Homeless Organizing Project
Steve O'Neil, Executive Director
The Damiano Center
206 W. Fourth St., Room 209
Duluth, Minn. 55806
(218) 722-0257

It's not too surprising that Duluth, the birthplace of the International Workers of the World (the "Wobblies") and a community that still provides heating for its downtown buildings through a century-old steam cooperative, is seriously into community organizing.

With the adjacent town of Superior, Wis., the "Port Cities" at the head of Lake Superior trace a robust blue-collar history based on ore and grain and the giant boats that ship them. But with the collapse of the U.S. steel industry and the loss of farming jobs to agribusiness, there's plenty of poverty about, even when you don't take a sizable American Indian minority into consideration.

Among many organizing efforts in the community (most of them based in the Damiano Center, a hulking red-brick building that once housed a Catholic school) are the Women's Action Group, focused on women's issues; Mending the Sacred Hoop, specializing in American Indian women victimized by spouse and child abuse; and the subject of this report, the Homeless Organizing Project, made up of homeless and formerly homeless people organized around local issues that affect them.

Affordable housing is a real problem in Duluth, where a shortage of rental housing (the current vacancy rate is just over 1 percent) has driven rental prices to one of the nation's highest levels outside the major cities.

According to the Homeless Organizing Project, more than 62 percent of Duluth residents pay more than one-third of their gross income toward housing costs. And with only the service-job sector growing, many residents receive minimum wage or close to it -- which leaves them in the unhappy situation of paying more than 50 percent of their income for rent.

While the region's fierce climate militates against street homelessness, because people without anyplace to live simply leave, advocates estimate that the city has 400 homeless people, and another 5,000 of its 100,000 residents are at risk of homelessness. Meanwhile, the city's housing stock is deteriorating. An estimated one-fourth of the city's 13,500 rental housing units are rated substandard, and during the past 10 years, 1,200 housing units were demolished while only 372 new ones were built.

It was that setting in which Steve O'Neil, a member of the Catholic Worker Community and a board member of the non-profit Damiano Center, a multi-purpose social-services agency in Duluth, started the Homeless Organizing Project in 1988. Using funds from the Community Action Agency, the Ordean Foundation and private donors, the HOP hired an experienced organizer to turn Duluth's homeless people into advocates for their own interests. Using a broad combination of demonstrations, negotiations and meetings with officials and the public, they have won many victories.

Participating in a broad coalition, the group persuaded the city to increase its allocation of Community Development Block Grant funds for housing from 30 percent to 50 percent of the total. They negotiated loans and contributions to establish a Duluth Housing Trust Fund that financed two houses for transitional shelter, and recently coordinated a successful drive to raise $240,000 to renovate the old Apollo Hotel building in downtown Duluth as a 32-unit apartment building to provide safe, affordable housing for very-low to moderate-income families.

Governed by a 10-member board of whom at least seven are homeless or formerly homeless, HOP has major plans: