Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul are conducting rezoning studies. One is focusing on missing middle housing, the other allowing business uses in more places. Let’s learn more from advocates in each city!
Episode summary
- 00:00:00 | Intro
- 00:00:58 | Luke Hanson, Sustain Saint Paul
- 00:26:39 | Zach Wajda, Neighbors for More Neighbors
- 01:05:06 | Outro
Resources
- Sustain Saint Paul
- Neighbors for More Neighbors
- Minneapolis Land Use Rezoning Study
- Minneapolis allowed uses chart
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band The Urban Hillbilly Quartet on their website.
This episode was hosted by Ian R Buck, and edited by Ian and Tim Marino. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
Zach: [00:00:00] I’m picturing like a McMansion on top of, you know, a grocery store or something. Yeah, it looks hilarious in my brain.
Ian: [00:00:07] You know what? I this is the Wedge Live headquarters, right? You know, John Edwards, I’m sure he would love to live in a big, giant single family house on top of an Aldi, for sure.
Zach: [00:00:17] Yeah. Right. Yeah. Have a real good recording room up there. Yep. Yep.
Ian: [00:00:26] Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Seward, Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m your host, Ian R Buck. Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul are currently conducting rezoning studies. They’re very different in focus, but the concepts intertwine in some important ways. And of course, what happens in one city will certainly inform what the other pursues. So we’re going to start with Saint Paul by chatting with Luke Hanson, who is a board member of Sustain Saint Paul, an advocacy group focused on…
Luke: [00:01:08] Abundant housing, low carbon transportation and sustainable land use in the city of Saint Paul specifically.
Ian: [00:01:13] Nice. So we’re here to talk about the rezoning study, public process that’s going on in Saint Paul right now. Actually, by the time this episode comes out, it will be too late for any listeners to participate because that ends on April 13th, I think.
Luke: [00:01:30] Well, actually, the the first round of public advocacy will be over. That’s true, Ian. But the, but only the Planning Commission level. So that’s sort of the first hurdle of public input. And then after the Planning Commission has hosted their public hearing on Friday the 14th of April, then the Planning Commission will make some revisions, some amendments to the proposal from the city and then pass their recommendation on to the city council. And so we expect that the city council will hold another public hearing probably sometime in June. And so the good news is that there will be another opportunity for public engagement at the city council level.
Ian: [00:02:13] Okay, good, good, good.
Luke: [00:02:14] Yeah. Keep paying attention to find out when that is so you can come and and say your piece.
Ian: [00:02:19] Sign up for the Sustain Saint Paul newsletter. I’m sure that I’m sure that will make its way in there for sure.
Luke: [00:02:24] Our website is [sustainstpaul.org]. You can sign up for our newsletter if you scroll down on the main page and we’re on Facebook and Twitter and put out advocacy alerts about things like this there as well.
Ian: [00:02:38] Nice. Okay. So, so this process was regarding, um, we’re considering allowing higher density, you know, more units to be built on like what heretofore has been known as single family zoning. Right? That’s kind of we’re kind of redefining what that lowest density zone is in Saint Paul. Um, and this so this conversation, very similar one happened in Minneapolis, you know, a few years ago, and that was very much tied to the 2040 comprehensive plan that they, you know, submitted to the Met Council. Obviously, Saint Paul had a 2040 comprehensive plan as well. But let’s yeah, like let’s talk about kind of like why this is happening a little bit later and like what how this relates to the 2040 comprehensive plan itself.
Luke: [00:03:31] Totally. First, let me back up and say it’s true that the process the city is working on this zoning proposal would increase allowable density in the city. Sustain Saint Paul has been talking about it in slightly different terms and so has the city. Instead of using the word density, we’ve been talking about increasing housing choices in the city of Saint Paul. We find that that’s a little bit more clear for people who aren’t familiar with zoning jargon and that sort of thing, and a little bit less intimidating. I think when they hear density, they think of huge apartment buildings…
Ian: [00:04:09] You’re gonna tear down my house and build a 12 unit apartment building or something like that.
Luke: [00:04:13] Right, right, right. And that’s, that’s really just not what’s bound to happen as a result of this proposal. We’re talking about legalizing smaller homes on smaller lots.
Ian: [00:04:24] The Missing Middle.
Luke: [00:04:25] Exactly. Yeah. The city proposes to legalize an even wider variety of small scale or missing middle housing choices. When people think about two units, three units and four units of housing, their minds might jump to duplex triplex and four plex like one building that has a certain number of units in it. But I think one really important thing about this policy is that it allows different variations of getting to two, 3 or 4 units per lot. Um, and there’s some really awesome illustrations of this. If you look at the city’s memos and publications about the study, you could get to two units by having the principal building on the lot, the main house and then an accessory dwelling unit. They’ve also proposed that if you wanted to get to three units, you could build a double Adu in the backyard. And so you’d have like two little homes in the backyard, an existing house. Um, you know, the cottage cluster is the same sort of thing. You can build several units of housing facing a central courtyard depending on the lot size. Or you could build a group of row houses for houses that like townhomes that have shared walls in the middle.
Luke: [00:05:42] Yeah. What we saw, what we have seen is that in Minneapolis, though, Minneapolis, you know, shifted the paradigm nationally on the topic of zoning reform by legalizing triplexes on every lot. The technical dimensional requirements that got passed along with that maximum number of units were, in many places, not sufficiently flexible to make it feasible to build a three unit building. I think the main culprit is a requirement called the floor area ratio. And basically that says based on the area of the lot that the building is built on, you can build a certain ratio of of floor space in the house. So if the floor area ratio is 2.0, that means that on, for example, a 5000 square foot lot, you could build 10,000ft of of floor space in the building. I think the floor area ratios in a lot of neighborhoods of Minneapolis that came with the with the 2040 plan were set so low that it’s not feasible to build a three unit building. Right.
Ian: [00:06:51] It would be very, very small units.
Luke: [00:06:53] Exactly. Exactly. So all that to say in in Saint Paul, we’re the city has proposed to legalize up to three units on every lot in the city, up to four on many lots in the city and in some places with a density bonus. We can talk about more later. Six units. Importantly, they’ve also proposed reducing the minimum setback requirements. That is the distance that a building has to be from the sidewalk and from the alley and from the sides of the lot. They’ve proposed to increase the maximum permissible height of buildings. Right now, I think it’s 30ft in some place in most places, and they propose to increase it to 35 or 40in a lot of places. They also have proposed to increase maximum lot coverage for buildings so that, you know, in in the same way that one could tear down an existing modest sized single family house and build a really large McMansion. Now, it would be legal to actually build a multi unit building that takes up more of the lot space. And these are the kinds of requirements that make it actually feasible to build missing middle housing. You have to set up the technical details, right?
Ian: [00:08:08] Yeah, I always forget that they’re like, so there’s the floor to area ratio and then there is also a separate categorization for like the total lot coverage. That’s right. Which is like, like they seem like they’re the same concept. I feel like they probably regulatorily, like, should be the same, like they should just be merged into one one concept.
Luke: [00:08:30] Yeah. I guess I haven’t thought through the, the reason for having those two overlapping regulations. I guess if you had a Venn diagram of what floor area ratio does and what lot coverage does, they do a lot of the same thing, but slightly different approaches in Saint Paul’s proposed zoning reforms. By the way, there is no floor area ratio requirement. Instead, they have something called a lot area per unit minimum. So the the proposed lot area per unit in zoning district H2 is 1500 square feet. So what that means is that if you wanted to build a four unit building in this district, you’d multiply 1500 times four and you’d have to have a 6000 square foot lot. So that’s like a 50 foot wide lot by 120ft deep. So by the way, one of the changes I would like to see the Planning Commission or the City Council make to the proposal is to reduce that required lot area per unit to 1200 square feet. Okay. Because that would mean that it would be feasible to build a four plex or four units of housing on a 4800 square foot lot, which is very common in the city, 40ft wide by 120ft deep.
Ian: [00:09:50] Okay. Yeah.
Luke: [00:09:51] Whereas right now the requirement or the proposed requirement of 1500 square feet lot area per unit minimum would only enable four units of housing on a 50 foot wide lot.
Ian: [00:10:04] So how much with, with the 1500 current proposal, uh, how many units does that allow on your typical like 40ft by 120 that you said it.
Luke: [00:10:15] Would allow three units of housing. Okay. On a 50 foot excuse me on a 40 foot wide lot. Okay. It would allow for on a 50 foot wide lot. Okay. Yeah. And both of those lot sizes are really common in Saint Paul. If you look around many of our neighborhoods, you’ll see 40 foot lots right next to 50 foot lots on the same block. So even if they left the requirement as proposed at 1500 square feet, lot area per unit minimum, it would allow four units of housing on many lots throughout the city. But we see no reason why 40 foot lots can’t have four units of housing on them. Right. Right. It’s it’s it’s common all over the United States. And so we think that requirement should be a little bit more flexible than it is, at least as it’s been proposed.
Ian: [00:11:05] And I think that that’s something that’s really important to emphasize is that like when you go walking around in a in a neighborhood that has a lot of fourplexes, you know, you’re not really like it doesn’t feel like it’s not a residential neighborhood, You know, they look like just kind of normal buildings. Definitely. And and, you know, but like, hidden inside, like, oh, they’ve got like two units on the floor, on the ground floor and two units above. And it’s like, that’s that’s lovely.
Luke: [00:11:32] Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. In the summer of 2020, I decided to bike all over Saint Paul looking for missing middle housing because I knew that there was a lot of it around the city, but I didn’t know just how much. It is really startling, really astonishing that in certain neighborhoods of Saint Paul, particularly Cathedral Hill, the parts of West Seventh that are within a mile or two of downtown Dayton’s Bluff, Payne-phalen, Frogtown. If you look closely, there are dozens and dozens of buildings that look like a single family house but have multiple mailboxes, multiple water meters. There are multi-unit buildings that either were were built or turned into duplexes or triplexes before the zoning code made that illegal 50 years ago or or they’ve been flying under the radar. Yeah, they were adapted into multiple buildings sometime in the last 50 years, even though they’re technically not allowed in some of those neighborhoods. Um, but it kind of goes to show that no one’s bothered by these types of housing in their neighborhoods. Right, right. And in fact, they’re very common and, and blend well into the character of our neighborhoods, to use the the typical term that gets thrown around. I do want to clarify, missing middle housing is allowed and has been allowed. And some of those neighborhoods all along, like in Cathedral Hill and I think Dayton’s Bluff and Payne-phalen, they’ve allowed slightly higher densities, slightly more housing choices than the majority of the city. But in places like Macalester-Groveland and Highland, the Midway, certainly vast swaths of the East Side, there’s no option except to build a single family house with a yard.
Ian: [00:13:28] Right, right. Yeah. And it’s and it’s like a lot of those neighborhoods that you were just naming were missing. Middle housing is has been allowed all along. Like. Like Cathedral Hill. That’s one of the most desirable places to, like, live in the city. Absolutely know it’s not like it’s not like we’re we’re destroying the fabric of our of our community.
Luke: [00:13:46] I would argue it strengthens the character of the community.
Ian: [00:13:48] I would agree. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So categories that are being introduced.
Luke: [00:13:53] Yeah. Let me lay it all out and I’ll try to keep it as simple as I can because this gets pretty technical. So in the current zoning code of Saint Paul, which we’ve had since the early 1970s, there are 6 or 7 different flavors of single family zoning. They are called RL, which stands for Residential Large Lot. This is only used in the very southeast sliver of Saint Paul up on a bluff. It’s in the Highwood neighborhood R1 R2 R3 R4. All of these are different categories of single family zones. They all only allow single family homes with a yard. And the major difference is how large does your front yard have to be? How far does the house have to be set back from the street and from the alley and from the sides of the lot? And how what’s the minimum lot size for each each each home in the neighborhood. So R1 requires I think, an 80 foot wide lot and then R2 is probably 60ft wide. R3, I think maybe 50 and R4 is 40, something like that. Okay. So you can have slightly smaller yards as you go up and then RT one and RT two allow for townhouses. So the proposal is to consolidate all of those districts except for RL to consolidate R1 through RT2 into two categories. The first one would be called H1 that would take the the lowest. Density of the three. R1, R2, R3 and collapse them into one new district that would allow up to three units of of housing per lot on most on every lot and then allow up to four units on corners. Okay. The other three districts (R4, RT1, and RT2) would be consolidated into a new district called H2 and an H2. They’ve proposed to legalize four units per lot on every lot, whether it’s the middle of a block or the corner.
Ian: [00:16:00] Subject to the total size of the lot, right? Because you still have that 1500 foot or square foot per unit, right?
Luke: [00:16:06] Exactly. Yeah. Like we were talking about the proposal for these two new districts, H1 and H2 is not only about the number of units they would allow, it’s also about the technical standards. They would have similar setback rules, much more flexible setback rules. It would be allowed to build your house up to ten feet away from the sidewalk, up to ten feet away from the alley and up to five feet away from the sides of the lot. So you’d have a lot more flexibility as to the placement of a building on the lot. They would also increase the maximum lot coverage by a little bit, increase the permitted height of buildings. Um, but yeah, one of the main distinctions is is the lot area per unit requirement. I mentioned earlier that there is a there is a provision in the proposal called a density bonus. Oh yes. Any developer who promises to include a unit that’s up to that’s affordable at 80% of the area median income or who promises to include a three bedroom unit, they can they would be allowed to add an additional unit to the building and they can do that up to twice per building. So what that means is in H1 where the the proposal would only allow three units of housing per lot except on the corners where four would be allowed. They could build up to five units if two of them are affordable at 80% AMI or and or three bedroom units and in H2 where the proposal would allow four units of housing per lot by right without additional permission, the the incentive would allow them to build up to six units of housing if two of them were affordable at 80% AMI or three bedroom units.
Ian: [00:18:02] And 80% AMI is not a difficult like price point to hit for an apartment unit.
Luke: [00:18:07] Yeah, that’s that’s what the city found out through its study. One of the one of the things they did really well in preparing this study was to do some financial modeling. They hired some consultants to help them analyze the costs of building housing in our market. In Saint Paul, the cost of land, the building costs for different sizes of buildings on certain sized lots. Um, and then comparing that to the area, median income and what, what people can pay, what their, their incomes and, and what they can pay for housing. And they figured out that, as you say Ian, it’s possible for a developer to build to to provide two units of housing at 80% of the AMI without subsidy. Right? The Planning Commission has invited members of the public to suggest other types of qualities in housing that should be incentivized with the density bonus. You know, their proposal is to incentivize affordability and to incentivize three bedroom units. What if they allow developers to build more units of housing in exchange for a promise not to hook a building up to natural gas lines? Um, another option might be to incentivize cooperative ownership models, putting for a developer who agrees to put the land underneath the house in a community land trust, for example.
Luke: [00:19:40] That’s a way that many organizations are pursuing long term affordability in housing. The third element of the proposal is to create a new district called H3, which would not the the areas that would be rezoned H3 would not be based on what they were zoned, what they’re currently zoned under our current zoning rules, but rather based on their proximity to high frequency transit routes, namely the light rail and the bus rapid transit lines. Both the current A-line and also proposed future lines like the B-line along Selby Avenue and also neighborhood nodes, which is the city of Saint Paul’s jargon for intersections around the city where there are sort of nodes of neighborhood business. Think of I think of one nearby me at Fairview and Saint Clair, where the Groveland Tap is located, and there’s a tailor and a dry cleaning shop and another restaurant and things like that. These places that are sort of serve provide neighborhood businesses that are within walking distance of people in these locations near high frequency transit and nodes. The city has proposed to legalize up to six units of housing by right. And they would have even slightly more permissive requirements for lot area per unit height limits, lot coverage, things like that.
Ian: [00:21:09] When you say near, I’ve heard that the current proposal is within an eighth of a mile of those nodes. That’s right. And high frequency transit, right? Yeah, exactly.
Luke: [00:21:21] And an eighth of a mile for you, all your listeners out there who haven’t thought about this is about one block. It’s not that much distance from an intersection.
Ian: [00:21:32] Yeah, and I believe Sustain Saint Paul wants that to be changed to a quarter of a mile. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which makes a lot of sense to me because, like, when, you know, transit planners are creating things like the green line, right? You know, they, they consider a like quarter mile radius walk shed for each, you know, each station. And that’s kind of like the, the defaults, you know, like, oh, if you’re within a quarter of a mile of a station, then you’re within like easy walking distance of it. That’s right. And so that’s why Yeah. All the stations for the Green Line are spaced out, you know, a half mile apart so that no matter where you are along university, you’re within a quarter mile of any of them. Yeah, absolutely.
Luke: [00:22:19] So we think that makes a lot of sense. We think that one of the great benefits of zoning reform, of legalizing more housing choices in every neighborhood is that it increases potential ridership for transit routes so that we can it’s actually feasible for Metro Transit to plan more transit routes and more frequent transit routes to increase frequency on existing ones. You can’t justify planning a high frequency transit route without people who are going to ride it, without people who are going to use it. Right.
Ian: [00:22:52] Right. And it’s also harder to pay for that without, you know, the people living there who are going to pay taxes. Yeah. So higher density means that we will have like more tax revenue, more tax revenue, and, you know, it’ll require less taxes per person.
Luke: [00:23:07] Exactly. We have more people sharing the burden of paying for the things that we want and need in our city, not only good transit, but also public schools and our, you know, fire stations and rec centers and our streets, of course. And not just.
Ian: [00:23:23] Not just like public goods. I realized that it was desirable to me to live at a high density area where there’s a lot of other people who could, you know, keep these businesses alive so that those businesses would be there on the rare occasion that I wanted them. Right.
Luke: [00:23:38] I think that connects back to, um, you were mentioning a moment ago the logic of having a quarter mile walk shed around public transit routes because it increases potential ridership. The same logic applies for neighborhood nodes, right? That neighborhood businesses, local businesses can only survive in places where they have a certain population of customers within walking distance. So it stands to reason that allowing more people to live within walking distance a quarter mile of a business node makes it possible for our neighborhoods to sustain more businesses co-located within walking distance of of those residents. So if we want more walkable neighborhoods, places where people can meet all of their daily needs and then some without need of a car with with the ease of getting there on foot or by bike, they can do that. This is the way for places like Saint Paul to evolve in a graceful way. I think there’s this concept in economics called the multiplier effect, okay? Where you know, when you when you shop at a local business, the people who work at that business are going to take the dollars that you pay for whatever good or service they offer and use those dollars to patronize other businesses in the local economy.
Luke: [00:25:06] For every $1 you spend at a local business generates three times the amount of economic activity in your local community. Right? So whereas when you spend your money at like national businesses, those dollars aren’t being reinvested. Recycled in your community, they might be siphoned out to pay staff who live in a distant part of the country. Right. So if we are really committed to the health of our local economy, then we should be nurturing our local businesses, making it creating more places for them to be and making it easier for people to support them. Yeah, I’m hopeful that Saint Paul will will follow Minneapolis’ lead in the next year or two once we’ve wrapped up this 1 to 4 unit housing study and hopefully legalized many more housing choices throughout the city. I hope that we take on the challenge of legalizing more mixed use buildings throughout our residential neighborhoods that we legalize more sort of neighborhood business areas or neighborhood main streets, if you will, so that the possibility of walkable neighborhoods will exist in more parts of the city.
Ian: [00:26:27] Yeah. Yeah. All right, Luke, thanks for joining us for this episode.
Luke: [00:26:32] My pleasure. Thanks, Ian.
Ian: [00:26:39] Now, that’s a pretty good place to transition towards Minneapolis because their rezoning study has more to do with what kinds of businesses are allowed in each zone. Here to talk with us about all of that is Zach Wojda, a volunteer with neighbors for more neighbors. Is that is that an accurate. That is correct. Okay, cool. So, Zach, can you walk us back like a couple of years to talk about the background of why we’re here right now? Because, like, it feels like we’ve been talking about rezoning in Minneapolis for ages. We have.
Zach: [00:27:12] Yeah, it’s been a long time. So Minneapolis 2040 is their comprehensive plan. They passed because the Met Council requires that they do this every ten years, I believe. I’m relatively new to the area, but I believe that’s kind of how it goes. And Minneapolis kind of set out goals to redo its zoning and now the zoning in Minneapolis. The goal is to have it be two parts. You have your land use portion and then you have your built form portion. So the land use is what can you have, where can you have it? The built form is how big can buildings be on a certain parcel? Maybe that’s how high can they be? What is their setbacks? How far does it have to be from property lines? That’s all you’re built form regulations. I call them built form zones. So those passed back in? Well, they went into law January 1st, 2021. So we’ve had those for a little over two years now.
Ian: [00:28:09] And the 2040 plan passed back in 2018. And so then it took us three years to finalize like, okay, based on the priorities put forth in the 2040 plan, what is the built form going to look like? What is that zoning going to look like?
Zach: [00:28:24] Right? So the plan laid out a general idea and the city has to actually pass ordinances to bring it into their code. The plan is just a plan. And we pass the ordinances to more or less make the city code compliant with that plan. The built form portion is done. Now we’re looking at the land use portion, which is the.
Ian: [00:28:49] Built form process was kind of the famous like we’re getting rid of single family zoning everywhere. Conversation.
Zach: [00:28:56] Yes, right. I guess kind of. So that was a separate part. That was part of the like if you look on the Minneapolis 2040 website, they have an implementation portion of it and that’s their missing middle portion is legalizing triplexes on all lots. So that was not necessarily along with the built form regulations, but it does kind of fall into that category. And this land use study that they’re doing right now. And eventually it will become an ordinance that will be voted on by city council that also has provisions for triplexes. So essentially the old version of the land use code, they’re called primary districts. I like to use the word land use. So it’s less confusing because every single parcel in the city will have two types of zoning. It will have your built form zoning and it will have your land use zoning.
Ian: [00:29:52] So not every parcel in the city has both of those. Currently they do.
Zach: [00:29:56] They do. Okay. So they do. They’re also called primary districts. But and yes, we have the built form districts already, so we’re replacing the old primary use districts, land use districts with new ones. Okay, essentially. So right now there is 23 primary land use districts. This includes your typical like R1, R2, R3.
Ian: [00:30:20] Which stands for residential one, two and three.
Zach: [00:30:22] Okay. Yeah. So that’s your residential. And now we’ll have 17 of them. So we’ll have six less. So part of it is certainly to try to consolidate it, make it easier to read the code. So we’re moving from 23 to 17 land use districts or primary districts. That’s kind of what they’re focusing on right now. And a lot of them are similar to the old versions. It’s essentially just a replacement. And a lot of the criticism of the new plan that they’ve put out for everyone to read and make comments on. They had a survey and that is now closed. And there will be in the future a public hearing with the Planning Commission. I believe public hearing is on April 24th. Anybody can attend. The city will have a revised draft based on the public feedback they’ve received. Neighbors for Neighbors is submitting our own personal letter, but most of the responses that they get will be through their Multi-question survey. They ask about the different zones that they have in their draft. They ask where they should be applied. They ask what should be allowed where. And we certainly have our thoughts and we’re hopeful that their next draft will be somewhat more progressive.
Ian: [00:31:34] Is this a process that is friendly to somebody who. Doesn’t want to have to really get into the weeds of like thinking about each of these zones and everything. Can I just go to the city and say like, Hey, I would like my neighborhood to be able to have like X, Y, and Z types of businesses sprinkled throughout my neighborhood.
Zach: [00:31:54] I will say that it is not very friendly for anyone that just wants to make a comment. Hey, I want to be able to have this like, yeah, so, so do I. But a lot of what’s happening with the land use rezoning study is more or less limited by the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan, where they’ve already talked about their goals. And I will say that’s fair. A lot of the land use districts are pretty intertwined with the built form districts. There are certain parts of Minneapolis 2040 that essentially say this district has to go where this built form district is. So they are intrinsically tied. And there are statements in Minneapolis, 2040 that say, well, we don’t really encourage commercial uses in urban neighborhoods, for example. It leaves it open to interpretation. But in general, we’ve found that the city staff has interpreted that to more or less say we don’t want commercial uses in urban neighborhoods. And I should say now that urban neighborhoods are essentially the equivalent of residential districts. These are 90% of parcels in the city. It’s where almost every single house is.
Ian: [00:33:07] Is that 90% by number of parcels or by like area that they cover in the city.
Zach: [00:33:11] It is area urban neighborhood, makes up a ton of the city. And the city does like to mention how they are increasing the amount of parcels that can have commercial uses by 50%. One of our favorite things to say in response to that is currently there’s only 3% of parcels that allow commercial uses, so a 50% increase is only 4.5% of parcels. Right. Which is still nothing. That’s that’s not much. And that’s what’s allowed. That’s it’s not like 4.5% are immediately going to become commercial uses and they do tend to be located along your goods and services corridors. That can certainly make things difficult when the city is touting some really big changes, maybe progressive changes, things that people in theory want to see, but it’s really not changing where those uses are. It’s not opening up the door for, you know, your your neighborhood coffee shops or corner store. It’s still pretty limited where you can actually have these uses.
Ian: [00:34:10] What are we pushing for as Neighbors, for More Neighbors? Like what changes to this draft? Are you hoping to see?
Zach: [00:34:17] Some of the things we’ve noticed as we’ve gone through is the city has implemented size restrictions on certain uses. So I will say that typically the sizes are related to the built form regulations. That’s how high can it be? How like wide can it be? However, in the land use rezoning study and in their current draft, there are size restrictions for certain uses in certain zones. So the best example is going to be your residential mixed use zones. There are three of them: RM1, RM2, and RM3. Now what we’ve seen is generally in RM1 most commercial uses are limited to 5000ft². For reference, the Trader Joe’s in downtown Minneapolis is 10,700ft². There’s an Aldi closing in north Minneapolis. That’s 13,000ft². Both of those are larger than that, 5000ft² by quite a bit indeed. So that’s certainly an issue we’ve run into. And we’re a little disappointed that the city hasn’t really made a good effort to help reduce food deserts in the city and make our neighborhoods a little more walkable with grocery stores. In in our opinion, that’s really where we want to see the change. 5000ft² tends to be enough for a lot of commercial uses that’s not too small for maybe a corner store or a coffee shop or something like that, something you might want to have in your neighborhood. And I understand the intent is to keep traffic low, make it feel more like a residential neighborhood. But these are generally these zones. They’re applied along goods and services corridors. So these are already busy streets. These are already streets with buses going down them. So limiting the size, I don’t necessarily agree with it.
Ian: [00:36:09] So we’re trying to bring that 5000 more in line with the number that I’ve heard getting thrown around. Is that like, well, a grocery store needs 10,000ft² at least. Is that by law they have to have 10,000ft² or that’s just a practical no.
Zach: [00:36:23] So a grocery store doesn’t need any certain amount of square feet. It is really.
Ian: [00:36:27] Hard to make it work in under 10,000. Okay.
Zach: [00:36:30] Yeah. Yeah. You certainly want to be able to have a larger one. And Trader Joe’s is is my go to example because it is. It’s a smaller. A grocery store. It has fresh produce. And I think like if that store got much smaller, it would not be a viable grocery store. You know, the grocery store has been one thing, and I will say there’s another portion of the residential mixed use categories, especially where there is in the land use tables. They denote it with an asterisk.
Ian: [00:36:59] That’s a good sign.
Zach: [00:37:00] Yeah, always a good sign. The asterisk essentially means that if you have this use so if you have a grocery store, it needs to be part of a multi story mixed use building.
Ian: [00:37:13] That is a requirement that’s specific to residential mixed use.
Zach: [00:37:17] It is, yeah, it’s not required for higher intensity zones. So for example, you could build a standalone grocery store in the commercial mixed use zones, the zones, there’s four of those. Those zones that.
Ian: [00:37:32] We’re talking about are land use zones not built form zones.
Zach: [00:37:36] Yes, we’re talking about the land use zones. So again, we’re regulating size through the land use portion of the code. You have both the square footage limits and you have requirements where these residential mixed use buildings literally have to be residential, mixed use buildings, whereas there’s are other zones rather, in this code that are called commercial mixed use zones, they are higher intensity, they are less common, they are mostly towards the middle of Minneapolis and those do not require mixed use.
Ian: [00:38:11] So that’s mostly like downtown.
Zach: [00:38:13] Yeah, generally downtown or you’re really more high frequency corridors. So, you know, Lake Street’s always a good example. Parts of Central Avenue where I live. Okay. Those areas, typically as you get further north in Minneapolis or further south in Minneapolis, you stop seeing so many of these commercial mixed use zones. And that’s where you really start to see these residential mixed use zones where we have food deserts in the city where these residential mixed use zones get applied. So that’s why the grocery stores in particular have been so important.
Ian: [00:38:42] When I think about like my favorite flavor of urbanism, right? I think about like, you know, European cities where the dominant built form is like, okay, you’ve got buildings with their front facades, like right up to the sidewalk. They’ve got some commercial space on the ground floor, and then they’ve got like two, maybe three floors of apartments above, which on the face of it seems like it aligns nicely with residential mixed use zoning in Minneapolis. But also I do I do wonder like, oh, in those European cities, how do they make grocery stores work? How do they get food to everybody? Is it just that like whenever I see the pictures of the cute streets that I want to live on in Europe, is there actually like right around the corner, another street where there aren’t a bunch of apartments above a grocery store? Am I getting the full picture or am I missing something?
Zach: [00:39:35] I think I think you have a great vision and I think a lot of people would really like to see more residential mixed use buildings where maybe you have retail on the ground floor and some apartments or condos or something above the retail use. And I guess we also like that vision, however, where these residential mixed use districts get applied are further out in the city that are less developed areas of the city. And it’s generally along built form zone areas that don’t allow for really tall buildings. This is maybe your lower corridor. So to get a little bit into the built form zoning, they are numbered in such a way that the number on the end is the general maximum height of the building in that zone. This is something I only learned a couple weeks ago. Like it’s not intuitive, but the exception is kind of the interior portions. That’s your like warehouses are that goes one, two, three. But then the corridor portion which is along your goods and services corridors, those go three, four, six, they skip five because we don’t have any because it makes sense, right? Sure. Yeah.
Ian: [00:40:47] So is that is that like indicating the number of floors that are allowed?
Zach: [00:40:52] Yeah, generally. Okay. So generally that’s like your maximum height. So like corridor six, you could have a six story building but no higher. There are always exceptions to the rule and you can go into the code if you want and kind of figure that out. There’s also premiums, like if you do certain things, you can increase your height. But generally where these residential mixed use buildings go, those are the lower corridor zones. So maybe 3 or 4. We like that idea. They also happen to be in neighborhoods where people probably aren’t going to be building like 2 or 3 story buildings. They tend to be in the well. Generally, these areas where we have urban neighborhood one and residential mixed use one, they tend to be north of Lowry Avenue and south of, I believe, 38th St. So those portions of the city, anything north of Lowry is generally this lower intensity area. That’s where you have probably corridor three and residential mixed use one. So that is where you would have your limited grocery store size of 5000. You would have to have essentially a 2 or 3 story mixed use building to even put a grocery store in the first place. And that grocery store has to be tiny.
Ian: [00:42:03] And changing, like which zoning categories are applied in on which parcels. Like that’s not what’s on the table right now. What’s on the table right now is like changing what is allowed in each of these different land use. Zonings, right?
Zach: [00:42:20] Yes. With an asterisk.
Ian: [00:42:23] Like I couldn’t just go to the city right now and demand like I want to see residential mixed use everywhere that currently is categorized as like urban neighborhood. Right?
Zach: [00:42:31] You could not do that. Okay. They are open to like within the categories. So maybe you want to see residential mixed use 2 instead of residential mixed use 1 somewhere. They’re open to that feedback. Some of our suggestions are currently there’s four commercial mixed use zones in general, commercial mixed use already doesn’t get applied very often throughout the city. So one of our suggestions is to consolidate it, make it maybe only three zones, like there’s just no reason to add complexity and extra zones when this is already so little of the city. If it’s really a concern and you don’t want to just allow something in a certain area, you could always make it a conditional use, which means the Planning Commission has to approve it. So that’s another option. That’s certainly something we’ve considered proposing for urban neighborhoods where we’d like to see those commercial districts. I should go back a little bit. Yes. There is a table that lays out all of the different use types that the city considers and that table, those are the rows. And then the columns are your different zones. So you have urban neighborhood, one urban neighborhood, two urban neighborhood, three and so on and so forth, including like your residential mixed use ones, your commercial mixed use production. They have one that’s called production mixed use. And then there’s also Transportation one and a parks one as far as zones go. And then your your rows are going to be your different uses. Right.
Ian: [00:44:06] So what kinds of stores, what kinds of. Yeah.
Zach: [00:44:09] What kind of what can you put there? Can it be a 1 to 3 unit dwelling so up to a triplex? Is it going to be four or more dwellings? Those are separate uses in the table. So again, we’re kind of regulating form here with the uses, which is a little bit weird, but the city has more or less agreed Triplexes is where we want to draw the line. Okay. I have my own personal feelings about that, but that’s the way it is. Yeah. So as you go down the table, there will be your little squares. Think of it like a little Excel spreadsheet, right? And that square is either going to be blank, which means it’s not allowed. That use is not allowed in that zone. It’s going to have a C, which means it’s conditionally allowed. The Planning Commission can choose to allow it, and there might be conditions that go with it. They might have to do certain things to get that permit. And then there is permitted, which means you don’t have to go to the Planning commission. If it is compliant, then you.
Ian: [00:45:08] Can do it by right?
Zach: [00:45:09] Yes, by right, Exactly. So those are your three like general categories. And then also, why is.
Ian: [00:45:15] There always an also. Zach, There’s.
Zach: [00:45:17] Always an also because we like to add exceptions and regulate form through uses. So this is this is where you start seeing where we regulate the sizes. So the 5000ft² we talked about a little bit earlier, that comes from the use table. There is a 5P, so that means it’s permitted, but it’s only allowed to be 5000ft² or less. Okay. And then they can also attach the asterisk on the end of the P. So say it says 5P, that means it has to be 5000ft² maximum. It is permitted and it has to be part of a multi story mixed use building. Okay. So you can have up to like three characters in a box, I guess. So you can have the number, you can have a P or a C and then an asterisk. Most of them are just a P or a C or empty if it’s not allowed. Right.
Ian: [00:46:07] I imagine that there’s a lot of empties on that table.
Zach: [00:46:09] There are, yes. Especially in the urban neighborhood column, which is, again, 90% of the city by area. Right.
Ian: [00:46:17] So it feels like urban neighborhood is really where we should be putting most of our energy as advocates. Yeah. You know, if we want to like see major opportunities, major change in the city. Yeah.
Zach: [00:46:29] So I think now is probably a good time to talk about what has changed with the urban neighborhoods. Yeah, there has been some confusion here and there. So Minneapolis 2040 essentially calls for the area between Lowry and 38th Street. Like everything between there is generally your more built up area in the built form zone code. This got designated as interior two or higher. So this is where you can have like a two and a half storey building and it can be a decent size in terms of like how much of the lot it takes up. That’s dictated by something called floor area ratio. And that’s in the built form code, not the primary district’s land use code, whatever you want to call it. What we’re looking at right now south of Lowry, north of 38th in the middle of Minneapolis, all of that is interior two now Minneapolis, 2040 calls for anything that is in interior to or in interior three. Those are kind of the ones that matter. Those will be urban neighborhood two urban neighborhood two is actually kind of cool as like an advocate and someone that is pro housing urban neighborhood. Two, it allows four plus units, allows four plus unit dwellings. That includes a ton of the city. And here’s where the asterisk comes in, only on lots above 7500ft². Now, for reference, most lots are around 5000 to 6000ft². Typically, there are some that are smaller, some that are bigger, which means even if you tore down a house in Minneapolis between Lowry and 38th, you likely could not build a fourplex there. You could build a triplex. Sure, because Triplexes can be between 0 and 8999ft² lots.
Ian: [00:48:12] You could do a triplex as long as setbacks and floor to area ratio are respected.
Zach: [00:48:17] As long as it works out that’s that’s the built form portion that’s not what’s being reviewed. And we certainly will be working with the city and CPED and city council members in the future, hopefully to make amendments and to change the built form portion to be a little bit better at incentivizing those duplexes and triplexes because we don’t do a good job of that right now.
Ian: [00:48:39] Who is CPED again?
Zach: [00:48:40] CPED is community planning and economic development. They write the zoning code, they send it to Planning Commission. Planning Commission will approve it and it’ll go to some other committees and eventually it’ll end up at city council. Okay, So.
Ian: [00:48:54] So CPED is city staff? Yes.
Zach: [00:48:56] City staff. Cool. Yep. So in theory, the urban neighborhood to change is a pretty massive up zone for the city. However, most lots can’t really take advantage of that up zone.
Ian: [00:49:08] Just because they’re not big enough.
Zach: [00:49:09] They are not big enough, right? They have to be 7500ft² or more. And that’s the four plus. And again, 1 to 3 units is its own land use row in the table and then four plus as its own. That’s where the cutoff is.
Ian: [00:49:24] Please tell me that everything that has a P in the four plus row also has a P for the 0 to 3.
Zach: [00:49:31] Um, not quite.
Ian: [00:49:33] Oh, my God. Zach, What. What is going on over there?
Zach: [00:49:36] So I’m not going to do this without consulting the table because it gets really confusing when you start talking about mixed use properties. There are certain areas they do not want you to build one, two, three units on top of retail. This is typically your higher intensity. They’re like, Hey, you can build four plus, but you can’t build one, two, three units. So the city doesn’t want you to under utilize like a high intensity zone, which essentially means they don’t allow one, two, three unit dwellings on your higher intensity zones like your commercial mixed use zones. They don’t want you to build one or 2 or 3 units above a large store or along like a busy corridor. So there are portions of the code where it is just not permitted to build a 1 to 3 unit, even as part of a mixed use development, that portion of the code.
Ian: [00:50:33] But four plus is allowed. Yeah.
Zach: [00:50:35] Four plus. Exactly. So if it isn’t allowed somewhere then four plus likely is the exception is the production zones.
Ian: [00:50:45] And and you know, that’s fair. Like I, I think that’s a reasonable thing to not allow. Also I can’t imagine anybody trying to build that because it would be very silly. Yeah.
Zach: [00:50:55] Yeah, definitely. Um, I’m, I’m picturing like a McMansion on top of, you know, a grocery store or something, right? Yeah. It looks hilarious in my brain. You know what?
Ian: [00:51:05] This is the Wedge Live headquarters, right? You know, John Edwards, I’m sure he would love to live in a big, giant single family house on top of an Aldi, for sure. Yeah, right.
Zach: [00:51:15] Yeah. Have a real good recording room up there. Yep, yep. I wouldn’t mind that too, but. Well, I like housing too, so I like the four plus on higher intensity while not allowing one, two, three. I think it makes some sense.
Ian: [00:51:30] Now, one of the other things that I’ve heard talked about in terms of like uses that are permitted is having a business that you’re running. Out of your home kind of thing. And there’s like really severe restrictions on like, okay, you can you can only serve one customer at a time and you can only have up to like five clients come per day kind of thing. And that does make me think more now that we live in a world where like more people are trying to work from home and you know, obviously like me, teaching a high school class entirely remotely like that doesn’t apply. I am working from home, but I don’t have clients. I don’t have my class coming here to my house.
Zach: [00:52:06] Home occupations is a weird portion of the code, and I have to admit that just doesn’t seem realistic, especially if you’re trying to run something like maybe a hair salon or something out of your house, which is totally reasonable. Like to run a small business, a bakery, something like that out of your house, probably going to want more than five clients a day. To be realistic, I don’t think like computer work or remote work is really at risk, right, Because you don’t have those physical clients. I think the goal to me seems like you’re supposed to try and limit traffic.
Ian: [00:52:35] It always comes down to traffic and parking.
Zach: [00:52:37] Yeah.
Ian: [00:52:38] Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is like it frustrates me that that is a thing that is still like a central concern in a lot of these ordinances, given that the goals of the 2040 comp plan are also like, Hey, we’re trying to build a city here where people don’t need to travel so far that they are going to be using a car. And it’s like, are we holding ourselves back from realizing that potential because we are afraid of the traffic and parking that comes with like building a city where you don’t need a car? Yeah.
Zach: [00:53:09] So neighbors for more neighbors, one of their big things they like to talk about a lot is complete neighborhoods. Yeah. To me, that means I like it to be walkable. I want to feel safe. I want to be able to get somewhere, get to retail, get to a store, grocery store or something like that without needing a car. I don’t own a car and I like it that way. And I do think sometimes the obsession with parking can get in the way of building a better cityscape, one that’s more pleasant for people to actually live in rather than just maybe visit, but also better to visit. So yeah, I mean, that’s a that’s a common concern for sure. Getting rid of parking mandates is a huge part of it.
Ian: [00:53:51] Check, did that! Transportation and land use are so intertwined and then now when we’re drilling down into land use, it’s like, oh okay, the built form and the land use permitting, those are intertwined. And it’s, you know.
Zach: [00:54:06] They are. So one of the things we’ve noticed as we’ve gone through is even within the built form portion of the code, there are specific values. So let’s talk about setbacks a little bit, because that’s the most obvious one that’s popped up to us. Setbacks are set up in such a way that they are different based on the land use district that the parcel is zoned for, even though the setbacks themselves occur in the built form districts. So the setbacks for urban neighborhood land use districts are greater than in the commercial mixed use land use districts. Okay, so there are certain parts of the city that are zoned built form corridor six, meaning you can have a six story building there. We’ve done, I guess a case study is what I’d call it, where there is a lot. I believe it’s somewhere in South Minneapolis. It’s close to one of our members down there and they found that this lot was 45ft wide. It is zoned corridor six and it will be zoned urban neighborhood three, which means it can be residential only. First of all, on a corridor six. I think there’s high frequency transit down there. That’s a separate issue entirely. But if you look at the setbacks for urban neighborhood in general, it’s urban neighborhood and residential mixed use that get these special setbacks. This setbacks for a six story building is 15ft wide for urban neighborhoods. This is a 45 foot wide parcel. So it has to be 15ft on either side, I should say.
Ian: [00:55:45] On both sides. Yeah.
Zach: [00:55:46] Which means your building can only be 15ft wide of the 45ft. This is like actually pretty common throughout the city where you have this corridor built form zone, but urban neighborhood or residential, mixed use, they both have this same problem like residential mixed use occurs almost exclusively in corridor zones, whether that’s corridor three, 4 or 6, that’s a different thing. But the setbacks are very restrictive. It essentially means that a lot of these buildings just aren’t viable. Like you’re not going to build a 15 foot wide building. My house is wider than that and it’s on a lower zone parcel.
Ian: [00:56:25] That 15 foot setback on either side applies specifically if you’re trying to do a six story building, like if you’re trying to do fewer stories. Yeah. So The factor, right?
Zach: [00:56:35] Yeah. The setbacks are. Set up in such a way that they kind of I guess Cascade is kind of a good word. So if you have a higher building, the setback has to be more As you reduce your height, the setback also reduces. So like if you had a three storey building, the setback is lower. I’m I don’t know the number off the top of my head. Right.
Ian: [00:56:53] What is the value that led us to this conclusion that like, are people worried about shadows from tall buildings or like, what are we worried about here? Yeah.
Zach: [00:57:03] So I think part of it is certainly like shadows. And if you think about where urban neighborhood is, it’s generally in residential areas, right? You know, the 90% of the city that is not along a corridor. So yeah, shadows are certainly a concern. People like to have their yards, or at least city staff thinks they do. So yeah, you have I should say there are several different kinds of setbacks. It varies based on what you’re looking at. Maybe it’s your side yard setbacks, so distance to the edge of the lot or maybe it’s your front yard and those all change and they change with building height, they change with primary district zone. Are you looking at And I think that’s the problem we’re really running into is these urban neighborhood districts and residential mixed use districts. I feel like the city had a vision that these will occur in lower density areas, but then they applied this along corridors where we want to see actual mixed use buildings, where we want to see taller buildings like six story buildings, for example, because that’s what they’ve applied the built form portion, they’ve applied that as like a six story building limit, right? And I will say, like they also have the FAR allowance. So this is your floor area ratio to go back to that a little bit. And it is set up in such a way that you get a good FAR allowance if you’re in like a corridor six zone, regardless of if you’re an urban neighborhood or commercial mixed use or something. The FAR allowance is quite high. You can build quite a large building In all of our different examples that we’ve looked at, you are unable to use the maximum FAR on on the lot we looked at. So that 45 foot wide lot, you could not build a building to the maximum FAR right. You could not because of the setbacks and the height limits.
Ian: [00:58:50] Okay. Yeah.
Zach: [00:58:51] Um, so it’s a real problem because a lot of the city is zoned residential, mixed use, like along corridors. They’ve kind of utilized that as a land use zone.
Ian: [00:59:01] It’s such a funny thing to worry about that. Like, oh, we’ve got these low density residential neighborhoods and it’ll like, you know, we can’t have these like multi-story apartment buildings, like overshadowing people’s homes because like, like I live here in Frogtown, which is predominantly single family homes. And every once in a while, you know, you’ll be on a on a walk in my neighborhood and you’ll pass by like, you know, a three story tall apartment building that’s like, you know, made of brick. And it fills like almost the entire like, it comes right up to the sidewalk and, you know, it comes right up to the property line of its next door neighbors. And and it doesn’t stick out like you walk right past it and you don’t even notice. And it’s like, oh, wait, Like, I have to really be paying attention and, you know, looking at things with my like, built form brain on, right? In order to really, like pick out like, oh yeah, that’s a different built form than its neighbors. Yeah, absolutely.
Zach: [00:59:53] A lot of our dissatisfaction really does stem from the built form portion. And I would agree that, you know, a three story building in a general residential neighborhood doesn’t hurt. I will say that with Minneapolis’s current built form code, three story buildings are only allowed in interior three and greater. And for reference, where that occurs is inner portions of South Minneapolis. And also like Dinkytown is a good example. Como area that’s like your interior three. Once you start getting outside of those like very narrow parameters, everything is two and a half stories or less. And I think a lot of that’s shadows. A lot of it’s just like you don’t the city doesn’t want to see tall buildings popping up in these residential neighborhoods. I think that three stories would be much more feasible, especially since we’re allowing Triplexes. I will say Triplexes are in a really weird spot with the current zoning code. The built form allowances essentially make it so even on a typical lot, a triplex could only have 900 square foot units, which is pretty small. That’s probably that’s a large one bedroom, maybe a small two bedroom. Okay. It’s not family housing for sure. Right. So one of the things we want to see in the future and I guess we’re past the public comment period, so it’s okay to talk about the the future is we’d like to see the built form regulations change in such a way that the floor area ratio allowances increase based on the amount of units.
Zach: [01:01:28] This is something we already do in the Minneapolis code for specifically interior three zones. The FAR allowance goes from like I think. Is 0.5 to 0.6 for duplexes and 0.7 for triplexes, meaning you can have those larger units. We’d like to see something similar in the interior two and one districts because that makes up so much more of the city and it would actually make these triplexes and duplexes more viable to build. What we’re seeing oftentimes, unless it happens to be in like a high, high demand housing area like around the university, is always a good example. There’s plenty of triplexes that are getting built there. Those have different built form regulations generally, so they can be bigger than most of the city. And part of that is those like gradual increases as you increase the amount of units. So we’d like to see something similar throughout the city just to incentivize developers and builders and potential homeowners to actually build these units rather than large McMansions. Like if you think about right now to build a single 2 or 3 family home, the FAR allowance in interior one and two is the same for all those types of buildings. So let’s say on your lot, it’s 5000ft². Generally it’s 0.5 is your floor area ratio allowance. You have 2500ft² to work with, regardless of if it’s a single 2 or 3 family home.
Zach: [01:02:56] Right? You start dividing that up and eventually you’re going to get down to where your triplex is going to have 800 square foot units, which is pretty small. And especially when you start consider like shared areas, maybe you need to have a shared laundry area, right? You need to have stairs and that all goes towards your floor area ratio. Basements are an exception. They don’t go towards the floor area ratio. So you can build out a basement and it doesn’t go towards it, but it’s still going to be a small triplex. So that’s something we want to see change in the future and we’re hopeful that the city is receptive. And they also have precedent in their very own code of them doing that. They’re aware that it incentivizes building larger buildings. We’re hopeful that we’ll see that change in the future, and it’s something I look forward to working on because I love middle housing, incremental housing, and there’s some really cool ones in my neighborhood. I live in Northeast Park and I see a few of them around. There’s a there’s a quad plex near me that I love to see. So I’d love to see these incremental houses, just duplexes. Triplexes the city legalized them. We aren’t really seeing them be built anywhere except for where there’s already like high housing demand. So we think there should be a step to incentivize these more.
Ian: [01:04:10] Given how complex all of this is to talk about like, I’m not surprised that we have little details that are like, Oh, they implemented this in this one instance, and nobody thought to like expand that concept out to a bunch of other cases. Yeah, but good that we’ve got neighbors for more neighbors, you know, taking a look at things and being like, wait a minute.
Zach: [01:04:32] Well, I would encourage anybody that cares about this to reach out to their council members. If you live in Minneapolis, reach out to them or we’re still undergoing city council elections. Find someone who maybe agrees with your views on this and support them. Back them. We don’t endorse candidates, so I certainly won’t name names. But you can you can look online and find it. There are lists of candidates, active candidates throughout Minneapolis. Nice.
Ian: [01:04:59] Nice. I think that’s a good place to to end it.
Zach: [01:05:02] I think so, too.
Ian: [01:05:03] Zach, thanks for coming on.
Zach: [01:05:03] Yeah, thanks, Ian, for having me.
Ian: [01:05:06] Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Streets.mn Podcast. This show is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-derivative license, so feel free to republish the episode as long as you’re not altering it and you are not profiting from it. The music in this episode is by Erik Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was hosted by me, Ian R Buck, and was edited by myself and Tim Marino. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn Podcast. So if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [[email protected]]. Until next time, take care.