Via Lisa Bender on Twitter comes this map from a 2013 CPED report to the city about permitted demolitions and residential unit development in 2013:
Yellow represent demolition and rebuild. Orange represent new buildings on vacant lots. Red X indicates a demolition without subsequent permit to develop.
MSPaint circle is via Ms. Bender.
Man, look at those red Xes over North. I’d love to see a longer time frame represented this way – but even this snapshot reveals that all the concern trolling over “demolishing perfectly good housing in northside neighborhoods” is stupid concern trolling.
Can you explain a bit more about your point?
There have been people popping up (I mostly see this on Facebook, though I have heard it from one person in real life) saying that the Minneapolis 2040 plan would allow giant (six story) buildings everywhere so developers would be demolishing houses northside to build apartment buildings and then charging high rents that drive people out of the neighborhood.
But what’s been happening over North, even more than in the near South neighborhoods, is that things are getting demolished and not replaced. Which you can see perfectly well just by wandering the neighborhood. The risks to houses Northside aren’t greedy developers – it’s things like people not being able to repair after the tornado (I assume that was the issue in 2013) or not being able to afford upkeep or utilities and the house getting condemned.
Which doesn’t mean people aren’t getting displaced from some of the northside neighborhoods. It feels like prices are going up everywhere. Just that where they are, it’s by high rents or high SFH sale prices, not new construction.
For a while the city and county didn’t know what to do with these foreclosed or tax forfeited properties. From about the start of the recession to around or just before 2013, the decision about what to do with these boarded up properties leaned more towards tear them down than try to mothball them further. I don’t really blame them either, if we set aside hindsight, since a person could go all day long and buy these properties for a song and they weren’t worth anything really (rent, resale, anything). No one was moving in, and although there were rumors, no one could foresee the market turning around as it did, and crime played a big factor in that as well.
The teardowns and rebuilds in North were mostly due to the Green Homes projects, and other highly subsidized programs. This is why they are clustered as they are. I’ll have to check again, but I think the breakeven point on new construction is around $230k, if the lot is free. North is a long way away from that, let alone it’s a long way away from using all the empty lots.
The PPL apartments off of Lowry and Lyndale are close to me. They took (from what I’m told) around 10 years to go from planning to completion. Off of Lowry, on either side of them, there are large tracts of empty lots that are pretty much designated for larger development – if or when the time comes. There are also sprinkles of multiple empty lots together across North. We’re far, far, from the time where homes are going to be torn down for apartments, or even other homes. Unless it’s more (what I’ll call) corridor development off of the major streets. Even then there are under utilized buildings and empty lots to keep everyone busy for a while.