The following Youtube video created three years ago explains how Minneapolis became the first major North American city to break the ironclad, almost universal bylaw ‘protection’ of single-family neighbourhoods. Already know about it? Skip the video.
Worldwide, there are apparently uncontrollable increases in housing purchase or rental costs. A growing pressure on cities in many countries targets neighbourhood densification to help stabilize those costs. One form of bylaw-permitted densification — often billed as housing support for the ‘missing middle’ — allows more than one housing unit to be built on a lot that was previously limited to a single home.
In single-home neighbourhoods, there has been fierce opposition from NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) advocates, who take the view that greater neighbourhood density is akin to the ‘sky is falling1‘.
Bylaw change, however, is gradually happening in some city neighbourhoods around the world. In spite of predictions of doom and gloom, there have been positive results.
In Aukland New Zealand, bylaws allowing greater neighbourhood density appear to have stabilized out-of-control free market housing price increases2.
America has been looking to Minneapolis, Minnesota for similar positive results. Minneapolis is allowing ‘plexes’ and low rise apartments to be built on single-family residential lots. New bylaws restrict density to duplexes and four-plexes. Six-plexes can be built as long as they include at least two units that are ‘deeply affordable’.
Such units are almost, but not quite, classic American public housing where the rents are set to a maximum of 30% of a tenant’s household income. Instead the new ‘deeply affordable’ housing units must have rents equal or less than 30% of median income3.
How are Minneapolis’s new bylaws working out? This year the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority is to build 84 ‘deeply affordable’ homes for individuals/families in 16 six-plexes scattered throughout the city. No monster public housing high rises here — an appropriate concession to the sensibilities of inhabitants in existing neighbourhoods across the city.
The delivery of all the units, whether free-market ‘missing middle’ homes or ‘deeply affordable’ ones is being accelerated by modular construction, which allows all the new -plexes to be built simultaneously. It also means minimal disruption to settled neighbours. Read more in REjournals: Minneapolis Public Housing Authority hits milestone in 16-building affordable-housing plan
Could this Minneapolis experiment pave the way for a widespread ‘rehabilitated’ vision of America’s much maligned traditional public housing? On current evidence, it seems unlikely, and will remain so until the Minnesota and/or United States government comes on board with sufficient funding. Here’s why, as explained earlier this year in MNNPOST: Minneapolis’ public housing agency can’t build units by itself. Here’s who’s signed up to help
Footnotes
- A children’s tale is the origin of this expression. You can read on version of it here: Henny-Penny: The Sky is Falling!
- Try: YIMBY Triumphs! But Will More YIMBY Housing Add Up To More AFFORDABLE Housing?
- Note that this is not quite the same thing — consider an individual who, for one of a number of possible reasons (e.g. ill, aged, pregnant, battered), has no income at all.
