Duluth residents press city leaders on worsening housing shortage

Duluth’s housing squeeze is now wide enough to hit new workers, longtime renters, seniors trying to downsize and families trying to stay in town. With market-rate rental vacancy at 1.8 percent, far below the roughly 5 percent considered healthy, city materials say Duluth will need 8,713 new homes by 2035, including about 2,400 senior housing units.

That shortage came through again as residents and local leaders pressed city officials over the city’s housing future. Mayor Roger Reinert has said the shortage pushes people to overbuy whatever is available or leave town because they cannot find the kind of home they want in Duluth. For St. Louis County, the stakes go beyond individual households: city officials tie housing availability to school enrollment, workforce recruitment, business growth and the ability of nonprofits and employers to keep people in the region.

The numbers show a market under strain. Duluth’s median rent in 2024 was $1,443 a month, up 6.5 percent from 2022, and the city says 53 percent of renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of income on housing. City officials also say Duluth has stayed at roughly 87,000 residents for more than three decades, even as Reinert has said the city should be over 90,000 by the 2030 Census. Hitting that goal, officials say, will require more housing at all income levels.

The pressure on City Hall is not new, and the city’s own records show the problem has outpaced recent construction. A 2019 study identified demand for roughly 3,600 new affordable units between 2019 and 2024, while the city says it has seen a net gain of 1,183 units since then. The 2025 Maxfield Comprehensive Housing Needs Analysis goes further, projecting total demand for 8,713 new units by 2035.

City leaders have already moved into policy work. On June 16, 2025, Duluth City Council passed Resolution 25-0520R backing zoning and code modernization to increase housing supply across all income levels. The city later proposed zoning changes that would eliminate new Residential-Planned and Mixed Use-Planned districts, part of a broader effort guided by Imagine Duluth 2035, the comprehensive land use plan adopted in 2018.

Planning staff have continued public outreach on the housing strategy, including an open house scheduled for Nov. 13, 2025, and the 2025 Housing Strategies Conference planned for November 2025. For Duluth, the question is no longer whether the shortage is real. It is whether the city can translate hearings, zoning changes and long-range plans into homes fast enough to keep people from being priced out.