The Winds Are Changing on Incremental Housing

Duplexes are just one type of missing middle housing that could have been up for adoption in Minnesota cities, had a recent statewide bill passed. (Source: Sightline Institute/Flickr.)

A bill to legalize certain forms of “missing middle” housing statewide in my home state of Minnesota appears dead in the legislature, according to a very thorough April 3rd article by MinnPost’s Peter Callaghan. The bill would have broadly required cities to allow more than one home on a lot in all residential areas, often up to six. (Cities of over 5,000 people would have had to legalize at least six housing types from a menu of options, including cottage courts, townhouses, duplexes, and small apartment buildings.) It also would have required cities to develop an administrative review process for approving such homes as of right where they are legal, instead of subjecting them to public hearings. There were some other provisions, including restrictions on the use of architectural design requirements.

This means we won’t be joining the ranks of Montana, Maine, Oregon, and California this year in passing bipartisan, statewide reform to single-family zoning rules, easing the regulatory lockdown that prevents cities and towns from addressing housing shortages.

That’s okay. Really. There’s a lot to cheer in what has already been a banner year for land-use legislation at the state level. Perhaps more than anything, the coalition assembled around this bill and related bills proves that the politics of this issue have shifted in a dramatic and permanent way. We’re not going back.

The legislative session is not over here in Minnesota. There’s another bill still alive and working its way through committees, sponsored by Rep. Alicia Kozlowski of Duluth, to allow more multifamily housing in commercial areas—echoing recent legislation in states including California. There is a bill that would exempt local comprehensive plans from bad-faith environmental lawsuits like the one that has caused the suspension of Minneapolis’s groundbreaking Minneapolis 2040 Plan.

And, of course, there’s the People Over Parking Act, a brilliantly simple move to eliminate baseless parking mandates across the state. Strong Towns has vocally supported this bill.

All this, as I’ve argued before, adds up to an impressive wave of policy action—and there are similar waves occurring in places across North America. We are in the middle of a sea change: the most dramatic rethinking in over half a century of the land-use principles adopted almost everywhere in the mid-20th century during the spread of rigid zoning across the U.S. and Canada. It was a massive, radical, uncontrolled experiment, and its costs have become obvious.

Our particular “missing middle” bill here in Minnesota wasn’t perfect. I certainly haven’t seen a perfect one yet. But it represents a basic reform that every city, no matter how big or how small, should undertake. No neighborhood should be frozen in regulatory amber. Cities need to be living, adaptive things; the process that drives their gradual renewal over time is the redevelopment or alteration of existing buildings to meet new needs. Prior to the radical zoning experiments of the suburban era, that always meant that, as a town grew, its core neighborhoods evolved: in general, they became incrementally taller, denser, and more intense. A place that people demonstrably want to be must be able to respond to that feedback—expressed through high prices and low vacancies—by creating new homes for people.

A few takeaways I have from watching the progress of this issue at the state level here:

1. The coalition for this kind of reform is incredibly broad and deep.

Housing is, truly, everybody’s issue. As MinnPost’s Callaghan describes, the supporters of the “missing middle” bill this session in Minnesota included housing advocates (both institutional and grassroots organizations), homebuilders, transit advocates, environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club, organized labor, faith-based and racial justice organizations. The bill, like many others of its type in other states, enjoyed bipartisan support in the legislature.

This issue cuts across normal political divides. I first observed the incredible coalitional politics that statewide land-use reform makes possible back in 2019, when Oregon passed a bill very similar to the one that just failed in Minnesota. More recently, we’ve seen the likes of GOP Montana Governor Greg Gianforte and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom find common cause on housing reforms.

Of course, this doesn’t just happen magically. A lot of behind-the-scenes convening work has gone into assembling these coalitions, in Minnesota as elsewhere, and in bringing disparate groups to the table in support. That works means the issue of allowing more types of homes, in more places, in order to ease affordability burdens is one that’s going to be back on the agenda next year, and the year after.

2. The opposition is no longer defending single-family zoning on its face.

This is huge, in my opinion, as a sign of where the wind is blowing.

The biggest opposition came from cities and towns, and the statewide League of Minnesota Cities. Callaghan’s piece in MinnPost, as well as a Star Tribune report on the bill, cite some of these opposing views. The focus of the opposition is largely on the notion that the state would usurp local control from cities, and that cities were not consulted adequately or early enough in the development of the legislation.

One objection raised repeatedly, including by the League of Cities, was that the bill might force cities to allow development for which they do not have adequate infrastructure in place. The Star Tribune quotes Prior Lake (a Minneapolis exurb) Mayor Kirt Briggs in saying that mayors alerted legislators to the specter of “infrastructure that wouldn't be able to handle even a small apartment building because city sewer and water pipes couldn't accommodate increased capacity.”

For what it’s worth, I am highly skeptical of this objection. Allowing, say, fourplexes in a single-family neighborhood does not mean that the actual residential density of that neighborhood will quadruple or even double in any sort of near term. Demands on infrastructure are likely to grow very gradually. And if future infrastructure upgrades are needed, incremental infill is precisely the thing that provides cities with the revenues to make those upgrades viable, because in the near term, such infill largely consists of connecting new ratepayers to pipes that already exist, instead of building costly new system expansions to accommodate greenfield development on the edge of town.

In any case, what is noteworthy to me in terms of the politics is the thing not being said. No report I have read about this bill has quoted a local official outright stating that rental housing such as duplexes and small apartment buildings is incompatible with single-family neighborhoods in their community. I have seen almost no culture-warmongering about the supposed downsides of urbanism or density, and very little dispute of the need for more housing. I strongly suspect that, had this debate occurred 10 years ago, the arguments being made publicly would look very different.

3. Advice to local leaders: Get out ahead on this issue.

Don’t wait for the state to force your hand.

Zoning has long been a local issue, but it’s one on which local governments tend to operate in lockstep. In many cases, large portions of the zoning codes of small cities and towns are literally copy-pasted from those of other communities. And it really is true that these codes—whose dominant feature is that most land in nearly every city is reserved exclusively for single-family houses—are failing all sorts of communities today. Local leaders are on the front lines of this.

Small towns often have the worst housing crises, impeding their ability to retain a workforce, develop a more self-sufficient economy, or house an aging population. And today’s suburbs are not your granddad’s suburbs—they are dealing with rapid demographic change and a set of housing needs more complex and varied than the Leave It to Beaver world of yesteryear might have implied. It’s noteworthy to me that both sponsors of this bill were suburban legislators.

If you are in local government, you already know, or have the ability to know, what housing needs are poorly met in your community. Be the one to lead that conversation with your constituents. It will be difficult at times, but you have the power to set the agenda and to shape the direction of zoning reform (and other policies to encourage incremental housing) in ways that have substantial local community buy-in.

And it’s clear that the statewide zoning reform movement (here in Minnesota, but also in lots of other places) has legs. If you don’t lead the conversation locally, there’s a very real chance that decisions are going to be made for you.

4. Advice to state legislators: Keep it simple and focused.

There is a lot of disagreement within the Strong Towns movement on the proper role of state legislation in reforming local land use. Where I land is largely at the view that state policy should act as a set of guardrails. Guardrails are needed because local housing issues create an inherent collective action problem: the incentives for NIMBYism are so strong that, in a region of many individual cities, it very often becomes in each individual city’s interest to keep their zoning restrictive and expect their neighboring communities to shoulder the burden of housing a regional workforce.

My ideal state-level zoning reform would, in very simple terms, tell cities what they may not do with their local zoning. For example, they may not impose an arbitrary minimum lot size on development served by sewer and water. They may not prohibit multifamily housing across entire neighborhoods. They may not impose arbitrary parking minimums. They may not prohibit homeowners from adding an accessory cottage on their own property. They may not impose an arbitrary, discretionary hearing on projects that are already legal to build. So on and so forth. I really like Nolan Gray’s list of six basic, focused zoning reforms that apply to essentially every type of community.

Of the current slate of Minnesota bills, the one Strong Towns has supported enthusiastically is the People Over Parking Act, and in large part, I know they were able to get there because it is an utterly simple “guardrail” bill.

The “missing middle” bill was a little bit less so. And there’s always the danger that, in trying to pull together a coalition and satisfy different stakeholders, legislation becomes a bit of a grab bag and ceases to play the basic “guardrail” function that is probably the right role of the state with regard to inherently local issues like land use. The more complex a bill’s provisions—in this case, with regard to things like design requirements—the more room opens up for affected cities to raise reasonable objections. (Here is an example of early reasonable objections to Minnesota’s missing-middle bill from a very pro-urbanist and pro-housing city council member I know and respect.)

The best way to undercut the “This doesn’t work in our local context!” objection is to be disciplined about legislating narrowly, focusing on things that really do apply across nearly all contexts.

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