Ground Broken on Aitkin Apartment Complex with In-Home Childcare

Prior to September 10, the state of Minnesota did not have any housing dedicated to in-home childcare. But that changed last week when a ground breaking ceremony was held for Bunker Hills Apartments in Aitkin.

“We’re aware of the daycare shortage that is occurring all over various communities,” said Jim Illies with INH Properties. “We developed [a] design for a ground-level unit that will have private entry, it’ll be direct access to the playground, it’ll have drop-off stalls designated for the daycare.”

Illies’ partner Angel Zierden, a co-developer with Lake Forest Development, raised her concerns regarding childcare during her time serving as Breezy Point’s mayor and came up with the idea to have multi-family developers incorporate units dedicated solely to the issue.

“Through that research—working with Wayfair, [First Children’s] Finance, Initiative Foundation—we started to understand the situation a little bit more, and I learned about the special licensing,” Zierden said. “Counties and cities have actually gotten involved to increase capacity for childcare through those licenses, and being that I was in the development and real estate world, I though, ‘Well, why don’t we combine the two?’”

According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), there are roughly 400,000 children in the state under the age of 6, and about 26% of said children live in a single-parent household, with 92% living with a father in the labor force and 83% residing with a mother in the labor force.

“When you look at childcare centers, those are regulated by the state,” Zierden explained. “We don’t have the labor force in rural Minnesota to sustain a lot of those centers. Hopefully, this new idea of putting designated, in-home childcare units in developments will solve that.”

That’s why both Zierden and Illies are hopeful the Bunker Hills Apartments will meet their goal of getting more people applying for special licenses now that there is a stable location dedicated to addressing the childcare crisis.

“We want to let developers know that it doesn’t cost any more to do this,” Zierden said.

“It’s been a long time—as a lot of people stated here today—with Growth Innovations, the city, the county,” added Illies. “We’re just excited to be here and have this finally started.”