Mayor Roger Reinert has made housing a centerpiece of his administration, arguing that Duluth is failing to attract people "simply due to a lack of housing" and that major employers like Cirrus Aircraft and Essentia Health are struggling to hire because workers can't find places to live. His goal is 90,000 residents by 2030. Notably, this agenda is oriented largely toward people who don't live here yet — and the solution he has landed on involves selling public land, including parkland, to private developers.

The mayor's framing doesn't pass inspection. The first problem is that the 90,000 population target is an assertion, not an argument. Duluth has hovered between 85,000 and 92,000 residents for most of the past 40 years. The city provides services, maintains infrastructure, and functions. Growth for its own sake primarily benefits developers and expands the tax base — but it also increases demands on schools, roads, and city services. The east side schools are already over capacity, and the mayor has offered no plan for how Duluth Public Schools absorbs more families. The question of whether Duluth needs to grow, or whether it needs to become more livable and affordable for the people already here, is one the mayor has decided without asking anyone.

The second problem is the assumption that a city must house every person who works there. No major American city does. Minneapolis and St. Paul have thriving downtowns and growing tax bases — and a significant share of their workforce lives in the suburbs. The regional housing market doesn't begin and end at the Duluth city limits, and the city isn't obligated to house every worker by selling parkland.

The mayor's framing — that Duluth needs more housing units — conflates two different problems. The city doesn't lack housing because too few units exist. It lacks housing that people who actually live and work here can afford. Those are different diagnoses with different remedies, and market-rate development on public parkland addresses neither.

For those who could buy, the math is brutal. The median sale price hit a record $292,000 in 2024 — up 50 percent from 2019 — and remains around $290,000 as of late 2025, with homes selling in roughly 18 days and only about six weeks of inventory on the market at any given time (a healthy market carries six months). At current rates, that purchase requires roughly $90,500 a year to meet standard lending thresholds. The median Duluth homeowner household earns around $72,000 — leaving them about $18,500 short, and that's before saving the $29,000 down payment.

More than 40 percent of Duluth's homes were built before 1940 — compared to 18 percent statewide — and two-thirds are at least 60 years old, built for households that averaged nearly 3.5 people when Duluth's population was at its peak. Today the average household is just over 2. And $290,000 doesn't buy what people expect for that money. As one local realtor put it, that price point lately means a house with at least cosmetic needs, and buyers who can't afford to both finance a $300,000 home and fix it up are simply priced out.

The affordability crisis isn't local to Duluth — it's a national problem that the mayor is framing as a local one. The mayor himself put it plainly: "Basically, we have a housing market in Duluth that lifetime Duluthians can't afford." That is accurate. It's also true of most of America — this is a national crisis, not a Duluth-specific failure. Nationally, home buying costs have more than doubled since before the pandemic, and households earning $75,000 a year — the range that includes teachers, nurses, and skilled tradespeople — could afford nearly half of all listings in 2019 but only about 21 percent as of early 2025.

Whoever actually solves the housing affordability problem in a mid-sized American city will have the choice of either being mayor for life or president of the United States. But greenlighting high-priced new condo construction doesn't fit what Duluth actually is, and the evidence suggests it isn't helping: new market-rate units at the top of the price range do little for working families already priced out of a $290,000 house. The next question — the one the mayor hasn't answered — is why wages at Duluth's major employers haven't kept pace with what Duluth housing now costs.

When Mayor Reinert says employers like Cirrus Aircraft and Essentia Health can't hire because Duluth lacks housing, he is describing a symptom. The underlying issue is that wages at both employers make Duluth housing difficult to afford — not just for workers the city hopes to attract, but for the ones already here. The wage argument isn't about population targets. It's about the nurse who already lives here, already has kids in Duluth schools, and is already paying more than she should have to for housing that's older than her parents. Higher wages don't create a new housing problem — they give existing residents a fighting chance at the one they're already living in.

Cirrus Aircraft posted record results in 2024: 731 aircraft delivered — its highest single-year total in company history, topping a record set in 2006 — and $1.2 billion in revenue for the first time. Net profit was $121 million, up 33 percent year over year. Its SR22 aircraft sells for around $1.1 million; the Vision Jet for $3.4 million. For a company posting record profits on products in that price range, average employee pay of $66,384 per year is worth scrutinizing.

Essentia Health presents a starker local comparison. Essentia nurses earn approximately $41–44 per hour. Across town, Aspirus St. Luke's advertises paying the 7th-highest RN wages in the nation — and Indeed reports Aspirus/St. Luke's RN pay in Duluth at approximately $52 per hour, roughly 20 percent higher for the same job in the same city. Essentia employs approximately 4,876 registered and licensed practical nurses across its entire system of 14 hospitals and 79 clinics; St. Luke's, before its merger with Aspirus, employed roughly 510 nurses at its Duluth-area facilities alone. These are not small numbers, and the wage gap between the two systems for the same work is not abstract — it directly affects whether nurses working in Duluth can afford to live in Duluth. That gap contributed to a July 2025 unfair labor practice strike by Essentia nurses after Essentia refused to meet at seven bargaining dates offered by the Minnesota Nurses Association. Why can't the city use its leverage over TIF districts, permits, and development agreements to hold its largest employer accountable?

When employers tell the mayor they can't attract talent because Duluth lacks housing, they are asking the city to subsidize their own labor costs — to make housing cheap enough to compensate for wages that wouldn't otherwise be competitive. That is not a housing policy.

There's a further consequence worth naming. Higher wages don't just help individual workers. They produce more homeowners, which produces better-funded schools — the same schools currently running out of classroom space.

Wages and leverage. The city awards TIF districts, development agreements, permitting priority, and workforce partnerships. It could use that leverage to reward employers who pay competitively and decline to extend it to those who don't. In fact, Duluth already has a living wage ordinance on the books — passed in 1997, requiring recipients of city development assistance of $25,000 or more to pay a living wage. The problem is that the wage floor hasn't been meaningfully updated since roughly 2005, when it sat at $7.61 an hour — so far below a liveable wage it's barely worth calling an ordinance. And a June 2025 News Tribune report found the city had been dispensing TIF without any coherent public benefits framework at all, prompting a city councilor to say the city had been "abusing TIF to try to get projects forward." Other cities have done far better with the same tools — Minneapolis requires businesses receiving $100,000 or more in city assistance to create at least one full-time living wage job for every $25,000 of subsidy, with the living wage set at 130% of the federal poverty level for a family of four — currently around $17–18 per hour — and updated annually. Cleveland goes further: under its 2023 Community Benefits Ordinance, any project receiving $250,000 or more in city assistance must enter into a legally binding agreement covering local hiring goals, minority and women-owned business participation, apprenticeships for Cleveland residents, and — for projects over $20 million — an expanded set of additional community benefits negotiated deal by deal. And CBAs with living wage and local hiring requirements have been successfully negotiated on major projects in Chicago, Denver, and Milwaukee.

Duluth has the authority. What it has lacked is the will to use it. When workers earn enough to afford a home in Duluth's actual market, they become buyers — and homeowners with rising incomes can absorb property tax increases that fund better schools and city services, rather than being perpetually squeezed by them. The virtuous cycle the mayor is looking for runs through wages, not parkland.

Expand first-time buyer programs. The city and the Duluth HRA could aggressively promote and fund down payment assistance programs targeted at families and first-time buyers in the $50,000–$80,000 income range — the people most likely to buy an existing Duluth home if they can get over the barrier of a down payment. The federal CDBG and HOME programs are the primary funding source for exactly this kind of initiative — and despite the Trump administration's attempt to eliminate both entirely, the money was preserved through Democratic negotiations and made it into the FY2026 appropriations bill signed into law on February 3, 2026. Getting more buyers into the existing housing stock also creates natural upward mobility: a family that buys a starter home frees up a rental unit. These programs work without building anything new and without touching public land.

Downtown conversion — done right, with the right partners. A 2023 study commissioned by the city identified capacity for over 2,400 new housing units on already-disturbed downtown land with existing infrastructure. At least eight downtown buildings are sitting vacant right now. The problem is not that Duluth has run out of places to build — the problem is that the city keeps turning to market-rate developers to solve an affordability problem. If the goal is affordable units, the city needs to work with organizations that actually know how to build them — One Roof Community Housing, Center City Housing, and the Duluth HRA, not developers with an affordable unit sprinkled in.

For large downtown office-to-apartment conversions, the relevant tool is affordable rental development using Low Income Housing Tax Credits, which cap rents at a percentage of area median income for decades. One Roof and Center City Housing both do this — One Roof's Brewery Creek Apartments and Decker Dwellings are local examples. It's not permanent the way a Community Land Trust is, but it keeps rents meaningfully below what a market-rate developer would charge and it's the standard tool for multi-unit buildings where individual ownership isn't practical. That's a fundamentally different outcome than a market-rate developer putting up a $1,800/month studio and calling one unit "workforce housing." For seniors especially — who need accessible living near services, medical care, and a view of the lake — downtown could be a natural fit, as part of a broader revival. Downtown Duluth is not currently the kind of place most seniors would choose to move, but that's an argument for investing in it, not for ignoring it. A downtown that adds affordable residential density, fills its vacant storefronts, and builds on anchors like the DECC, the library, aquarium and the medical district becomes somewhere people actually want to live. Every senior who makes that move frees up a family-sized home elsewhere in the city.

For smaller conversions and homeownership throughout the city, One Roof's Community Land Trust (CLT) model produces homes that stay affordable permanently. The way it works: One Roof retains ownership of the land and sells the home itself to an income-qualified buyer at well below market rate — currently around $75,000 below market — and when that buyer eventually sells, they pass the same affordability along to the next income-qualified buyer rather than cashing out at market price. One Roof has already done this 375 times in Duluth. The city's initial investment recycles through every future sale instead of disappearing into one family's equity.

Solve — and rethink — Incline Village. The former Duluth Central High School site — a spectacular hillside overlooking Lake Superior, already cleared, with infrastructure investment underway — had its development agreement terminated after the developer fell into material breach. It was supposed to deliver 1,300 units of housing. It is now stalled. Before the city commits to selling Lester Park to create yet another development project on a separate front, it should concentrate its energy on attracting a credible developer to a site that is already prepared, already approved, and already in desperate need of one.

The city also desperately needs to rethink what Incline Village development looks like. For example, why not commit to build with the help of Just Housing, a local social benefit corporation building zero net energy homes specifically designed for Duluth's brutal winters — triple-pane windows, airtight construction, extra insulation, all-electric with no fossil fuels on site — that use less than a third of the energy a code-built home would consume, with rooftop solar bringing the annual energy bill to zero. They cost only about 11% more to build than a standard home, and they're designed to still be standing and functional a century from now. Just Housing is also training the next generation of builders in these techniques — working with high school construction students on high-performance building skills — a green-collar workforce pipeline that Duluth badly needs. These are not luxury units aimed at out-of-town buyers. These are homes real Duluth families and seniors would actually want to live in, at prices designed to stay within reach. A site like Incline Village, in the hands of a partner like that, could demonstrate that the city doesn't have to choose between housing and values — that building for the community already here is both possible and worth doing.