Since 2021, the number and share of selected rental units going to Greater Minnesota communities that have not received a Multifamily Consolidated Request for Proposals (Consolidated RFP) award in the past five years have steadily increased. Additionally, the share of selected units in qualifying Greater Minnesota communities has exceeded the share of units that applied for funding in those communities since 2022. In 2024, Minnesota Housing awarded funds for 280 units in these qualifying communities, which represented nearly a third (29%) of all units selected in 2024 compared to only 20% of all units that applied for funding in qualifying communities.

Some rural communities do not have the resources to meet the unique housing needs of their communities nor commit funding to a project that applies to the Consolidated RFP. Committed funding sources help projects achieve higher scores in the Consolidated RFP process. Because there is insufficient funding to select all requests in any given year, lower scoring projects struggle to be selected. To help those communities, the Consolidated RFP process includes points for communities that have not received a funding award in the last five years from Minnesota Housing. These additional points help ensure that more communities across the state have access to housing resources and advance our goal to distribute funding resources for housing across the state. 

Rental housing applicants to Minnesota Housing’s Consolidated RFP receive selection points if the project is in a community where no project has been approved for funding in the multifamily capital funding programs in the past five years. This metric captures the number and share of all rental units that applied or were selected for funding that meet this criterion and are in Greater Minnesota.