Cities: October 2019 Archives

NOTE: I will be on KFAQ 1170 with Pat Campbell at 8:05 am on Wednesday, October 8, 2019, to discuss this issue, which was mentioned by Minneapolis police union president Lt. Bob Kroll in his interview with Pat Campbell this morning, as well as the City of Tulsa's plan to scrape Paul Harvey's childhood neighborhood to build a stormwater detention pond.

In December 2018, the Minneapolis city council (consisting of 12 Democrats and a Green) adopted a comprehensive land-use plan that called for eliminating single-family residential zones and allowing triplex homes to be built on any residential lot. Stories about the change claimed that this measure was necessary not for the usual zoning reasons -- making more efficient use of public infrastructure, improving the quality of life, ensuring new development is orderly, protecting residents and business owners from sudden disruption of the character of their neighborhoods -- but in order to combat systemic racism.

Slate's Henry Grabar wrote in December 2018:

Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, [Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey] said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation.

The idea that Minneapolis, which has welcomed large numbers of Somali refugees in recent years, is systematically racist is ridiculous. Perhaps this was the only way urban planners could convince homeowners to embrace high-density urban development, after years of warnings about peak oil and climate change failed to persuade voters to approve the radical transformation they sought.

CityLab interviewed Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in December 2018:

I believe strongly that housing is a right. I believe that everyone should have a safe place to go home to at the end of the night, to rest their heads on a pillow and rejuvenate for the next day. Clearly that right is not afforded to everyone.

Moreover, I believe that affordable housing should be in every neighborhood. There's a right to live in a great city. We should have a beautiful diversity of people, of socioeconomic background, in every neighborhood.

Last week in Architectural Record, architect James S. Russell summarized the plan adopted by Minneapolis and its progress toward implementation:

The Minneapolis 2040 plan intends to enhance housing supply by allowing denser development in much of the city. It will permit duplexes, triplexes, and small backyard houses (accessory dwelling units, or ADUs) in once exclusively single-family zones, and it promotes large residential buildings and towers near the downtown core, as well as a variety of smaller-scaled apartment buildings along arterials and transit routes.

Though the city council approved the plan last December, it can go into effect as soon as this November, having received an OK from the regional Metro Planning Council in late September with a final city council vote scheduled for this month.

Russell notes that good design can mitigate higher density, but MInneapolis's change doesn't account for design.

In fact, Minneapolis already has "neighborhoods that mix single-family, duplexes, triplexes, and small apartments," points out David Graham, a founding principal of ESG Architecture and Design, "and they work." The key to reducing resistance to greater density in single-family areas, he adds, "is design that's sensitive to neighborhood fabric, context, and materiality." Yet while the plan limits the number of units in such neighborhoods, it does not include design guidelines.

Russell doesn't expect the change to accomplish what proponents desire.

While developers are already eyeing single-family houses to convert to duplexes and triplexes, many experts believe there is little evidence that adding market-rate units will have a trickle-down effect in thriving cities. After upzoning led to the construction of tens of thousands of new units, at market-rate and higher, in New York and Seattle, for example, there has been some price softening for luxury housing, but low-rent units continue to vanish.

Neighborhood planner Rick Harrison says Minneapolis land is too valuable to be feasible for low-rise multi-family development:

Minneapolis' problem is not that there are too many single family homes - it's that the real estate prices are too high to justify low density redevelopment. Allow me to explain. If a developer wanted to re-develop a 10 acre area in Detroit, they would pay almost nothing for the land. Not so in Minneapolis. Because there is no such blight, even the land under the worst existing homes would cost at least $100,000 to buyout each existing home - possibly more. Assuming that the 10 acres in Detroit or Minneapolis would be in a tight 'urban grid' layout, about 40% of that 10 acres would be in the form of street and right-of-ways as well as easements. Assuming that in both cases, the right-of-ways and easements could be abandoned - much of that area could in theory be recaptured to create a more cohesive 'neighborhood'. e can also assume the city grid would be at a density about 5 homes to the acre. So, 10 acres X 5 = 50 homes x $100,000 = 5 million dollars for the Minneapolis site vs. $5 for the blighted Detroit land....

In Minneapolis the $5 million land cost is increased by demolition of the existing structures, all passed onto the next buyers or renters. So, at 5 homes per acre, that acre of land at best will be somewhere north of ½ million dollars per acre. Put another way, to maintain single family validity, if you are buying a $100,000 home (that would be in the worst neighborhoods), and 1/4th of a new home is typically a finished lot, at minimum you would need to replace that home with a $400,000 home. That would make no sense - not in downtrodden areas at least. These Minneapolis lots are small to begin with, so replacing single family with duplex won't make much of a dent financially. Building code in Minneapolis won't allow attached housing of the past where a thin common wall separated the adjacent unit. Today, the builder must construct what is essentially two exterior walls with airspace between adjacent units for duplex and townhomes, so why not separate the units and build somewhat high density single family instead? The only way to economically justify redevelopment in an area of high raw land cost would be high density vertical growth.

Back in January, urban analyst Joel Kotkin noted that just as Democrats are beginning to win the suburban vote, they're out to destroy suburbia:

The assault on single-family homes grows, at least in part, out of the identity politics that now dominate progressive politics. From Roosevelt through Clinton, progressives had pushed programs and incentives that made it possible for more working- and middle-class people to purchase a home. "A nation of homeowners," President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed, "of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable." Homeownership, he saw, was critical, not only to the economy but to democracy and the very idea of self-government.

This focus began to shift under President Obama, whose HUD Secretary, Julian Castro, sought to socially reengineer suburbs deemed insufficiently diverse--even without any proof of discrimination. In California, San Francisco State Sen. Scott Wiener, backed by the tech oligarchs and operating on the notion that more high-rise projects would dramatically reduce car usership and lower real-estate prices, has sought to strip zoning authority from local jurisdictions that protect their existing single-family houses.

A few quick notes about Tulsa's situation. I don't have time to footnote everything.

As of the 2010 census, there wasn't a single "lily-white" census block group in the City of Tulsa; every block group had some African-American residents. A census block group is a subdivision of a census tract, typically containing about a thousand people. In central Tulsa, there are typically three or four census block groups in each square mile. That said, the square mile that includes Utica Square, Woodward Park, and Cascia Hall only had two black residents in 2010.

The highest concentration of African Americans in Tulsa is found in single-family neighborhoods in north Tulsa. The highest concentration of Hispanic residents is found in single-family neighborhoods in east Tulsa.

Tulsa has a few neighborhoods that developed with a mixture of uses and housing types. For example, Swan Lake neighborhood has small bungalows, big mansions, and numerous three- or four-story walk-up apartment buildings, all coexisting nicely with pedestrian-friendly commercial development along its northern and eastern edges.

Tulsa also has experience with upzoning an established single-family neighborhood. In the 1960s, city leaders thought it would be a good idea to upzone the area west of the TU campus to provide for more student housing. Perhaps they imagined that developers would put up handsome brick apartment buildings of the sort that were built in the 1920s. Instead, opportunists tore down craftsman bungalows and built ugly, single-story, four-plex apartment buildings that fit in a single house lot. A few ugly '60s apartment complexes were built. As these apartments deteriorated, they weren't deemed worthy of renovation, and they gave the city an excuse to condemn the neighborhood as blighted and use eminent domain to acquire much of the neighborhood and flip the land to TU. Upzoning to multi-family, commercial high-intensity, and industrial damaged residential neighborhoods south and east of downtown.

INTERACTIVE MAP RESOURCES:

• Tulsa zoning map (INCOG)
• Justice Map: Interactive map that plots 2010 population by race and income for census blocks, block groups, tracts, and counties.
• The Racial Dot Map displays each individual in the 2010 census as a dot on the map, color-coded by race, a different way to visualize distribution of population.
• US Census Bureau TIGERweb interactive map shows boundaries of 2010 census divisions, but does not display demographic information.