Affordable Grannie Flats Are ‘In.’ Flop Houses? In Minnesota, Not so Much… Yet.

three storey brick and stucco dwelling
A boarding house from another era in Minneapolis. Such housing has been banned there since the 1980's.

Simple solutions have a way of finding themselves.

Some reports suggest that at ground zero of the affordable housing crisis — the state of California — grand schemes for generating affordable housing don’t yet cut it. Inclusionary zoning projects, for example, in spite of all the encouragement they receive from government subsidy or tax breaks, have yet to generate meaningful quantities of affordable housing.

By contrast, re-enabling an old, old form of additional housing on existing properties — Accessory Dwelling Units or ADUs — has produced a boom in building permits. ADUs, whether a separate unit in an existing dwelling or a cottage at the bottom of the garden, go by a variety of different names. Whatever they are called, in a growing number of jurisdictions traditional neighbourhood resistance to these add-on dwellings is crumbling and municipalities are overturning decades-old bans to reap the benefits of the extra housing they provide.

Another old fashioned form of affordable housing, however, has yet to gain the same acceptance. Co-living is receiving attention and promotion as individuals, couples, and even families band together to occupy housing designed for single families. Traditional ‘flop houses,’ more reasonably and politely called ‘rooming’ or ‘boarding’ houses, were purpose-built to provide the very cheapest forms of co-living. And yet so far there seems to be little appetite for the legal return of this form of housing that could quickly put more housing that is undeniably affordable on the market.

Undeniably affordable? How is it possible to tell? Because in many jurisdictions that have banned rooming houses for a very long time, illegal rooming houses continue to proliferate in spite of by-law enforcement efforts to stamp them out for their seemingly inevitable health and safety violations.

Read more about why Minnesota rooming houses are banned, as well as so-far unsuccessful efforts to take advantage of the affordable housing they offer, in MPRNEWS: The Old ‘Flop House’ Emerges As Solution To Affordable Housing Crisis

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