state legislators to discuss ways to cut some of the regulatory underbrush and accelerate construction.

The tension that persists is, while everyone agrees on the need for more housing and construction, disagreements emerge about where it should go. Developers at the seminar, for instance, suggested that state lawmakers preempt cities from imposing rent control. But earlier this year, municipal and county leaders pushed back when state lawmakers considered preempting local zoning rules.

Woodbury Mayor Anne Burt cited another moment state lawmakers preempted local control. “Whether you like it or not, it was cannabis,” Burt said. “Would it have been better to work in cooperation to address that? That would have been good. It becomes a slippery slope.”

But I didn’t visit Canvas to hear about the difficulties the partners at Broadway Street Development had getting things done. I wanted to see the complex because it stands out in another way — as a rare new property built mainly for families, rather than singles and young or old couples. More than 75% of the units at Canvas are three-bedroom, which is virtually unheard of these days in new multifamily housing, particularly at market-rate monthly rents.

“To get a three-bedroom unit of this quality in this neighborhood would be $3,100, $3,200,” Boulay said. “Our 60 percent AMI [average median income] rent is $1,850. There’s really a need in the market for this for families.”