Our Winter Sidewalks Are Broken

Snow emergencies are a big deal here in Minneapolis. You hear about it on the TV news. There’s an app–tens of thousands of people have installed it on both iPhone and Android (“avoid the cost and hassle of a ticket and tow…”). People are very interested in not having their cars towed, so people become very interested in moving their cars to designated areas.

The reason the City of Minneapolis makes a big fuss and puts so many residents at risk of serious personal cost, inconvenience and unhappiness is that we’ve collectively decided to make it a priority to keep our streets plowed and safe. Individually, people comply with the rules because their personal interests (money and property) have been aligned with public safety (plowed streets).

13 reasons Minneapolis needs to move beyond Intentional Communities

In the videos below, City Council Members Lisa Bender and Jacob Frey make some compelling arguments for why we should ease occupancy restrictions for all people living in Minneapolis, and for why we shouldn't limit housing opportunities to a select few who live in strictly defined "intentional communities."

[For a detailed discussion of problems with the intentional communities ordinance, read my earlier post]

"Intentional Communities": A Path to Legal Status for White People

Over time, average family sizes get smaller, and old houses get emptier. But in Minneapolis’ lower-density zoning districts, no more than three unrelated people can live together as a household; in higher-density districts, the limit is five unrelated people. For people who want to live with three or more friends in a big old house, this is a problem. As a targeted fix, the City Council is on the verge of removing occupancy restrictions for a select group of residents who live in what are called “intentional communities.”

Intentional communities are “a form of housing co-operative where residents form a household organized around an idea.” In researching a proposal to legalize these communities, City staff found that Minneapolis “is fairly unique in that occupancy is regulated in both the Zoning Code and the Housing Maintenance Code." No other city defines the special legal category of "intentional community," and many peer cities don't specify maximum occupancy in their zoning codes.

Minneapolis’ 1924 definition of a family was surprisingly liberal.

70s-Era Planner Confesses Role in Decades-Old Downzoning Plot

In commenting on the city's current plan to downzone the Wedge neighborhood, former Minneapolis city planner Perry Thorvig has given us some historical perspective. He starts off by celebrating the results of the 1975 downzoning:

The zoning scheme adopted in 1975 must have worked. It was gratifying to me and I'm sure many neighborhood residents, including former council member Meg Tuthill, that the recent study by city planner Brian Schaffer found that very little new development has occurred in the neighborhood since that rezoning was done forty years ago.

Who gets to live on our nicest streets?

Alex Cecchini has written a nicely comprehensive post outlining all the reasons it's a bad idea to force dense housing out of neighborhood interiors and onto the most noisy, polluted, dangerous streets in the city.

It's a timely post because the Wedge neighborhood is about to be downzoned. As Alex writes, the last time the neighborhood was downzoned, in 1975, it was happening in parallel with an equally successful movement to force dangerous high-speed car traffic out of the neighborhood's interior (a good thing). In other words, the city and neighborhood activists were making the neighborhood interior nicer/safer at the same time they were telling a certain kind of person in a certain kind of housing they have no business living there.

Read Alex's post for all the reasons why that's a problem.

Lisa Goodman hates your minimum wage study

The Minneapolis City Council hired some economists from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs to produce this study on the impact of raising the local minimum wage. The study showed that raising the wage would not lead to economic apocalypse. The study did show that raising the wage to $15 would help a lot of people who need it--at the cost of an extra 50 cents to $1 for a $25 restaurant meal. Council Member Lisa Goodman was not happy with the results.

Downzoning Deadline: Submit Your Feedback to the City

This Friday, September 30 is the deadline to submit public comment on the downzoning proposed for Lowry Hill East--which I have written about a quite a bit. Here's a chart showing how the proposal would push us further along towards a zoning code that doesn't reflect our current built reality: