A Better Way To Zone

Minneapolis has a grand plan to make housing more affordable. Inside the fight for the future of an American city.

- Noah Buhayar

The crowd at the Bauhaus Brew Labs was thick with flannel and knit beanies, with the odd “Beto for President” T-shirt thrown in. But the handful of patrons gathered by the glass garage doors of the cavernous Minneapolis taproom in March weren’t regulars. They’d turned out for the kickoff of a website called vox.MN. Their nametags said things like “I my neighborhood.” Another had a circle with “2040” inside and a line running through it, like a no-smoking sign.

That was a reference to the city’s sweeping new urban plan, Minneapolis 2040, approved by local officials in December. Spelled out in a more than 1,000-page document, it makes this city of 428,000 one of the first and largest in the U.S. to end single-family zoning, which applies to 70% of Minneapolis’s residential land. Developers will soon be able to build duplexes and triplexes without going through the time and expense of applying for a variance or confronting the kind of neighborhood opposition that often stymies such projects.

The move, which made national headlines, was widely celebrated by urbanists, who’ve long argued for more density. Restricting large swaths of U.S. cities to single-family residences limits the supply of housing, they argue, driving up prices, contributing to sprawl, and reinforcing decades of racial inequity. “Minneapolis 2040: The most wonderful plan of the year,” was the take of the Brookings Institution just before Christmas.