Richard D. Kahlenberg: Minneapolis Saw That NIMBYism Has Victims→

CityLab:

Robert Fullerton: Getty

“Social scientists broadly agree that bans on multifamily housing are bad for housing affordability, bad for racial inequality, and bad for the environment. Yet there has been a broad political consensus that changing these long-entrenched policies is out of the question. In neighborhood debates about planning and zoning policy, the loudest voices usually belong to people who are satisfied with the status quo. The vaguest of not-in-my-backyard objections from wealthy homeowners—who attend public meetings and regularly vote—are often enough to thwart the construction of new housing.

What’s happened in Minneapolis is different—and so unusual that my colleagues at the Century Foundation and I undertook a detailed review of how and why reformers prevailed. In Minneapolis, housing advocates have succeeded by shifting the focus of public discussion toward the victims of exclusionary zoning. More important, advocates also showed public officials and their own fellow citizens just how numerous those victims were.

Despite being a city of 425,000 residents, Minneapolis until now has banned duplexes, triplexes, and larger apartment buildings from 70 percent of its residential land; in New York City, by comparison, just 15 percent of residential land is set aside for single-family homes. The city council’s Minneapolis 2040 plan up-zones the city to allow two- and three-family buildings on what had been single-family lots, tripling the potential number of housing units in the city.”

This new zoning law is now the standard in Minneapolis. See City Pages

The Miracle of Minneapolis→

Derek Thompson, writing for CityLab - The Atlantic:

Matthew Paulson

“How has the city stayed so affordable despite its wealth and success? The answers appear to involve a highly unusual approach to regional governance, one that encourages high-income communities to share not only their tax revenues but also their real estate with the lower and middle classes.

In the 1960s, local districts and towns in the Twin Cities region offered competing tax breaks to lure in new businesses, diminishing their revenues and depleting their social services in an effort to steal jobs from elsewhere within the area. In 1971, the region came up with an ingenious plan that would help halt this race to the bottom, and also address widening inequality. The Minnesota state legislature passed a law requiring all of the region’s local governments—in Minneapolis and St. Paul and throughout their ring of suburbs—to contribute almost half of the growth in their commercial tax revenues to a regional pool, from which the money would be distributed to tax-poor areas. Today, business taxes are used to enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.

Never before had such a plan—known as “fiscal equalization”—been tried at the metropolitan level. “In a typical U.S. metro, the disparities between the poor and rich areas are dramatic, because well-off suburbs don’t share the wealth they build,” says Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. But for generations now, the Twin Cities’ downtown area, inner-ring neighborhoods, and tony suburbs have shared in the metro’s commercial success. By spreading the wealth to its poorest neighborhoods, the metro area provides more-equal services in low-income places, and keeps quality of life high just about everywhere.

For decades, Minneapolis was also unusually successful at preventing ghettos from congealing. While many large American cities concentrated their low-income housing in certain districts or neighborhoods during the 20th century, sometimes blocking poor residents from the best available jobs, Minnesota passed a law in 1976 requiring all local governments to plan for their fair share of affordable housing. The Twin Cities enforced this rule vigorously, compelling the construction of low-income housing throughout the fastest-growing suburbs. “In the 1970s and early ’80s, we built 70 percent of our subsidized units in the wealthiest white districts,” Myron Orfield said. “The metro’s affordable-housing plan was one of the best in the country.””

Lakes Legacy→

Tony Randgaard, writing for MinnPost:

Joe Bielawa

“Last week, Mound Mayor Mark Hanus and state Sen. David Osmek, R-Mound, went on the offensive to blame the Met Council for the disastrous recent overflow of raw sewage into Lake Minnetonka and three other lakes. The Met Council fired back, stating that its sanitary sewage systems worked normally during the record weekend rainfall and were not the cause of the overflow. While this is sorted out, it might be instructive to look back at how we once worked together to clean up our landmark city lakes.”

Control, control, you must learn control! To be Honorable is to face the truth, and choose. Give off light, or darkness. Be a candle, or the night.”