Almost Finiteness for General Etale Groupoids and Its Applications to Stable Rank of Crossed Products

We extend Matui's notion of almost finiteness to general etale groupoids and show that the reduced groupoid C*-algebras of minimal almost finite groupoids have stable rank 1. The proof follows a new strategy, which can be regarded as a local version of the large subalgebra argument. The following three are the main consequences of our result: (1) for any group of (local) subexponential growth and for any its minimal action admitting a totally disconnected free factor, the crossed product has stable rank 1; (2) any countable amenable group admits a minimal action on the Cantor set, all whose minimal extensions form the crossed product of stable rank 1; and (3) for any amenable group, the crossed product of the universal minimal action has stable rank 1.