"What kind of city do we want to leave for our children?"
Note for our readers in Minneapolis: As of this writing, there is an ongoing open-comment period for the draft built form regulations discussed in this article, which closes on October 19, 2020. There are also three virtual public meetings scheduled. Read on for why you should get involved, and find more information on the city’s website.
The Minneapolis skyline. Image source.
I recently wrote about the less-than-explosive beginnings to the city of Minneapolis's experiment with legalized triplexes citywide. It turns out only 3 have been permitted so far in 2020. I gave several reasons why that's not something to greet with alarm, nor does it mean the policy is a failure. But I also expressed that the devil is in the details with this or any land-use policy, and that much will depend on getting those details right. There's work yet to be done.
Shortly thereafter, Bruce Brunner reached out to me. Brunner is a small-scale developer in Minneapolis who builds and rehabs small rental properties including triplexes, and teaches house hacking to young would-be owners of such properties. Media coverage of Brunner's recent work can be found, among other places, here and here. He doesn't happen to be one of the three applicants in 2020 but was already doing this work well before this year.
Our conversation reaffirmed to me that the it’s the details that will make or break this policy—and in fact, those details are being shaped as I write this.
The end of single-family zoning, changes to parking minimums, taller buildings on transit corridors, and everything else you read about in the national news (or here) in December of 2018 were all part of Minneapolis 2040, a new edition of the city's Comprehensive Plan. Think of this plan as a deliberately broad, guiding policy document for the next decade. The Comprehensive Plan is not especially technical, and it lacks the force of law: it is not the final word on what you can build on your property.
Triplex finished by Bruce Brunner last year after the Minneapolis 2040 plan was announced. Image via Bruce Brunner.
What is the final word is the zoning code. Minneapolis has been updating its zoning code to comply with the new comprehensive plan. As of this writing (late September 2020) there is a draft available of new built-form regulations, the rules that govern the height and scale of buildings. You can read a memo outlining the draft rules here, and there is a 45-day open comment period. There are also three open Zoom forums scheduled for September 23, September 29, and October 7. The above and additional information are on the city’s website here.
Although the zoning is required by law to be consistent with the comprehensive plan, there's a huge amount of room for varied interpretations of how the comp plan's guidance is to be implemented. And elected officials are not always attuned to the importance of which interpretations are chosen, so public input is especially vital at this stage.
If you are in Minneapolis, this is the time to get involved and weigh in on this process. If you're not a code geek, the minutiae of zoning are unlikely to pique your interest in the same immediate way that "Minneapolis is about to do away with single-family zoning!" did. It may feel technical and obscure. But it's what is going to set up the lofty goals of the comprehensive plan for either success or failure.
FAR from Ideal
Details in the zoning code can dictate aspects of the form and scale of a building, how it's placed on its lot, required setbacks and parking. Minneapolis’s built form regulations specifically will govern Floor Area Ratio (FAR), height, and the city’s approach to increases and bonuses to those criteria.
(For those unfamiliar, FAR is the ratio of the finished floor area of a building to the area of the lot it sits on. For example, a one-story building with an FAR of 1.0 would cover the entire lot. A two-story building with an FAR of 1.0, or a one-story building with an FAR of 0.5, would each cover half the lot. And so on. FAR is thus one of the simplest quantitative measures of "how big" a building is allowed to be.)
These rules in turn interact with development economics: how much rent can you bring in from the finished product, and will it be enough to cover your construction costs? Not every theoretically permissible project is viable; not every viable project will withstand the detailed requirements of the code when you kick the tires on them, even if it sounds like it should be allowed on paper.
Brunner expressed to me that the draft rules are not shaping up to be favorable to the kind of work he does. In particular, he singled out the FAR requirements for having a likely effect on close-in neighborhoods—the kind that already contain a good deal of historic missing middle housing—that is contrary to the stated intent of the comprehensive plan:
I have properties in R4, R5, and R6 [ed: relatively higher-density residential zones under the existing zoning code]. Under this draft, with the redo to Interior 1, 2, and 3 zones, they’ve effectively downzoned these properties. The FAR used to range from 1.4 through 3.0; now they’re giving me 0.5, 0.6, 0.7.
They've expanded the areas where they reduce the size of what you can build. And so this is another thing that will make it difficult for people who can’t afford to buy a house in this city. You can still afford to build a single-family home in those areas [but not a small multifamily building]. So I think it has the opposite effect of what they passed.
Brunner and other developers have met with city staff, and Brunner stressed to me that Minneapolis has highly knowledgeable and competent planning staff. But those staff are tasked with juggling a large number of priorities and competing objectives and developing a single set of rules to implement the objectives of a 500-page comprehensive plan. And, according to Brunner, these rules are still at risk of being too onerous for the math that ultimately determines if a development project can pencil out.
Contrast this to, say, the process that Portland, Oregon used to develop its Residential Infill Program, which involved enlisting the input of small-scale developers and housing nonprofits like Habitat for Humanity to actually do proof-of-concept exercises, demonstrating that it'd be financially feasible to develop under the new regulations.
Brunner clarified for me the crucial implication of the FAR rules: by limiting the size of a building relative to its lot, they ultimately limit the size of the homes it can contain. A typical urban lot might be 5,000 square feet. With a FAR of 0.5, you are limited to a 2,500 square foot structure. As a single-family house, you'll find a ready buyer; as a triplex, though, it must consist of apartments no larger than about a cozy 800 square feet.
And this has implications for whom new rental housing will serve.
Brunner observes that this cements an already troublesome disparity in what is and isn't being built in Minneapolis:
In recent years, over 90% of the multifamily housing built in the city has been in larger apartment buildings, which tend to have smaller units. Over 90% of those apartments have been efficiencies or 1-bedrooms.
With [the draft FAR requirements], any new triplexes have to be made up of small units. So what do you do for families? When you reduce the FAR, you reduce my ability to produce family-sized units. You restrict how many people you serve in those places. And what kind of policy does that reinforce?
These restrictions, additionally, may put the new zoning at odds with the racial justice goals that were a significant part of the pitch for the comp plan reforms, making it harder for new housing in Minneapolis to serve the needs of lower-income families of color.
This, Brunner says, illustrates the stakes of this kind of nitty-gritty policy detail. And whether we get it right will shape the city well into the future. Minneapolis missed the boat once already: its housing affordability problems today have more than a little to do with the lack of new housing developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Those are precisely the buildings that, if they had been built, would have been the workhorse of the city's affordable housing supply today: decent quality homes with reasonable rents.
Brunner has taught 80 young adults in South and North Minneapolis how to house-hack in the last three years. 30 of them, he says, bought duplexes or triplexes after working with him. These buildings, because they are both a home and an income-generating rental property, make ownership accessible to a whole class of people who couldn't manage it otherwise.
Minneapolis, Brunner observes, has a high percentage of local ownership of rental properties compared to many cities. "There are a lot of small landlords here. And all these rules will help determine who owns a rental property. Do you want someone who has 15 properties or someone who has 5,000?"
The rules in place now help determine the shape of the city a generation later, even two or more. Fundamentally, the stakes of these decisions are what kind of city today's kids will inherit. Will it be one with more or less opportunity for them to own or rent a home they can afford? One with more or less inequality between neighborhoods or between racial groups? More or less displacement?
The answers can only be affected by those who get involved. Says Brunner,
It needs to be young people carrying the torch here. A few of us tend to be spokespeople because we’re the do-ers. But the biggest club in the world is the somebody-oughta club.
Is that “somebody who oughta” you?
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