Variety of factors make Bemidji's part in a national housing crisis unique

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BEMIDJI — Area leaders know that Bemidji is feeling the effects of a nationwide housing crisis — this was on full display during a Dec. 2 housing summit at the Sanford Center.

Developers, community resource organizations, bankers, state representatives and tribal partners all participated to welcome community engagement. The summit was supplemented by a Beltrami County

comprehensive housing needs analysis

presentation from

Maxfield Research.

The summit showcased a myriad of challenges — like a lack of affordable housing — and highlighted key priorities, such as innovation and collaboration. A main barrier echoed throughout the morning and afternoon: funding shortcomings.

“The simplest (barrier) is money,” Skip Duchesneau, DW Jones president, said during the summit. “There’s a gap of money, whether it’s an affordable project that Minnesota Housing finances … with the tighter state budget, the state hasn’t been providing as much extra money to the agency, so funding is lower there.

“I think in the past, Bemidji has done quite well in getting tax credit funding … but that is funding one project, maybe every couple of years, and it’s maybe 30 (to) 40, units. I think the demand for affordable, subsidized housing is 619 by 2035; there’s no way to get to that number. It’s impossible. But that’s the reality of doing workforce housing in the state of Minnesota.”

Bemidji is not alone; funding has run short for many municipalities. However, numerous factors make Bemidji’s housing situation unique. For starters, Bemidji is defined by aging infrastructure.

“These homes, which are built in downtown, were built at a time for smaller families who operate in a very different way,” Bemidji Fire Chief Justin Sherwood said. “Now, here in 2026, our housing is providing shelter to more people than intended. The overall infrastructure in the home are being pushed to a limit to which they were not designed, and as a result, we’re getting more electrical fires, cooking fires, heating fires.”

This is best displayed by

Red Pine Estates,

which was abandoned in 2023 due to structural concerns. The 47 residents were displaced but successfully

relocated

elsewhere. For more than two years, the building has sat empty, further amplifying Bemidji’s housing crisis.

Recently, the

Bemidji Planning Commission

moved a project forward to

replace

Red Pine Estates, though the project has yet to be approved by the city.

Even positive projects can have negative impacts. This is exemplified by Greater Bemidji’s

downtown rail corridor

revitalization project set to bring a

YMCA

and

new hotel

to Bemidji. Presently, no housing projects are slated for the corridor.

Additionally, the project necessitated the

demolition of an abandoned building

that once housed Bemidji Paper Sales. Despite health and safety concerns, the abandoned building served as a makeshift shelter for many unhoused individuals who must now seek shelter elsewhere.

Bemidji’s housing crisis runs hand-in-hand with a homelessness crisis. Most local leaders would agree that the area needs more affordable housing, but an exact model has not been determined, especially for an unaccounted-for unhoused population.

Bemidji is a rural city with mounting urban pressures. This is, perhaps, Bemidji’s greatest challenge when facing the national housing and homelessness struggles.

Sherwood estimates that Bemidji serves an excess of 100,000 people despite population signs that estimate roughly 15,000 within city limits. This is due to geography and the fact that Bemidji serves as a central hub for much of northern Minnesota.

Sherwood believes the population will only climb from here, meaning Bemidji will need to expand services, yet it is not benefiting from the excess of service.

“You may not necessarily see it on the population side, but when you look at our region as a whole, it’s exploding,” he said. You can see that in the construction that’s happening outside the city. … If we don’t keep up with our essential services, meaning public safety, (a rising population is) going to continue to really tax us, and it’s going to get to the point where it’s going to cost us a ton of money.”

And the challenge is further compounded by external factors, such as the

boundary trial

against

Northern Township,

which will determine a permanent border surrounding Lake Bemidji, and the devastating

June storm

that wiped out an estimated 9 million trees, with the true scope of its damage yet to be fully understood.

Factoring in all of these elements makes a solution challenging for community leaders. The aforementioned housing summit served as a good starting point. Other avenues are being explored, such as updating the city’s

comprehensive plan,

which is done once every decade.

“How we roll out that comp plan in the corresponding ordinances can have a huge impact on what houses can and can’t be built,” said Bemidji Mayor Jorge Prince.

The

Headwaters Regional Development Commission

is overseeing the editing of the plan. Prince hopes that the changes can churn a positive result for Bemidji’s housing market.

“I want to go to the people who may have made choices or are making choices about development and hear directly from them about what worked and didn’t work,” he shared. “If you’re somebody who just built, I don’t know, let’s say 20 houses outside the city limits, I want to know why you didn’t build those in the city.

“And more importantly, I want to know what we could have done as a city that would have caused you to have built those 20 inside the city limits. That’s what I really want to know. And if that rolls back to an ordinance that needs to be changed, that then rolls back to the comprehensive plan.”

Other than the comprehensive plan, community leaders will need to brainstorm together to find solutions. During the summit, many leaders expressed that this collaboration is already occurring. However, other community leaders hold a different perspective.

“We say this with love: we all, as organizational leaders, can take the time to talk to the news outlets, or we can take the time to display the cause, but why are we not meeting to try to work together?” questioned Isabella Schaefer, owner of

The Recovery Space

in downtown Bemidji. “My fear is that a lot of the information that’s going around is coinciding with politics season, and it’s coinciding with issues that on the surface sound really good to address, but underneath the surface, there’s so much more going on.”

This demonstrates a disconnect somewhere, potentially stalling solutions that must be brainstormed together. The thing is, everyone has a different solution, with some overlap.

For instance, Prince shared that improvement must be done one step at a time.

“I don’t want perfection to be the enemy of better,” Prince elaborated. “Sometimes, we look for that all-inclusive, all-solving solution, when we should just be trying to get better, and that requires a little bit of grace from everybody.”

Dave Hengel, Greater Bemidji executive director, stated during the housing summit that progress will primarily come from private development.

“I feel like the solution today isn’t going to come from the government or with philanthropy foundations,” he said. “I think they are big partners in this, but I don’t think that’s the solution. The solution is going to rest with folks here (at the housing summit). I think this is going to need to be a private-led, private-driven effort that screams for public-private partnership.”

Meanwhile, Reed Olson, executive director of the Nameless Coalition for the Homeless and a small business owner in Bemidji, has advocated for raising taxes on billionaires to help fund various economic woes — a governmental solution.

Either way, everyone agrees that money must be raised and progress must be made to help solve Bemidji’s housing crisis.

This idea of overlap bleeds into other aspects of the housing crisis, like homelessness. Olson believes that a lack of housing creates homelessness, and if ignored or pushed aside any longer, could cause each issue to grow.

“We’re spending a lot of money on this population in inefficient ways that are not getting the results that we want, but we’re afraid to do anything else because of moralizing about whether or not they are worthy of the investment,” Olson stated. “We don’t question the investment when it comes to incarcerating them and giving them health care through the emergency department.”

Additionally, many leaders agree that Bemidji needs to implement some sort of transitional housing program to help people build skills to live on their own, but the same issue of funding arises.

Many factors align to make 2026 a potentially pivotal year in solving Bemidji’s housing crisis. The need is clear for community leaders to connect at every intersection of the situation to find themes and patterns in developing a communal solution.