Revised Zoning Rules Make Minnesota City Legal Again

Suburban development in Richfield, MN, in 1950. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Richfield Historical Society.)

“Legalize Richfield.” City council member Sean Hayford Oleary coined this clever catchphrase to describe how zoning changes over the years in this suburb of Minneapolis had rendered much of its original development in violation of its current rules. In practical terms, this meant that almost one in five existing homes, including his own, were noncompliant with the city’s lot size requirements.

In January, the Richfield city council voted unanimously to reduce the minimum lot size and to allow duplexes citywide. The city hopes the changes will allow it to address a gap in its housing stock. But Richfield’s challenges also illuminate a broader trend in which the way North American cities evolved in the last half of the 20th century undermined the original development patterns that made them prosper. 

Richfield was laid out in the 1930s, and then built out substantially during the postwar boom. When the city started enacting zoning changes in the 1950s, it rendered much of its existing housing stock afoul of its amended rules, which sought to ensure that larger, single-family homes would predominate. The recent revisions bring the minimum lot to 47 feet wide, with a total of 6,000 square feet, and ensure that 97% of its dwellings are now code compliant.

Like many cities, Richfield grapples with the dearth of a housing option that is increasingly difficult to create. Most recent additions have been large-scale apartment complexes with 100 or more units. Even on lots large enough for multi-family options, the previous zoning rules stifled their development.  

“We have this truly missing middle,” says Hayford Oleary, with a “demand for a type of housing that doesn’t really exist, and [which] we don’t have a way to accommodate.” Under the new rules, it will be legal to build duplexes on any lot that meets the new minimum size. The city had previously passed an ordinance allowing accessory dwelling units.

Since the city of Minneapolis in 2018 eliminated single-family zoning, allowed triplexes citywide, and adopted the ambitious 2040 Comprehensive Plan, neighboring Minnesota jurisdictions have also enacted changes. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports, “Bloomington and Richfield are not alone among metro suburbs looking to make more housing affordable. The Roseville City Council in 2021 voted to allow denser housing on some city lots ... Other suburbs are adjusting development restrictions to encourage housing on oddly shaped or blighted lots.”

For the session in which Richfield voted on the zoning changes, the agenda summary cited that comprehensive plan’s provisions calling for “expanding housing choices, promoting modernization of the housing stock, maintaining affordability, and supporting attractive neighborhoods,”

As in many American cities, some of the zoning changes over the years also came with historical baggage and dubious motivation. “The restriction on duplexes in Richfield came in 1954 shortly after racial covenants were found to be unconstitutional,” says Hayford Oleary. The effects of that rule served to “make housing sufficiently expensive and limit the role of renters at that time as sort of a proxy discrimination.” 

Hayford Oleary also points to a good-government motivation for the zoning revisions. He cites two cases in which developers sought to develop large infill lots with three new houses. One was rejected for being minimally over the minimum lot size, resulting in two larger houses being built. A later request, before a new council, was approved. 

“I want to avoid when we’re always ruling by exception,” says Hayford Oleary. He says all citizens will benefit from the new well-defined rules compared to “a squishy standard that becomes negotiable based on neighborhood reception,” plus an often-adversarial process that can pit well-intentioned citizens against each other. 

He also wants to assuage those neighbors who fear rapid changes, including the more than 300 Richfield residents who signed a petition opposing the provisions. Any changes are likely to be incremental. The economics of redeveloping existing houses—including the cost to tear down, design and reconstruct a duplex property—will not support rapid turnover. In fact, Strong Towns reported that two years after the big changes in Minneapolis, there were only three permits filed for triplexes citywide. 

But Richfield hopes the changes might help citizens who want to defray the cost of a mortgage with a rental unit, or perhaps establish a multigenerational duplex. Says Hayford Oleary: “It’s about getting out of the way of something good.”

Strong Towns Editor-in-Chief Daniel Herriges calls Richfield’s moves a “valuable reframing of the push for incremental housing reform: Strong Towns is not advocating a radical experiment in American towns and suburbs, but rather a return to the development pattern that was completely normal prior to the era of mass downzoning postwar.”

Hayford Oleary echoes this theme: “We kind of assume that the way things are—auto oriented and use separated—is what suburbia is and always was. That really isn’t true… So, we should legalize the things that made us who we are today.“

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