Reader Opinion: Up-zoning in a Pandemic World

Why the Novel Coronavirus Means Up-Zoning Should Be Eliminated from The Minneapolis 2040 Plan

Dennis Paulaha, PhD, Great River Coalition

The Minneapolis 2040 Plan was created on the premise it would help solve three crucial problems: affordable housing, racial inequities, and the city’s negative impact on global warming.

The major tool in the Plan is up-zoning, a policy that eliminates single family zoning throughout the city and allows developers to buy and tear down any homes they want and replace them with apartment buildings ranging in size from three units to an unspecified limit, depending on the proximity to mass transit routes.

The authors of the Plan, saying they did not want to impose any financial burdens on developers as they tear down and rebuild the city, removed lot-line setbacks, which means new buildings can be built right up to lot lines, or across lot lines if adjoining properties are purchased by a builder. 

The Planners also eliminated the “burden” to developers of providing off-street parking, which means the occupants (renters, not owners) of the new apartment buildings will have no choice but to park on the street.

The question is: Is there any chance the up-zoning tool will help solve any of the Plan’s stated problems?

The answer is, no. The truth is, up-zoning will make each problem worse. Of course, we knew that before the 2040 Plan was adopted. 

There were enough articles, meetings, and presentations to make it clear to the mayor, the Planning Department, and the City Council that up-zoning will lead to increasing, not decreasing home prices and rents, will eliminate the homes people who, as they struggle to advance, might someday be able to buy (because those homes will be gone), will increase population density, which will increase, not decrease, the city’s carbon footprint, and instead of reducing the racial inequity problem, will make it worse by forcing blacks out of homes they are renting with no thought as to where they can go after those houses are torn down and replaced with apartment buildings with each unit having rents higher than what they were previously paying.

In other words, if someone wants to increase the affordable housing problem, increase racial inequities, and increase a city’s carbon footprint, there is absolutely nothing better than eliminating single-family zoning.

A PANDEMIC WORLD

Now there is an even more serious problem with up-zoning. 

In a world we now know must live with pandemics on an ongoing basis, the absolutely worst thing any city could do is install an up-zoning plan.

Here’s why.

As the writers of the Minneapolis Plan promised, up-zoning will increase the population and population density of the city, which makes controlling pandemics worse.

Replacing single-family homes, which give people a physical safety net, with apartment buildings that remove that safety net by forcing people to live in much closer quarters makes it easier for a virus to spread. 

Apartment buildings with no lot-line setbacks, no off-street parking, and no grass make it impossible for people to spend safe time in their own yards, which imposes both psychological and physical damages on city residents.

The Minneapolis up-zoning plan, which city officials also called “transit oriented development,” meaning it is intended to increase the use of mass transit, is also the absolutely worst thing a city can do when dealing with the reality of pandemics, because mass transit does not allow social distancing unless the buses and trains only one-quarter filled with passengers.

The related plan of encouraging tall (and very expensive) condo buildings throughout the city, in order to give wealthy people an opportunity to accumulate equity in something other than single-family homes, has also been singled out as a dangerous design by architects who point out the obvious contamination issue with elevators and hallways. 

When the Mayor of Minneapolis, the City Council, and the Planning Department pushed through a Minneapolis 2040 Plan based on up-zoning, they made it absolutely clear at the few public meetings they held that they had no concern for the financial well-being of homeowners, the future of the black community, the education of the city’s children, the natural environment, or the city’s impact on global warming.

And now, in our new world, it can be said that a failure to eliminate up-zoning from the 2040 Plan and to reinstall single-family zoning will make it clear that their disregard for the residents of Minneapolis is even deeper and even more dangerous.