Minneapolis 2040 Upzoning

[1Boston]

https://www.curbed.com/2018/11/27/18...nt-2040-zoning

Minneapolis 2040 believes the solution is simply more: more construction, more high-rises, and more triplexes. The comprehensive plan update would create new zoning categories across the city. In addition to allowing triplexes, the new rules would allow developers in most residential areas to build four stories high. It would also eliminate off-street parking requirements, which add to the cost of a new project without increasing density.

Minneapolis is set to update its zoning in one of the most progressive, city-wide zoning changes of a major city in the United States. I am interested in everyone's perspective on this issue.

[Centropolis]

on the surface, sounds like a great plan. i think that the (generally) plain-jane housing stock works in minneapolis favor, they shouldn't be afraid to tear down and build up. this is the kind of historical process that changes cities from good to great.

[The North One]

I don't understand why this is happening in Minneapolis and not a city that actually needs it like San Francisco, why is there this rush to upzone the entire Minneapolis city limits? Does the city even have a transit plan to service upzoned outer neighborhoods?

Core Minneapolis is full of parking lots and empty land, why not focus on that first? Also there's tons of pushback and even lawsuits going against it.

It's naive to think this relaxed upzone will turn Min into Chicago, instead, you're almost guaranteed to get a Houston scenario out of this, tons of soulless apartment complexes for miles and random skyscrapers in weird places. Not good.

[ardecila]

^ The upzoning mainly focuses on adding units incrementally in existing neighborhoods. Why would you think this will result in "soulless apartment complexes" - which require large blocks of land not found in most existing neighborhoods - or "random skyscrapers" which are explicitly not allowed by the plan?

Why does Minneapolis need a transit plan for a densification process that will be diffused among the many neighborhoods? If the entire city is now open for ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, then the new units will probably not overwhelm the existing transportation system. A duplex/triplex level of density is perfectly suited to the existing bus and rail system.

If you want to know what this will look like, check out inner-city neighborhoods in Denver. Cherry Creek, Capitol Hill, Highlands etc. Denver also has plenty of vacant land downtown, but lots of people don't want to live in a midrise elevator building in a concrete jungle. Meanwhile, Cherry Creek has literally been wiped clean and rebuilt with a mix of SFH and walkups while preserving its neighborhood feel. Although, tbh, Houston isn't a bad model. The parts that have maintained small-lot zoning, like Rice Military, are great neighborhoods with a huge diversity of building styles. Very much like older neighborhoods in Chicago (just with higher parking ratios).

As for why it's happening in Minneapolis - the whole point is to get out in front of higher demand for urban living, to avoid becoming the next SF in 20-30 years' time and reduce displacement and rising rents in the short term. SF could never hope to pass something like this. The neighborhood groups there have worked themselves up into such a frenzy over development, the only way SF will ever remake its neighborhoods is if the Big One hits and there's no neighborhoods left to preserve.

[The North One]

Originally Posted by ardecila

Why does Minneapolis need a transit plan for a densification process that will be diffused among the many neighborhoods? If the entire city is now open for ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, then the new units will probably not overwhelm the existing transportation system. A duplex/triplex level of density is perfectly suited to the existing bus and rail system.

Because you're spreading out density across the city instead of centralizing it in the core (which has plenty of room), that's a recipe for bottleneck traffic. Minneapolis light rail is a joke, it's just two lines and one leads to an edge city, that's not going to support a city-wide upzone.

If you want to know what this will look like, check out inner-city neighborhoods in Denver. Cherry Creek, Capitol Hill, Highlands etc. Denver also has plenty of vacant land downtown, but lots of people don't want to live in a midrise elevator building in a concrete jungle. Meanwhile, Cherry Creek has literally been wiped clean and rebuilt with a mix of SFH and walkups while preserving its neighborhood feel. Although, tbh, Houston isn't a bad model. The parts that have maintained small-lot zoning, like Rice Military, are great neighborhoods with a huge diversity of building styles. Very much like older neighborhoods in Chicago (just with higher parking ratios).

Denver gets tons of soulless apartment buildings and they don't need entire blocks, Houston doesn't either, so I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said. I've studied the neighborhoods around downtown Denver and most of it is still pre-war detached homes with midcentury apartment buildings thrown in. Cherry Creek looks nothing like a pre-war Chicago neighborhood and nothing in Houston does either. I read that the plan includes high-rises so how is it explicitly not allowed?

As for why it's happening in Minneapolis - the whole point is to get out in front of higher demand for urban living, to avoid becoming the next SF in 20-30 years' time and reduce displacement and rising rents in the short term. SF could never hope to pass something like this.

Minneapolis will never have the affordability problems of SF because it's nowhere near as constrained by geography, it's really the anti-San Francisco since they can develop 360 degrees around the core. San Francisco's core is also completely developed, Minneapolis is not. The neighborhoods being upzoned don't seem to offer urban living either, they're grided inner ring suburbs you can find everywhere in the Midwest. It seems the only goal is to create a release valve to allow for better housing affordability, not to create higher urbanism or allow more people to live in higher urbanism.

The neighborhood groups there have worked themselves up into such a frenzy over development, the only way SF will ever remake its neighborhoods is if the Big One hits and there's no neighborhoods left to preserve.

That's what I'm saying though, I know it'll probably never happen.

[1Boston]

I think that critique is a bit misplaced. Minneapolis is geographically much smaller than Houston and overall just a small sized. The upzoning doesn't open up new greenfield sites for development, but increases the density of existing neighborhoods--but only marginally. This will NOT lead to random skyscrapers everywhere.

Also, I think people get the equation of housing and transportation sightly off. People assume that you build transit and then all of sudden development will be built around it. But its really hard to get funding and support for transit when people dont already live in situations that demand it. By upzoning with parking maximums, you are creating a population that will demand improved public transportation: which does not just mean light rail-----BRT and buses in general are the backbone of public transportation in the US. They are also much more easily improved in a timely and cost effective manner to respond to new demand.

[ardecila]

Not even BRT, even regular buses run frequently on a 1/2 mile grid can easily support 3-flat density.

Besides, if the entire city is upzoned then it’s not like we’ll see Chicago-like or Houston-like neighborhoods of nonstop 3-flats anytime soon. The population just isn’t growing THAT fast. In the short term the most likely trend will be homeowners (legally) building basement or attic apartments. This has the added benefit of lowering the financial bar for homeownership a little for any homeowner who’s willing to be a landlord, and creates affordable housing units with zero change to the cityscape except a few more cars parked on the street. As certain neighborhoods grow in population, Met Council can simply ramp up frequency on certain bus lines.

If it sounds boring and unremarkable, that’s because it should be. It’s not a radical plan. It’s a common sense way for the city to grow and provide reasonably-priced housing. Sadly it’s an option that’s illegal in most US cities because of greedy homeowners seeking to maximize property values, and racist stereotypes of apartment dwellers.

[mhays]

Great post ardecila!

[creamcityleo79]

Originally Posted by The North One

Because you're spreading out density across the city instead of centralizing it in the core (which has plenty of room), that's a recipe for bottleneck traffic. Minneapolis light rail is a joke, it's just two lines and one leads to an edge city, that's not going to support a city-wide upzone.



Denver gets tons of soulless apartment buildings and they don't need entire blocks, Houston doesn't either, so I'm not sure how this contradicts what I said. I've studied the neighborhoods around downtown Denver and most of it is still pre-war detached homes with midcentury apartment buildings thrown in. Cherry Creek looks nothing like a pre-war Chicago neighborhood and nothing in Houston does either. I read that the plan includes high-rises so how is it explicitly not allowed?



Minneapolis will never have the affordability problems of SF because it's nowhere near as constrained by geography, it's really the anti-San Francisco since they can develop 360 degrees around the core. San Francisco's core is also completely developed, Minneapolis is not. The neighborhoods being upzoned don't seem to offer urban living either, they're grided inner ring suburbs you can find everywhere in the Midwest. It seems the only goal is to create a release valve to allow for better housing affordability, not to create higher urbanism or allow more people to live in higher urbanism.



That's what I'm saying though, I know it'll probably never happen.

Do you live in the Twin Cities? Or have you? Because you sound like you don't know a lot about our area. First, I have to ask, what edge city are you talking about where the light rail ends? St Paul? One of our core cities with over 300,000 people!? Or Bloomington, where the blue line ends at the Mall of America (just outside of Minneapolis and certainly not an edge city in the metro area), one stop after our major international airport. I wonder why the line would have stops at those two places?

Building more housing (and there's been a LOT of it) downtown and in the core of the city has not stopped the average rent in Minneapolis from going up significantly over the past 5 years. The goal IS housing affordability...not urbanism. Urbanism and density are just a side effect of what will hopefully lead to more affordable housing and less pressure on rental costs.

...and the Twin Cities is an area that people are moving to. Sure, we'll never be San Francisco with their geographic constraints; but, we have a LOT of homeless people here, too...FAR too many for being the coldest major metropolitan area in the US. There are tent cities popping up because of the housing affordability crisis. Hopefully, the upzoning will ease those rental increase pressures and allow for more affordable housing options for those people who have been forced to live on the street.

[creamcityleo79]

Originally Posted by ardecila

Not even BRT, even regular buses run frequently on a 1/2 mile grid can easily support 3-flat density.

Besides, if the entire city is upzoned then it’s not like we’ll see Chicago-like or Houston-like neighborhoods of nonstop 3-flats anytime soon. The population just isn’t growing THAT fast. In the short term the most likely trend will be homeowners (legally) building basement or attic apartments. This has the added benefit of lowering the financial bar for homeownership a little for any homeowner who’s willing to be a landlord, and creates affordable housing units with zero change to the cityscape except a few more cars parked on the street. As certain neighborhoods grow in population, Met Council can simply ramp up frequency on certain bus lines.

If it sounds boring and unremarkable, that’s because it should be. It’s not a radical plan. It’s a common sense way for the city to grow and provide reasonably-priced housing. Sadly it’s an option that’s illegal in most US cities because of greedy homeowners seeking to maximize property values, and racist stereotypes of apartment dwellers.

I agree with all of this; but, it's your last sentence that hits the nail RIGHT on the head. We've had opposition for exactly those reasons in Minneapolis (St Paul, too over at the old Ford manufacturing plant site). The city needs to do something because, as diverse as we are, as progressive as we are, the Twin Cities are still 4th worst city in the country for black residents. We can and we MUST do better!

[Sun Belt]

Originally Posted by The North One

I don't understand why this is happening in Minneapolis and not a city that actually needs it like San Francisco, why is there this rush to upzone the entire Minneapolis city limits? Does the city even have a transit plan to service upzoned outer neighborhoods?

Core Minneapolis is full of parking lots and empty land, why not focus on that first? Also there's tons of pushback and even lawsuits going against it.

It's naive to think this relaxed upzone will turn Min into Chicago, instead, you're almost guaranteed to get a Houston scenario out of this, tons of soulless apartment complexes for miles and random skyscrapers in weird places. Not good.

You just answered your own question. S.F. doesn't want and actually cannot build high-rises, by law, in most of it's city limits.

[twister244]

Minneapolis is really a hidden gem.... and I am happy to see them taking this up and looking ahead.

I lived there a few years back before moving to Denver. No, Minneapolis isn't San Francisco, but it does have one hell of an urban fabric for a city of its size. If you haven't been, I recommend going (just not in January). As a couple others have posted, it is growing. Maybe not as fast as places like Austin/Denver, but it still has it's own affordability issues.

[MPLS_Const_Watch]

Didn't realize there was a separate thread out there discussing this.

The plan was adopted yesterday. You can view the final version online here: https://minneapolis2040.com/media/14..._12_7_2018.pdf if you'd like. Note that this is a 1,100+ page PDF. The use and build form district descriptions and maps on on pages 58-79.

[MPLS_Const_Watch]

I don't understand why this is happening in Minneapolis and not a city that actually needs it like San Francisco, why is there this rush to upzone the entire Minneapolis city limits?

I think we actually need it. We actually have both lower apartment vacancy rates and lower unemployment than both the SF and SJ MSAs. We have simultaneously the lowest unemployment rate (https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laulrgma.htm) and the second-lowest vacancy rate (http://www.governing.com/gov-data/ho...s-rentals.html) among major metros. As to why other places who also need significant upzoning aren't doing it, I'd hazard that we just have more effective government.

Does the city even have a transit plan to service upzoned outer neighborhoods?

Transit planning here is largely done by the Met Council or the relevant county rather than the city. But yes, we do. Our local bus network is very strong, and in addition to the more regional-oriented LRT and BRT lines that we have under construction, we are in the process of developing an arterial BRT network to enhance local service. You can read about it here: https://www.metrotransit.org/abrt.

Core Minneapolis is full of parking lots and empty land, why not focus on that first?

This has been a very valid critique of our city for a very long time. Post-recession, we have made huge strides towards developing this area. Please see this post: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...&postcount=661. If we are lucky enough to enjoy a strong economy and continued investment growth in urban cores, it won't be long until all of the vacant land downtown is completely developed. Our final full-block lot of surface parking will be torn up this spring.

But even if we were to assume that the downtown area had the capacity to accommodate all of the city's growth, access to housing choice remains important. Not everyone who wants to live in multifamily housing wants to live in mid- and high-rise buildings in the core. Many people are attracted to smaller-scale multifamily buildings located in areas that are more residential and neighborhood-focused. We should be doing what we can to accommodate this and should be working with the market to provide as many people as possible access to their preferred housing and neighborhood type.

It seems the only goal is to create a release valve to allow for better housing affordability, not to create higher urbanism or allow more people to live in higher urbanism.

Have you read any part of the plan? If not, I would encourage you to take a look. There is a lot of urban design policy in the plan.

Minneapolis light rail is a joke, it's just two lines and one leads to an edge city, that's not going to support a city-wide upzone.

METRO actually has the highest ridership per mile of any recently-developed LRT system in the US (SF's Muni and Boston's Green Line being developed under very different circumstances) (https://streets.mn/2018/11/29/chart-...ship-per-mile/). Our system is small, but it's effective, and it's expanding.

[mhays]

This is phenomenal. Kudos to Minneapolis for its leadership and vision.

In Seattle, we have a huge need for the "missing middle" of accessory units, townhouses, duplexes, and so on, but have made little progress. Next year maybe we'll make a little more. Our affordability problem is pretty epic despite a drop in housing prices and a flattening of rents in the past year. (And let's not even start on state condo liability laws. You can't build a highrise condo in Seattle unless you can charge $1,000 per square foot on average, so relatively few get built. We get even fewer lowrise condos.)

It'll be interesting to watch Minneapolis grow. Without really digging into it, I suspect some neighborhoods will see significant growth. Lots of building will happen around the fringes of the job centers and near good retail districts and rail stops. Smaller retail districts might find that this helps save them from the decline of retail...fewer square feet of retail per person, but more people.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by The North One

I don't understand why this is happening in Minneapolis and not a city that actually needs it like San Francisco, why is there this rush to upzone the entire Minneapolis city limits?

You should let Minneapolis' city council & planners know that other cities need this more. Maybe if they're feeling generous they'll give it back and donate it to San Francisco instead.

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by MPLS_Const_Watch

I think we actually need it. We actually have both lower apartment vacancy rates and lower unemployment than both the SF and SJ MSAs. We have simultaneously the lowest unemployment rate (https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laulrgma.htm) and the second-lowest vacancy rate (http://www.governing.com/gov-data/ho...s-rentals.html) among major metros. As to why other places who also need significant upzoning aren't doing it, I'd hazard that we just have more effective government.



Transit planning here is largely done by the Met Council or the relevant county rather than the city. But yes, we do. Our local bus network is very strong, and in addition to the more regional-oriented LRT and BRT lines that we have under construction, we are in the process of developing an arterial BRT network to enhance local service. You can read about it here: https://www.metrotransit.org/abrt.



This has been a very valid critique of our city for a very long time. Post-recession, we have made huge strides towards developing this area. Please see this post: http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...&postcount=661. If we are lucky enough to enjoy a strong economy and continued investment growth in urban cores, it won't be long until all of the vacant land downtown is completely developed. Our final full-block lot of surface parking will be torn up this spring.

But even if we were to assume that the downtown area had the capacity to accommodate all of the city's growth, access to housing choice remains important. Not everyone who wants to live in multifamily housing wants to live in mid- and high-rise buildings in the core. Many people are attracted to smaller-scale multifamily buildings located in areas that are more residential and neighborhood-focused. We should be doing what we can to accommodate this and should be working with the market to provide as many people as possible access to their preferred housing and neighborhood type.



Have you read any part of the plan? If not, I would encourage you to take a look. There is a lot of urban design policy in the plan.



METRO actually has the highest ridership per mile of any recently-developed LRT system in the US (SF's Muni and Boston's Green Line being developed under very different circumstances) (https://streets.mn/2018/11/29/chart-...ship-per-mile/). Our system is small, but it's effective, and it's expanding.

This is one of the reasons I keep coming to this site, responses like this.

[Chef]

Slate's take:

Minneapolis Confronts Its History of Housing Segregation
By doing away with single-family zoning, the city takes on high rent, long commutes, and racism in real estate in one fell swoop.
By HENRY GRABAR

DEC 07, 20184:48 PM

Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.

On Friday, the City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.

“Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity—which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing—only goes as far as the housing stock.

It may be as long as a year before Minneapolis zoning regulations and building codes reflect what’s outlined in the 481-page plan, which was crafted by city planners. Still, its passage makes the 422,000-person city, part of the Twin Cities region, one of the rare U.S. metropolises to publicly confront the racist roots of single-family zoning—and try to address the issue.

https://slate.com/business/2018/12/m...ng-racism.html

City Lab interviews Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey about Minneapolis 2040:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/...zoning/577657/

[dubu]

will there be a law where you can build a foot paths in the suburbs on peoples properties where it would help a lot in walkability? people would get pissed in those rich suburbs if that happened.

[osmo]

Geography is a poor excuse for SF and it's affordability problems. Both Paris and SF are the exact same size for thier city proper and Paris holds 2.5 million versus the 750k in SF, all with no skyscrapers. SF and it's problem is all due to land use polices and rabid NIMBY groups.