Biden’s 2.5 trillion infrastructure plan has supply side incentives for getting additional housing up and running. The push is provided by grants to those who will eliminate restrictive zoning laws.
The fact sheet goes on to describe this zoning plan in two sentences, as follows:
CNS News
Eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies. For decades, exclusionary zoning laws — like minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements, and prohibitions on multifamily housing — have inflated housing and construction costs and locked families out of areas with more opportunities.
President Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative, new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate such needless barriers to producing affordable housing.
The City of Minneapolis rezoned the entire city in 2019 to allow for multi-family dwellings across the city. What was discovered however, is that there are still many additional rules in place that restrict developers from completing the task. Things like height restrictions and underground parking. As most of the requests thus far have been in the high demand neighborhoods, the planners seem disinterested in working out the kinks.
The persistent thought that development for the wealthy is a negative, not a positive, continues to restrain people in power from acting.
The city gets full credit, however, for bringing back some old school methods of diversifying the composition of household formation. In November of 2019 a change in zoning was approved to allow for intentional housing clusters. This is a similar set-up to a rooming house where residents share a kitchen and one or more bathrooms.
The intentional community cluster development ordinance allows nonprofit organizations, government agencies or healthcare agencies to create collections of small housing units (tiny homes) and a common house or rooming houses with shared facilities on a city lot that is at least 10,000 square feet. The developments are allowed in any part of the city with the exception of industrial zoning districts.
Most recently, the county in conjunction with Avivo, a local non-profit, created “Avivo Village, an indoor community of 100 secure, private dwellings or “tiny houses” created to provide shelter to individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness, has opened in Minneapolis’ North Loop Neighborhood.”
And the council continues to push through additional changes.
A few days ago “the Minneapolis Council Business, Inspections, Housing and Zoning Committee approved a provision that would remove language from the city’s Housing Code regarding occupancy requirements. Currently, the city’s Housing Code limits occupancy by restricting dwellings “to one family that must be related by blood, marriage or domestic partnership.”
All this undoing of how housing is built and used in the city is a start to allowing more people move into more space. More units leads to lower costs. But it is also necessary to keep the history of such restrictions close at hand. The reasons constituents blocked rooming houses were because they became problem spaces. So what’s the plan to prevent this from happening?
To revive old systems and proclaim them to be new solutions without any consideration of their history seems shortsighted. They do provide lesser expensive housing. But there needs to be an active and on-going companion piece to keep the public from turning on these ‘new’ solutions again, down the road.
Home Economics 