Over the last two months, Neighbors for More Neighbors has been taking action as Minneapolis City Council updated zoning rules to align with the Minneapolis 2040 Plan. We organized around this issue because zoning rules have a major impact on the number of homes that can be built in our city. Here is the update with the results from the City Council.

Single-family homes are substantially more expensive than equivalently sized duplexes and triplexes, primarily because multidwelling homes get to share the large fixed costs of land and building construction across all of the residences.

To achieve the goals in the plan, the implementation must be as ambitious as the plan itself. The built form recommendations are one key part of charting a different future. The Interior zone recommendations in the Built Form Rezoning Study do not implement the commitments made in the Minneapolis 2040 plan. They are a status quo recommendation. The status quo preserves our racial disparities, our worsening housing affordability, and makes it hard to achieve our climate mitigation goals.

Unfortunately, these draft regulations include barriers to building more homes for more families. Triplexes were identified in Minneapolis 2040 as an affordable way to add accessible family-sized homes. Notably, the proposed regulations limit the FAR (Floor Area Ratio) in a way that will make it difficult to build new triplexes in many parts of the city.