A new zoning paradigm from the Upper Midwest?
When Santa Fe established its own minimum wage in 2002, the City Different was a leader on the issue and for years battled with San Francisco for the highest “living wage” in the country.
Santa Fe has also been out front on other progressive issues, for example with its immigrant-friendly “sanctuary city” policies.
A resolution by the City Council supporting same-sex marriage — an issue the city had no control over — helped start momentum that in short order resulted in the state Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage in 2013.
But Santa Fe these days is not diving into what seems to an emerging progressive cause — deregulation, or less regulation, of residential zoning.
Last week, Minneapolis took a step that some commentators called revolutionary when it passed a new comprehensive city plan that bans single-family home zoning. That’s the category that limits development to one residential unit per lot, the standard regimen for neighborhood housing development in the United States for decades.
Under the new rules, what was a singlefamily lot can now have three residential units. There may in fact be rapacious developers or greedy landlords licking their chops at the prospect of denser development in Minneapolis, but it was a liberal mayor and a liberal city council that enacted the change.
Denser housing development, its supporters say, will lower housing costs, make neighborhoods more diverse, encourage smaller-scale neighborhood commercial zones and reduce carbon emissions by curbing sprawl and commuting distances.
Liberal on-line journal Slate was quick to issue kudos to Minneapolis, saying it’s the first major U.S. city to abandon a zoning policy “that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.”
One Minneapolis councilman described single-family zoning as “a government-endorsed and sanctioned racist system.” Slate’s reporter wrote that single-family zoning “proved as effective in segregating northern neighborhoods (and their schools) as Jim Crow laws had in the South.”
Mayor Jacob Frey said, “Large swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can’t live in the neighborhood.”
There are expert voices on the other side. “The basic idea of promoting greater density to get greater affordability is an economic principle that is true in theory, but in practice can get complicated,” Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit that fights urban blight, told U.S. News and World Report. “Sometimes increasing supply actually increases demand.”
In the same article, Tim Keane, a real estate attorney and former city planner, said “Densification is a fad contrived by the real estate industry, a great experiment by the new urbanists that doesn’t have any evidence for any predictable outcomes.”
Many residents of single-family neighborhoods organized in opposition to the change, arguing developers would raze “starter homes” and ratchet up prices for newly built units, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The prodensity Neighbors for More Neighbors group and the anti-density Minneapolis for Everyone dueled. But the new plan was passed in a 12-1 council vote.
Here in Santa Fe, city leadership is dealing with some of the same issues Minneapolis officials say they’re trying to address — housing prices that are too high for what’s usually called “the workforce,” a severe lack of rental housing, and community divisions, which in Santa Fe separate north and south by economic class and somewhat by ethnicity.
A new Santa Fe city report says “the affordable housing problem has gotten worse in recent years, negatively affecting the well-being of families, neighborhoods, and the economy” and that 53 percent of the workforce lives outside city limits.
Three recent apartment projects — one by the Santa Fe Place Mall, one on Rodeo Road and the third, creatively sited behind the former Whole Foods that is now a Natural Grocers store near the Pen/Cordova intersection near downtown — should make a small dent in a huge rental unit shortage.
But all three developments made payments into the city’s Affordable Housing Trust instead of offering any actual affordable units. Those financial contributions apparently are not going to help a typical member of the “workforce” — the trust fund’s rental assistance is for “very low income renters,” according to the city’s website.
The new housing report makes several recommendations, including density bonuses for the developers of affordable housing and promotion of “accessory dwelling units,” like casitas in the back yard, by making requirements less burdensome, or with a loan program.
Not surprisingly, there’s no mention of following the Minneapolis revolution and doing away with single-family zoning. In Santa Fe, neighborhood opposition to anything nearby development other than single-family zoning is a given and a bedrock idea of the city’s own form of liberal political consensus.
Santa Fe, obviously, is a lot different from Minneapolis, a city of 420,000 and part of a much bigger metro area. The Minnesota city has a real urban transit system to serve denser neighborhoods without driveways or much parking.
Another important difference is Santa Fe’s economic reliance on tourism.
Particularly in areas close to downtown, denser housing in Santa Fe arguably would just mean more Airbnb units — which actually drive up housing costs by taking units out of the available housing stock for residents and adding value to property by converting residential space to commercial use.
But Minneapolis’ move does show there are big ideas out there for taking on affordable housing and trying to create diverse neighborhoods, alternatives to just wringing our hands and sticking with a post-WWII game plan for housing or forcing renters into apartment ghettos.
Like the rest of the country, Santa Fe should keep a close watch on what happens in Minnesota, and an open mind.