Speaking of Housing…

By Lee Egerstrom, Economic Development Fellow, September 23, 2011 at 9:30 am

Today Minnesota 2020 Economic Development Fellow Lee Egerstrom is set to address the Minnesota Housing and Redevelopment Officials’ (Minnesota NAHRO) annual conference in Duluth. With the housing market holding back our nation’s economic recovery, Egerstrom will tell the crowd that it’s time to look both overseas and to the past for solutions.

Here’s an excerpt from his speech:

If a threatened default on public debt by Greece can send world markets into a tailspin, community leaders and prospective entrepreneurs should look around the globe for business models that can help them cope with a weak, global economy. One such model is a cooperative.

In my April 2011 report Cooperatively Moving Minnesota Forward, I pointed out that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of cooperative enterprises, ranging from giants such as CHS Inc. and Land O’Lakes, on down to worker-owned Positively Third Street Bakery in Duluth and rural cemetery associations.

We should explore co-op business models employed in Minnesota, in Europe and South America. People coping with market failures and imperfect market conditions created all these models. Here in Minnesota, seniors are using co-ops as a way to find affordable housing during retirement.

Home equity, the source of much start-up business capital in the past, is mostly gone. Consumers and would-be entrepreneurs are scared to borrow; lenders are scared to lend.

In this economic environment, community leaders and local entrepreneurs should rediscover the cooperative tools that moved Minnesota from the edge of the frontier a century ago to center stage in the global economy.

Posted in Economic Development | Related Topics: Co-ops  Housing Market