On Wednesday, a who’s who of Minneapolis urbanism gathered at the Walker Art Center stage to hear a panel discussion. It was the first of three talks put on by the Minneapolis Foundation called Abundant Cities, orchestrated personally by former Mayor R.T. Rybak. The lively discussion, moderated by Adair Mosley, was a back-and-forth about key downtown issues: working from home, COVID, affordable housing, and the role of real estate capitalism.
The key point for me was when panelists began talking about the contrast between 20th century specialization – separating areas for work and play, home and business – with what has become the dominant trend of the 2020s of blending things together.
“It lies at the intersection of multiple ways of thinking,” explained artist and facilitator Gabrielle Grier, when asked about the future of Downtown Minneapolis. “We can’t think about restaurants as exclusive from cultural experiences or entertainment. We’re talking about hybrids. Things that used to be mutually exclusive, how do we fuse them?”
Cities in general, and downtowns specifically, have been organized for too long to be specialized places. “Central business districts” are for 9 to 5 office workers, and “residential neighborhoods” are for domestic quietude; never the twain shall meet. The moral of the Walker Art discussion was that those barriers are breaking down.
“Pandemics are accelerants,” said University of Minnesota architecture professor Tom Fisher, who recently wrote a book on how disease outbreaks change cities. “Almost everything we experienced existed before COVID. We had Zoom before COVID. We had telemedicine, we had telecommuting, we had all these things, but they were marginal parts of our economy. Pandemics make the marginal the dominant; we’ve been accelerated decades into the future.”
Adapting to change
The lesson for a city like Minneapolis is that, if cities are flexible, they adapt to change. But there’s a great example of how that kind of change is playing out in Minneapolis right now, and it’s not flattering.
Here’s the situation. When the Minneapolis 2040 Plan passed back in 2018, most onlookers thought it was a done deal. The Comprehensive Plan was adopted on a 12-1 vote, and all of a sudden everything had changed in Minneapolis. Right?
In reality, it takes years to make sweeping planning changes, and that’s even before you throw in the litigation brought forward by ostensibly environmental groups. (Note that the Minneapolis chapter of the Audubon society withdrew their support of the lawsuit two weeks ago.)
In general, zoning controls two separate things: the size and scale of buildings (including how much of the “lot” they occupy), and the use that occurs there. Usually those two things are considered separately, which is why the first step of the Minneapolis 2040 implementation was creating zoning conformity for height and scale. While this process can sometimes be a bit confusing and cause conflict, it’s relatively straightforward.
The second step involves the land uses, which quickly gets complicated. Right now, Minneapolis is at the tail end of a discussion about its Land Use Rezoning Study (LURS). This involves rethinking rules around what, in every U.S. city (except Houston), is called “Euclidean zoning.” Named after a 1926 Supreme Court case involving an Ohio suburb, the principle is to separate land uses that might be “incompatible.”
Today’s resulting “land use tables” resemble a complex orchestral score. For example, under the classic trio of commercial, industrial, and residential zones, many uses are allowed or disallowed. The end results are elaborate controls over uses are acceptable in which areas of the city.
[image_caption]A subset of categories. Click on the image to view the entire chart of zoning districts. Click here for the table descriptions.[/image_caption]
Blending zoning
To my mind, the LURS changes don’t go far enough, especially in a post-COVID environment where fundamental assumptions are being routinely upended. For example, under the proposed changes, the majority of Minneapolis’ land area would be classified as “urban neighborhood.” In these zones, non-residential uses would be simply banned. The only exceptions would be institutions like schools, libraries, or churches.
The new rules overly limit where business activity can take place, which seems like a mistake in 2023. If you want to start a home enterprise, for example, you’re out of luck if you want to have more than one customer at a time. Remove the possibility of commercial activity from half the city’s land area means far fewer pop-up stores, coffee shops, or any other creative idea that we can’t predict today. That quickly limits the potential of the over 400,000 people that make Minneapolis home.
In 2019, the gradual tweaks of the LURS study might have been a good compromise, increasing the theoretical density of a neighborhood while maintaining its land use restrictions, but a lot has changed in the last three-plus years. But in a world where most former commuters are logging hours from their living rooms, why not let zoning change with the times?
Businesses in formerly residential neighborhoods make a lot more sense when nobody is going into the office. Walking in your neighborhood to a coffee shop or tax prep or chiropractor is far more appealing. Running a business from a basement or garage, or turning a large home into a commercial space, seems more normal.
In the post-COVID environment, a blanket ban on flexible land uses seems like a missed opportunity. A better solution might be to make more uses conditional, where the Planning Commission and City Council can approve them one-by-one, perhaps imposing considered “conditions.” (As a former St. Paul Planning Commissioner, I assure you that this process is almost always thoughtful.)
Hybrid attitudes
Becoming more flexible was the dominant theme of this week’s Abundant Cities discussion, as every speaker agreed that loosening restrictions and adopting hybrid attitudes will be a dominant trend.
In particular, it might be over for the work vs. home dichotomy, the era of urbanism where homes were quiet refuges away from our workplaces, and we commuted back and forth between the two. For many people, that’s not happening, and likely never will. Our cities should try to get ahead of the curve, anticipating social changes sweeping through our lives.
“When we’re thinking about collaboration, who is doing that?” Grier asked the Walker audience. “(We have) these new hybrid buzzwords are coming up, like enter-education, eater-tainment, and resi-mercial. Well, how do we fuse it? If I’m in an office, do I want it to feel like an office anymore? I don’t know. Maybe I want it to feel like my house.”
It would be nice if our zoning code matched what’s coming down the social and technological pipe.
Public Comment on the Minneapolis Land Use Rezoning Study is open until March 26. The next two sessions of Abundant Cities at the Walker take place on April 12 and May 17.
Nothing says neighborhood like a barber shop in your house and cars parked all over the street. How about selling flowers and plants in your front yard, that is a good selling point for fellow homeowners on the block. The United States Postal Service disclosed 1,400 businesses have left the Minneapolis zip code lately. The question should why did so many businesses leave Mpls and is it possible to get them back? Opening up a no zone requirement throughout Mpls may be the way to get some of those businesses back up and running, but it comes with a cost.
It’s been some years now since I read Jane Jacobs, whose “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” is a genuine classic in the field of urban planning, but among the lessons I drew from the book were: A) single-use (i.e., Euclidean) land-use zoning is mostly terrible, and shouldn’t be practiced by cities hoping to be livable and sustainable; and B) scale and form matter. Her thesis, at least as interpreted by this amateur (I also served as a planning commissioner, in two different cities in succession) was that variety of land use was extremely valuable, and should be encouraged in a variety of ways, one of which was to limit *size* or *scale* rather than *use*.
“…under the proposed changes, the majority of Minneapolis’ land area would be classified as “urban neighborhood.” In these zones, non-residential uses would be simply banned. The only exceptions would be institutions like schools, libraries, or churches.”
What this does is guarantee (or condemn, depending upon your viewpoint) that my Minneapolis neighborhood of 1,500 lots will continue to have zero goods or services – zero – within a 15-minute walk, except for the few families fortunate enough to be living on the northern fringe of the neighborhood. Most of us will continue to be auto-dependent because there’s no alternative. It also guarantees that one of the most stereotypical of low-rise urban living arrangements – retail of some sort downstairs, residential upstairs – will be impossible, thus contributing to the already crisis-level shortage of affordable housing in the city.
It’s funny… these days, schools and churches are two of the biggest car-magnets around, even though traditionally they were not. Kids went to neighborhood schools and churches were the focus of neighborhoods. But more usually now, houses of worship draw their members from much larger areas, sometimes based on an ethnicity and for sure based on a particular flavor of whatever religion. Conversely, in the past it wasn’t uncommon for at least Christian churches to draw the people who were close by who would switch from Presbyterian to Methodist (or whatever) because it was what was in the neighborhood.
Allowing some level of customer-facing business in residential areas seems like an obvious need, and I’m surprised the Minneapolis zoning plan doesn’t allow for it.
Bill, in view of the City of Minneapolis thoughtlessly hastening the demise of businesses in the Uptown neighborhood, do you really think a City of Minneapolis process for considering case-by-case “conditions” will be thoughtful?
My only comment is that anyone who thought 2040 was or will be a “done deal” was living in an academic bubble. It continues to amaze me that these “planners” have yet to realize that we don’t live in their academic models, we live in our neighborhoods and homes and we live the live we have, not the ones they imagine us to have. So here we have a bunch of planners trying to resolve and solve problems that other planners created; without any insight into the fact that the concept and practice of “planning” in and of itself might be part of the problem.
I’m going to be the contrarian here, I guess. My wife and I, who together had lived in Chicago, Northern California’s East Bay (Oakland/Berkeley), Lansing MI, Ithaca NY and (for my wife) a few other places, chose to move here (from Berkeley) in ’83 largely because of what makes Mpls/StP unique among large American metros – The existence, in the cities themselves, of what are, in most other cities, either “inner ring” or even “outer ring” suburban neighborhoods, and the blessed comparative lack of urban congestion. One can get from Stillwater to Minnetonka, both then and now, in less time than it took to get from Mom and Dad’s house on the north side of Chicago, to Grandma and Grandpa’s – in another neighborhood of Chicago’s north side (in the ’60s! – it’s way more difficult to move about there, now…)! The 2040 plan, if implemented as its supporters intend, will kill both of those things. That’s not necessarily bad – I will forever also be a “Chicago boy”, still love to visit family there, and would not dismiss out of hand moving back there for some compelling reason.
However, Mpls will not become “Chicago-like” just by getting denser, more mixed-use, and harder to move around in. There is so much more to what makes a city desirable, memorable, etc. What the 2040 plan, and the zoning changes recommended here, WILL do, is to eliminate two of Mpls.’ major distinctions among the central cities of large American metros. It will not make Mpls. more desirable for very many people – it will just diminish its advantages for those who seek “something different” in a city, without adding anything new that cannot be found elsewhere. It’s pretty much a lose/lose.