Heather Worthington may not be a household name, but she’s had a huge impact on the city of Minneapolis.
As director of long-range planning during some critical years, Worthington led the city’s Minneapolis 2040 process, the now famous comprehensive plan that passed back in 2019. (That said, it might be the longest 5-years-ago-duration in generations.) The current situation in Minneapolis is rife with irony, because at the same time that the Minneapolis 2040 has been hugely influential across the country leading to similar changes in cities from St. Paul to San Diego, it’s been on hold in its hometown due to a cynical environmental lawsuit.
(This year, at least, there’s some promising state legislation that is seeking to clarify state environmental laws around municipal zoning.)
A longtime government policy guru, Worthington moved on to working at Ramsey County in the economic development and project management fields before working as a consultant. This month she started a new position at Urban 3, a cutting-edge urban data visualization firm based in Asheville, North Carolina. I wrote about their work a few years ago, especially the revolutionary act of viewing cities through a per-acre lens, where the tradeoffs around density and infrastructure come into sharp focus.
After years of chatting with her as a colleague in St. Paul and Minneapolis planning circles, I sat down with Heather Worthington the other day to look back at her work in Minneapolis and forward to her new leadership position with nationwide scope.
(Interview is edited for clarity.)
Bill Lindeke: Looking back at Minneapolis 2040, what did you get right and what did you get wrong?
Heather Worthington: There’s a lot of groundbreaking stuff in terms of approaches we took and things that we studied. It was researched in a deep and meaningful way to better understand what the comprehensive plan could be for the city.
Our policy approach around climate change was well ahead of its time in terms of understanding something I hear all the time now: The Midwest is going to be impacted by climate change. We will be a place for climate refugees. Our population will be impacted by this situation, and we will have a lot of development pressure as a result of climate change, because some parts of the U.S. will not be livable any more. We might begin to see this trend well within our lifetimes.
The comprehensive plan is a forward-looking, long-range document. It’s not intended to be what’s happening here today. I think we got that right, using research and policymaking so that we weren’t trying to approach it from a hair-on-fire standpoint.
Another thing we got right was focusing the plan on racial disparities in the city. Knowing what we knew going into the Minneapolis 2040, the two articles that were published in The Atlantic, those were important wake up calls for the city. Now in light of the murder of George Floyd, it looks a little prescient. We could never have foreseen that tragedy unfolding, and we got racial disparities and racial equity right.
The other thing we really nailed were the built-form aspects of the plan. We were the first city in the nation to use built-form maps to communicate land use regulation and zoning. It showed people visually what the city would look like once the policies were enacted. It was a way for lay people, who might not have a deep background on planning, to understand. It demystified the land use and planning regulations, to see the through-line from planning and deregulation.
BL: OK, what about the other hand?
HW: On the other hand, we did a poor job around strategic communications. Things went off the rails pretty badly pretty early on in terms of our ability to communicate with residents. This was largely because we had a council member who called the Star Tribune to tell people we were eliminating single-family zoning, which is how they framed it. It’s not what we did, but we didn’t get that chance to strategically frame the work, and we were always playing catchup.
If we had had more time and space to talk with the community about racial disparities in advance of the work, it would have been more helpful too. We couldn’t have seen the importance of that, in light of the intervening years. I would make a space where all residents of Minneapolis could engage with a conversation about racial disparities and racial equity.
BL: It’s sort of ironic, this particular moment, because Minneapolis 2040 is influential all around the country. At the same time, it’s not even functional in its own city because of the lawsuit. Minneapolis was held up as having a “secret sauce,” solving some longstanding urban issues like exclusionary zoning. Is that true?
HW: It was about having the courage to take on the hard things, the issues that have been ignored for a long time. But when you move that much cheese, people get angry right from the start.
We had this very courageous leader in Lisa Bender who put her personal and professional life on the line in this project. She really did. I think that took a toll. She was completely steadfast throughout the work. She stood up and talked with her colleagues on the dais, and she carried and delivered a 12-1 vote in favor of the plan, which is remarkable in retrospect.
I was also blessed with the best team I’ve ever gotten to work with in long-range planning. They each had the courage of their convictions to do this work.
It is really interesting to see how our work has started conversations in some communities. It has strengthened conversations. It has challenged people to think differently, it’s true, and the impact has undoubtedly been greater outside of Minnesota. Throughout the U.S. and Canada, people have gone much further than we took it here. It emboldened people to talk about these things, which is great.
One example: Cities in California now are really focused on the missing middle housing policy issue, largely because Gov. Newsom said, ‘We need to do this.’ We talked with Gov. Newsom’s staff in 2019. They approached us and said, ‘How did you do this?’ We had a couple of hours of conversation, and now you have a state that is really pointed in the right direction of increasing housing, to counter this toxic real estate market.
BL: Tell me about your new gig. I’ve been a fan of Urban 3 for years. It seems like an exciting fit for you, and I can’t wait to hear more about what your group will be working on.
HW: It really uses my 20 years of experience in local government management and economic development. Before I worked on Minneapolis 2040, I worked on TCAAP [the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant site in Arden Hills] and West Publishing [on the downtown St. Paul riverfront].
Before I did the comp plan, I was more known for that work, and this transcends all of what Urban 3 does in terms of data analysis and visualization. We’re a company that provides visualized data for local government, really about how cities can use that data to craft better policies, to keep that conversation about land use going forward.
For example, center cities, the core cities, are still the most potent generators of tax revenue in the U.S. for states that rely heavily on the property tax. It really helps cities understand how investments in those center cities have a big return in terms of tax revenue. For example, 11% of the city’s tax base is in downtown St. Paul. That’s a significant property tax generator for local revenue.
BL: And yet, it should be much more … One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how U.S. city governance compares to other places around the world. One of the big variables to me is the fragmented nature of U.S. cities, when you compare that to Canada or Europe. For example, there are 175 separate cities in the Twin Cities metro, and we’re not even all that bad. That’s a big part of this ongoing conversation around local control versus state pre-emption, and how our cities can even manage large-scale problems like housing or climate change.
HW: When you think about the Twin Cities having 182 separate jurisdictions, for a 3.6 million population city in 7 counties, that’s fascinating. The fact is we have this regional government entity called the Met Council… The birth of Met Council is all about the environment. It was making the poop go away. We were going to drown in our own human waste, and they created the Met Council, [which manages wastewater for the region]. Then the Met Council says, ‘Hey, regional planning would be a good idea.’
This is the interesting opportunity that everybody else sees outside of Minnesota: You have this thing called the Met Council. Tell us about that. What’s happened over the last decade, you’ve watched all of these states where you have a conglomeration of cities working together. We have this great tool here, but we don’t really use it very well. And we don’t really appreciate its value.
BL: What about the specific state legislation proposed this year, say the missing middle bill or the bill proposed last week that would address the Minneapolis 2040 lawsuit.
HW: There’s this long tradition of deep local control in Minnesota, almost a separation of state and local from the standpoint of control of things like zoning and land use regulation. It’s been good for Minnesota cities, for the most part, but at the same time these 182 separate jurisdictions, the impact of one city’s land use or zoning can transcend those boundaries. So, in some cases in the Twin Cities, we need the Legislature to step in to help tweak that. I hope that the state’s light touch approach will continue.
The missing middle law, it’s the Legislature’s role to balance the impact of these local government decisions. The discrete decisions of a city don’t stop at those boundaries. What the Legislature is trying to do is react to a market need. There’s a clear market need for missing middle in the Twin Cities from a price standpoint and an infill standpoint. That law, if it’s passed, really is an important opportunity.
BL: OK, what about the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act [MERA] lawsuit legislation?
HW: MERA is one of the most important laws on the books in Minnesota. It’s what makes Minnesota what it is: a state that really loves and values its natural resources, its animals and wild places. MERA is intended to protect those things, but it shouldn’t be used as a blunt instrument, as a planning document.
The comprehensive plan already requires a complete systems analysis and statement for every comprehensive plan. We effectively did a citywide EIS in Minneapolis 2040; that’s been overlooked consistently in conversations about the lawsuit. NIMBY groups are using MERA in a very cynical way that can actually damage that statute. That can be dangerous, because we all understand what MERA is all about. It’s about protecting natural resources and wild places, it’s not about preventing housing from being built. The continued use of MERA in that way is going to create deep cynicism about that statute, and I’m really hoping that one gets cleaned up.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
