Our Town

Last evening I attended a most interesting gathering where the topic was Affordable Housing in our community.  Speaker was Woodbury’s Mayor, Ann Burt.  Two Council members, Steve Morris and Donna Stafford, also attended.  There were about 20 of us in attendance – in my experience, a group of 20 is nearly ideal for such gatherings – large enough for some differences of opinion; small enough so that participants can feel free to participate.  Here’s a photo I took:

October 27, 2025, Woodbury MN.

“Affordable Housing” is a complicated phrase these days.  It has many moving parts.  I am not going to pretend to address any of the issues raised even at this small gathering of 1 1/2 hours.  As a resident here for 25 years, who tries to stay well informed, I’m not naive about the issues.  On the other hand, I don’t attend city council meetings because of a consistent sense that our city basically functions very well, which in turn suggests generally good governance, which further does not indicate that everyone agrees about everything all the time!

For more information about Woodbury,  here is the community website.  There is plenty of accessible information about most anything one might have an interest in.

For the casual visitor, my town is a suburban St. Paul MN community, between St. Paul city and the Wisconsin border a few miles to the east.  It’s essentially an old rural township 6 miles on a side, which has become a city over roughy the past 60 years.  We currently have a population of 83,000, and a projected maximum capacity of perhaps 100,000.  I think we would be considered a fairly prosperous place.

The words “affordable housing” have definitions, but as one can imagine, there are differing interpretations of what those words mean.  The general direction of the meeting was around these words and what they mean in contemporary practice.

It is easy to retreat into one’s own definition of things like “affordable housing”, or any other generalization, say “community”.

It is a bit more complicated when the definition includes neighbors, neighborhoods, entire towns, counties, regions, states, countries….

We literally cannot survive as individual survivalists (though we’d like to think we can), and into the breach over the centuries has come ‘government’, which last night was represented by Mayor Burt and Council members Stafford and Morris.  They are the ones who have to make sense of why we have those irritating traffic cones, and on and on.

Without a government, of people of differing views working together, comes chaos.

In my own situation, really quickly, it is good to have good neighbors, next door and across the driveway.  It is useful to have a good functioning Home Owners Association, which has rules, most of which are codified state law, to minimize disagreements.  There are building codes, zoning, regional agencies like the Metropolitan Council, League of Minnesota Cities, state and federal agencies, on and on and on.  We like to complain about this or that, but they are all essential to someone.   A handout at the meeting defined some aspects of this – the illustration is only part of the entire handout: Woodbury 2025.  I’m certain the entire handout or other information would be accessible to citizens at city hall.