Last year, the Star Tribune published a fascinating but overlooked article on zoning in the Twin Cities’ suburbs, written by MaryJo Webster and Michael Corey. Illustrated with a plethora of land-use maps, the piece focused on single-family-only zoning in the city’s suburban municipalities, where only 7% percent of residential metro area land allows for multi-family housing.
This matters because multi-family zoning – allowing rental apartments to be built in residential neighborhoods – is directly correlated with regional racial segregation. That fact has become more apparent with a new working paper put out by housing researcher Salim Furth, a Senior Research Fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. Drawing on Webster’s research, the paper lays out the connection between zoning, housing, and racism in the Twin Cities metro, suggesting that the lack of multi-family zoning is one of the greatest “bottlenecks” maintaining Twin Cities’ segregation. The good news is that, given enough political will, the problem has an easy fix.
Missing access
To form the backbone of the Star Tribune’s article, the team gathered zoning maps from every municipality and jurisdiction in the Twin Cities, all hundred-plus places that have land use control over local housing. The results gathered by Furth were stark:
Zoning for multifamily housing is associated with a 21 percentage point higher non-White population share, enough to double the non-White population share of an average neighborhood zoned exclusively for single-family residences.
The research is important because it links the mundane fact of land-use zoning to the de facto racial segregation that persists in the Twin Cities, home to more than 3.5 million people.
[image_credit]Mercator Center[/image_credit]
One of the report’s key points is that the normal narrative — the homeownership gap — should not be the only focus of policy makers in the Twin Cities.
“Minority homeownership is really important, but it’s a long-running goal,” Furth said. “In this generation, we’re not going to make enough change to close that gap; it’s really a generational wealth thing. That goal has really sidelined the basic needs. If people don’t have access to good school systems, locations near their jobs, and healthy solid housing choices, they’re not going to be in a position to build wealth for themselves.”
Redlining’s legacy
The ascendance of single-family zoning in Twin Cities’ suburbs is nothing unique or new, and is a development shared by every American city. Richly detailed in Richard Rohthstein’s 2017 book, The Color of Law, these practices were literally mandated by the federal government throughout the 20th century. Beginning in the New Deal, Federal Housing Agency manuals required its appraisers to devalue any place with apartment buildings, non-white people, or both, privileging segregated low-density landscapes with massive subsidies. This practice, often referred to as “redlining”, should be thought of as the wide-ranging institution of racist zoning, a policy that laid the groundwork for today’s racial inequality.
“These are interrelated problems that express themselves as greater poverty, lower employment rates, or lower credit scores, much worse in the Twin Cities than the rest of the country for reasons that are a little bit opaque, even for us,” Furth admitted.
While Furth cautions that focusing on home ownership should remain a goal for long-term policymakers in Minnesota, the issue of building apartments often gets lost. The reason that home ownership rates are so low for people of color in the Twin Cities have a lot of causes that stem from segregation in the first place, making housing a chicken-and-egg situation.
[image_credit]Met Council[/image_credit][image_caption]This map shows areas of concentrated affluence (orange) and concentrated poverty (purple).[/image_caption]
Fixing zoning
In the paper Furth lays out a list of policy prescriptions that Twin Cities suburbs could quickly adopt. These range from things like “traditional apartment” zoning to removing residential zoning altogether, allowing for a far greater mix of housing types in nearly every area.
These things are easier said than done, and getting the details right makes a bit difference.
Even cities that have been trying to change this situation haven’t done an effective job. Take Bloomington — Minnesota’s fourth largest city. Three years ago, the city passed a zoning change to allow accessory dwelling units in residential neighborhoods. But that hasn’t translated into more housing.
“Bloomington technically allows duplexes everywhere, but functionally, to build a duplex you need larger than standard land parcel,” Salim Furth said, pointing out how rare this kind of opportunity has become in a built-out city.
The same criticism holds true for Minneapolis, which madre headlines in 2018 for ending single-family zoning city-wide. But because of details around setbacks and code requirements, the results on the ground have not translated into meaningful housing construction in single-family zones.
“Just take a 360-degree view of zoning, and talk to builders,” said Salim Furth, offering advice to city leaders. “Ask them, ‘we wrote these rules and can you build these things under the rules’; then revisit the rules, and don’t blame the builders for wanting go make money or stick with precuts they know they can build and market.”
Furth admits that the Twin Cities has a leg up on most other cities, at least theoretically. The Metropolitan Council government coordinates the region’s planning efforts, meaning that there’s probably more multi-family housing in many Twin Cities’ suburbs than in other US cities. But because the region boasts the largest home ownership gaps, the end results remain grim.
The takeaway is that suburban leaders who care about racial divides in the Twin Cities need to take the lead on changing their regulations, opening up their cities to more people. That means allowing apartments to be built in more places, no matter what kinds of comments are made at public meetings.
“There’s all these other things you can do, but it’s worth keeping the eye on the ball” said the Furth said. “Zoning is a key bottleneck all across the United States. Let’s put some energy into getting this right, and future generations who are trying to find home for everyone will have a much easier job of solving all the other problems.”
“Given enough will” is the problem, because zoning law change requires action by local or maybe county governments.
Had me confused for a minute there- it’s not “directly correlated”, it’s “inversely correlated”.
whoops!
Indeed, “political will” is the key issue. A former planning commissioner and housing commissioner, I’ve sat through many a community meeting where the more reasonable voices in the community are quite literally drowned out by the far-more-vocal minority, and while it may have changed somewhat in the years since I was a commissioner, my hunch is that a sort of paranoia among suburban homeowners focused “property values” (to the exclusion of other values) has not disappeared entirely. Even in admittedly urban areas, that focus can still be pretty powerful. For example, my impression has been that much of the opposition within Minneapolis to the 2040 Plan (not all of the opposition, but a sizable portion) boils down to the “horror” of having triplexes and quadriplexes being built in areas of the city zoned for single-family detached housing. The forces of racism and reaction can take multiple forms, as Rothstein lays out in considerable detail in his book.
It is not triplex or quads, it is large high density apartment buildings many oppose, including people of color.
You pay to move into a residential neighborhood and to have a large increase in traffic, buildings does impact value. Also many suburbs have more large apartments than say Linden Hills, Fulton and SW Mpls . You then also have to increase taxes to pay for more roads, schools, etc.. And the other issue is why the assumption that POC don’t want to own a home and want to rent?
A lot of the opposition to the 2040 Plan can from those who would call themselves “progressive.” Never mind that multi-family is not only a good way to provide affordable housing and that it’s generally better for the environment, we want quaint single-family bungalows with just enough front yard for an “All Are Welcome Here” sign.
I do think Lisa Miller has a point in her last sentence. I, too, question what seems to be an assumption on the part of some developers and public figures that people of color either can’t, or don’t want to, own their own home. That said, however, much of the objection to the 2040 Plan struck me as little more than NIMBY whining, coupled with a sizable dose of “Them that has, gets. Them that don’t, don’t.”
“…we want quaint single-family bungalows with just enough front yard for an “All Are Welcome Here” sign.” Well said, RB. Minus the sign, I live in one of those, though some might question its “quaintness.” It’s a 68-year-old tract house, on a standard, city-sized 5,000-square-foot lot. The detached garage has an alley entry, and there’s nothing especially interesting about the house architecturally – there are thousands like it in the metro. The problem – well… one of the problems – is that Zillow says it’s worth a quarter million dollars – nearly $100,000 more than what I paid for it in 2009.
How many sales floor supervisors at Target, customer service reps at CenturyLink, mechanics at your local dealer or auto repair place, teachers, nurses, not to mention the thousands of administrative assistants toiling away in metro offices, can afford to save enough to put 10% ($25,000) down on such a property, and pay more than $1,000 a month to live in it? The payment, by the way, has gone up 25% in the 13 years I’ve lived in my house (significantly more than my limited retirement income has increased) due to tax increases, so I’m not oblivious to the usual “conservative” complaints about taxes, but there are other values besides property values, and as RB points out, multi-family housing is generally more affordable per square foot of living space, and more environmentally-friendly, to boot.
Another map I’d like to see is one that shows the breakdown between areas of single family homes vs multi-unit buildings in the various suburbs. The reason I say that is I live in the south metro area, and I’m here to tell you that there hasn’t been a large, dense unit development that Apple Valley HASN’T liked and approved. Since 2000, virtually ALL of the new construction in Apple Valley has been townhomes, condos, large multi-story apartment buildings and the like. The most recent project is going in on the site of a former golf course northwest of Apple Valley High School, a large, multi-story apartment complex. It’s going in over the objections of some who spoke at the associated government meetings, who wanted to see the property turned into a city park instead. That means the city government approved this development, in spite of “what kinds of comments” were made at public meetings.
We need more housing. The reason we don’t have enough is because supply is artificially constrained by he local land use regulations Lindeke mentions. If we deregulate to allow people more freedom to build on the land that they own, you may not like the way the neighborhood changes, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that your own land will become more valuable. It’s more of a win-win situation than you think.
In the coming decades most of our older housing stock will need to be deeply retrofitted (expensive) or replaced (also expensive). So we have a lot of building to do. We need the regulations to allow newer building technologies and more efficient land use.
A starter home in the city ought to be a unit in an energy-efficient, well planned multi-family development instead of a small, decaying, energy wasting box.