For those who remember a time before COVID, the phrase “Minneapolis 2040” might ring a bell. Before the pandemic wiped other news off the front page, Minneapolis endured a heated conversation over its 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which was formally adopted last October. The ambitious planning document called for a host of innovative policies — legalizing triplexes citywide, reducing parking minimums, increasing housing options closer to transit — and made headlines all across the country.
But plans only count if they are used, and when it comes to the on-the-ground rules that govern cities, the devil is in the details. A year after its passage, Minneapolis has finally started to implement the goals of the 2040 Plan. This month, planning staff, commissions and elected officials are tweaking regulations to help the plan come to life. The resulting discussion is reshaping the zoning, ordinances and language that governs the city’s built environment.
“The old zoning code was never actually was brought into conformance with our last comprehensive plan,” explained Sam Rockwell, the chair of the ten-member Minneapolis Planning Commission. “If you ask the attorney’s office, they will say it was consistent with the Comp Plan, but if you ask anyone behind closed doors, they would say it doesn’t make any sense.”
For example, Rockwell points to the confusing lack of clarity around height limits and density goals in many parts of the city. Under the old rules, the Northeast downtown riverfront simultaneously called for a maximum density of 800 units per acre while setting a height limit of only 56 feet. These mixed messages laid the groundwork for some of Minneapolis’ failed projects, like the 40-story condo tower on Central Avenue which was officially shelved earlier this year.
[image_credit]City of Minneapolis[/image_credit][image_caption]Height maximums in the new Zoning Code.[/image_caption]
[image_caption]Sam Rockwell[/image_caption]
To accomplish this goal, the new Zoning Code has tiered districts — from Interior 1 all the way up to Core 50. At each level, almost like playing a video game, developers can get “premiums,” or bonuses, to Floor Area Ratio or building height that can “level up” a project. The premium system reduces a lot of the previous song and dance around variances and CUPs to a more straightforward formula.
“We’ve standardized the bonuses, and you can get up to 3,” explained Chris Meyer, who represents the Park and Recreation Board on the Commission. “We redistributed our premium budget to incentivize things that were more important. For example, we’ve been trying for a long time to incentivize grocery stores, and staff included recommendation to create a premium for a grocery.”
[image_credit]City of Minneapolis[/image_credit][image_caption]Suggested list of "premiums" for different districts.[/image_caption]
“How do we create a mechanism that ensures we are actually getting something back from the folks asking for more density or height?” mused Sam Rockwell, who has spent six years on the commission. “Yes, we need more housing, but that’s not the only thing we need. We are facing a climate crisis. We have food deserts. We have an affordability crisis. How do we leverage some of these potential requirements for height to get some of those other things and some of those outer things like sustainability, are things we cannot do except through a condition.”
Revising minimum lot size
Of all the proposed tweaks, none proved more divisive than the conversation around minimum lot sizes. According to Minneapolis planners, these long-standing rules about the size of lot required to construct a new building are on the books to ensure “practical space needs” and to “reinforce existing built form patterns.” But according to some commissioners, they also raise the cost of housing. A recent study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison argues that these kinds of regulations end up making “high amenity” neighborhoods less affordable to people.
[image_caption]MPRB Commissioner Chris Meyer[/image_caption]
The desire to boost affordable housing lies at the core of a lot of the changes proposed in the new Comprehensive Plan. The idea makes sense given the housing crisis that has been gripping the Twin Cities, which has seen the cost of housing rise while incomes remained flat, especially for the working-class. Even so, getting rid of minimum lot sizes was a step too far for most commissioners.
“It sounds really good in a sound bite, but in practice, it negates the property rights of 15,000 lots in the city,” explained Allisa Luepke Pier, who spent ten years on the Commission. She argues that the lot size requirements are a key part of the variances system, where “unique circumstances” allow small lots to be grandfathered-in.
“[The change] undermines the goals it’s supposed to be supporting,” said Luepke Pier. “The only people who benefit from this are people holding large enough lots that hey could split them and still have reasonable quality development. This affects setbacks, building coverage, impervious surface coverage. That’s why we have the variance process.”
In the end, the commission agreed to reducing the minimum requirements, which should allow for more flexible housing throughout the city. Other changes that were suggested included rules to incentivize pollinator friendly grasses, and incentives for larger apartments for families.
The Zoning Code’s next stop is the City Council’s Zoning and Planning Committee, chaired by Council Member Jeremy Schroeder, who also sits on the Planning Commission. If they pass there, the city’s zoning changes should meet the technical deadline for implementing the new rules.
At that point, the hours-long meetings about zoning text amendments might begin to wind down, and the city can return to the nitty gritty business of working with developers and debating variances. But if the incentives aren’t working, they’ll come back to tweak them in about a year.
“The funny thing about the comprehensive plan stuff, the process is just so darn time consuming,” said Alissa Luepke Pier. “After this all gets passed, it’ll be back to normal business. It’s supposed to be easier [this time] to amend the comp plan, and so chances are we’re going to see amendments all the time.”
2040 yeah Ok, reality is that the majority of problems are in the operations side of the equation. We have lots of folks that work daily on ordnance enforcement and or lack there of. Some communities typically the not so well off, get a much lower bar than the upscale ones, what do you expect? Folks don’t seem to realize that systemic racism is also structurally embedded into the enforcement of codes, ordinances etc. Don’t push those codes and stds. in the minority or lower income neighborhoods, those folks are already stressed, Which really means, they and their neighbors don’t deserve fair and equal treatment, so in essence low income and minority neighborhoods get a lower level of city services and quality of life and are basically taught that is all you deserve, generation after generation, set the expectation low and try to get folks to live down to it. If you can’t fix today, you sure as H**l aren’t going to fix 2040!
I agree with you to a point that lower expectations tend to prevail in lower income areas. Some of that is well to do areas such as Linden Hills, Fulton, Lynnhurst, etc. are better organized politically often times. The other issue is the domino affect, certainly Mr. Rockwell’s goals are admirable, however there comes a point where the middle and working classes can’t keep paying the increase in taxes for his plan. So the rent in the non affordable units are higher probably than they would have been without the increased services. Look it you want an apartment with supportive services, then get a grant and do it, but how much do tax payers pay when they struggle themselves to pay for day care and school? Government does need to focus on equitable education and access to medical care but how much can a planning commission do? Add to it, many disabled and seniors can’t bike or take mass transit. And why on earth did they build the SWLRT when it could have gone to the northern suburbs that already has a higher density of apartments/condos vs now building up around the SWLRT. My guess is you will see some of those higher earners in Kenwood, Edina, Minnetonka and Eden Prairie move even further out to avoid LRT and some house prices go down. They could have increased bus service and then build the LRT where people actually have fewer options for transit. The theory of building massive apartments near transit in hopes of equalizing job opportunities is appealing in some ways, but has it worked. In San Diego, they did this and their LRT continues to be under used.
I hate to say it be this article is good example of the kinds mumbo-jumbo we always get out of neoliberal attempts to “incentivize” whatever they think they want to happen, and it the main reason these attempts typically fail. Urban “planners” have obviously invented a robust catalog of jargon that they like to use, but whenever you study their “plans” you tend to come away the experience wondering where the actual substance is?
We spend half the article talking about the bonuses builders get for building what MPLS thinks they should build, and how they can get up to 3 of them… but what exactly ARE those bonuses? It looks MPLS is trying to standardize the variances they’ve been granting for years, but since those variances didn’t create the city they want, one has to wonder how that will yield the results they promise?
One thing is clearly predictable, the idea that affordable housing will simply be a by-product of 2040 is certainly a fantasy that will never manifest on the streets of MPLS. This “plan” will not produce affordable housing, it will only grant builders and owners the permission they’ve been demanding for decades.
Paul, I have to say that your distain for planners and for the author’s expertise strikes me as kind of Trump-esque. Forget the experts. Forget the people who study this for a living. Just use “common sense.”
The plan will grant builders and owners what they want. And what they want is to build housing. To add supply to a city that has inflated housing costs because that supply has been constrained for so long.
One key thing that everyone interested in this – from Mr. Lindeke to the City Council to the Planning Commission to the various neighborhood associations, to other commentators, right down to the individual resident – is that master plans like this are not “enforceable” in Minnesota. That is, they do not have the legal force of law, and as Lindeke points out in his article, variances and “incentives” can (and often are) used to, in effect, throw out the carefully-constructed plan in some way, either exempting a specific development, or even a single lot, from plan “requirements,” or clamping down on the plan’s requirements in typically uneven fashion, in much the same way Dennis Wagner suggests. Unless and until state laws around zoning undergo a major overhaul – something I don’t think is likely to happen while I’m alive – officials in pretty much every Minnesota city that has a master plan can ignore that master plan if it conflicts with a project they want, whether the reasons for abandoning the plan are good ones or not.
Zoning, as it’s practiced in this country, is essentially exclusionary – a way to keep “things,” be they people, types of land use, housing density, OUT of a particular area. That is, to exclude them. In an auto-dependent society (leave aside, for a moment, the question of whether auto dependency is a good idea), for example, building affordable, dense housing while simultaneously limiting parking is an automatic policy failure unless a robust public transit system is already in place. We don’t have such a system. The truism I learned when a planning commissioner was that light rail, for example, becomes financially feasible when housing density reaches 7 dwelling units (DUs) per acre. With allowances for streets, alleys and sidewalks, that standard allows for lot sizes of roughly the 5,000 square feet (50′ x 125′) commonly found in many Minneapolis residential areas. Bigger lots mean fewer DUs, and fewer people as potential riders of light rail. You can still build the light rail line, but you have to subsidize it with taxpayer dollars to make it financially feasible. In that context, prohibiting high-density housing within a 10-minute walk of a light rail line is close to insanity as public policy. Yet my casual reading of articles in the ‘Strib suggests that there are plenty of residents who’d prefer just that – that development in a light rail corridor be limited to relatively low-density housing and commercial. All that does is pump up the value of existing housing and retail in those corridors at the expense of the community as a whole, forcing low-wage workers to live farther and farther away from employment, including employment located in suburbs, with attendant commuting costs of time and money.
My point is that master plans like Minneapolis 2040 can be – and often are – tossed aside when local political and economic leaders decide, for whatever reason, that the plan(s) are inconvenient, uneconomical, or ineffective at reaching a goal that’s deemed politically desirable.
You’re onto something here Ray. State law makes it hard to require certain things — affordable housing, certain land uses, etc. — which is why making them conditions of variances is the angle for a lot of these proposed changes. Those do hold up in court, and developers have to pay attention if they want the bonuses.
So Commissioner Meyer wants to “incentivize” grocery stores through zoning code “premiums.” Far better to repeal the business regulations in the city code that disincentivize grocery stores. Current city ordinances prescribe in great detail the dairy and dairy alternative products that must be carried, including amount and composition; also animal and vegetable proteins including range of selection that must be available. Fruits and vegetables, juice, whole grains and legumes are similarly regulated.
The only reliable indicator of the inventory a grocery – or any other retail business – should carry is what its customers buy and don’t buy. The heavy hand of city policy-makers and regulators adds nothing to public health and safety, it only adds cost and reduces profit.
We need a city council that is not anti-business. I’ll trust such a council to make the right decisions about zoning.
There are plenty of places to buy junk food. You can survive shopping at gas stations.
But its not just access to calories the city wants to incentivize. Its access to healthy food.
Pat, in your previous comment to Paul you want to give developers the freedom to build what they deem the marketplace wants, to make business decisions that produce what people will buy and that can be done profitably.
Same principle applies here. Grocery store owners and investors will put on their shelves what their customers want to buy. Our elected officials have no special expertise in retailing (in fact almost none of them have experience in business of any kind). The city has no business prescribing what businesses can and can’t sell.
In some respects the city is validating the fears of the more strident 2040 opponents. During the plans public phase there were assurances that new multi-family units would fit in with the surrounding buildings, being no bigger and be subject to all the same restrictions as single family.
Now we see the FAR includes a large premium for multi-family even in the Interior. Maybe 0.5 would be too low for all builds but now the infill multi-family will have a size premium out of the gate.
Likewise the desire to build on undersized lots is admirable – so long as the practical issues of infill construction are taken care of – and if you need to research that, talk to the people who had large teardown-to-build-a “McMansion” construction next door cause their foundations to be damaged or flooded with new runoff – a smaller lot needs to have tighter size requirements, and firmly enforced setbacks to protect neighboring structures, respecting the limits of the location, without regard to the number of units.