By Anthony Flint, May 14, 2024

Consider Minnesota, a place that has pioneered many things: Scotch tape, the first toaster, the Mall of America. Add to that one more: taking the lead in zoning reform for more affordable housing.

Minneapolis was the first city in the country to abolish single-family-only zoning, which means a duplex or a triplex or any kind of greater density is allowed now on residential parcels. The idea is to increase supply with more affordable varieties of housing, rather than just the single-family home, which of course tends to be more expensive.

Dozens of cities across the country followed suit, in a quest for more density and multifamily housing in places where the single-family home has been dominant.

Is it working? For this episode of the Land Matters podcast, we sat down with the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, to talk about that and more, including bike and bus lanes, regional governance, value capture for urban infill redevelopment, return to work, and the city’s infamous skyways system.

The City of Lakes was the site of the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference this year, and a delegation from the Lincoln Institute was there.

Frey is an unabashed transplant. He grew up in northern Virginia and went to the College of William and Mary on a track scholarship, and after graduating with a degree in government, he started running professionally while attending law school at Villanova in Philadelphia. That’s when he came to Minneapolis to run the Twin Cities Marathon and, as he tells it, fell in love with the city. The day after graduating, he drove the 1,200 miles west to Minneapolis, his chosen home.

He started as an employment and civil rights attorney, became an active community organizer, served on the City Council and was elected mayor in 2017. He saw the single-family-only zoning ban through in 2019, then was promptly faced with COVID and the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. He was reelected in 2021 and has continued to address police and race relations, and indeed race and equity became a bigger part of the story of the lack of affordable housing, as he talked about how exclusive zoning has driven segregation.

“For years, we were operating under these fairly prescriptive zoning ordinances, that explicitly said, we’re going to keep the Blacks and the Jews over in one portion of the city,” Frey said. “During the Civil Rights Act, that became illegal to do explicitly. We then started to do the same stuff implicitly through the zoning code, making it so that unless you could own a huge home on a huge parcel, you couldn’t live in huge swaths of the city. We wanted to push back on that.”

At APA, Jacob Fry joined two other “Mayor’s Desk” interviewees—Cincinnati Mayor Aftab Pureval and Paige Cognetti, mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania—for a standing-room-only panel discussion of what’s working and what’s not in legacy cities trying to make a comeback from population loss and disinvestment.

A lightly edited version of this interview will be available online and ultimately in print in Land Lines magazine as the latest installment of Mayor’s Desk, the series of Q&As with mayors from around the world—now also available as a book compilation, Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

By Anthony Flint, April 16, 2024

The housing affordability crisis keeps rolling on, dragging down otherwise booming local economies. A survey for the Boston Chamber of Commerce found that nearly one-third of young people say they plan to leave because of high home prices. The Massachusetts housing chief bemoaned: “That’s our workforce.”

“That’s your favorite restaurant that can’t find enough help to stay open,” he wrote in the Boston Globe. “That’s the child-care provider you drop your kids off with. . . . That’s the large company considering moving out of state. That’s our economy.”

Runaway housing costs are impacting homebuyers and renters alike, not just in Boston but nationwide. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, the number of cost-burdened renters hit a record high with half of all households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.

Young people aren’t the only ones affected by the current crisis. The US population of people over 65 is ballooning past 60 million, and most of those people will be on fixed incomes while managing rising health care costs.

The Lincoln Institute is well-attuned to this extraordinary challenge, and recently dedicated our annual Journalists Forum to the subject of affordable housing. It was a lively series of conversations over two days, with some 30 reporters, editors, podcasters, and Substack columnists sizing up the problem and assessing the impact of several current policy interventions. This episode of the Land Matters podcast features highlights from the event.

The 2023 Journalists Forum: Innovations in Affordability was made possible by a partnership with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University and TD Bank. The annual convening bridges the media and academic inquiry, allowing journalists to explore new ideas with researchers and practitioners and to network with each other.

The forum was organized by first looking at the scope of the crisis, followed by an assessment of four major interventions: statewide zoning mandates requiring cities and towns to allow more multifamily development; tax policy designed to help manage runaway land prices and real estate speculation (with Detroit’s efforts to establish a land value tax as a case study); local strategies to outmaneuver institutional investors; and potential changes in the home financing system to help close a stubborn racial wealth gap.

Arthur Jemison, director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, delivered the keynote address, describing the city’s “all of the above” approach to increasing housing supply, including legalizing accessory dwelling units or ADUs, embracing a citywide rezoning initiative known as “Squares and Streets,” and offering big incentives to property owners who convert vacant office buildings to residences.

Cities like Boston are going to need all that and more. According to the State of the Nation’s Housing report issued annually by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, home construction hasn’t kept pace with demand ever since the Great Recession. Prices are up 40 percent nationwide, inventory is tight, and it appears the era of low interest rates is decidedly over.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Chris Arnold of NPR moderates a panel on housing finance at the Lincoln Institute Journalists Forum with (l-r) Jim Gray of the Lincoln Institute, MJ Hopkins of TD Bank, Chrystal Kornegay of Mass Housing, and Chris Herbert of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Credit: Anthony Flint.