Via the Star Tribune’s Editorial page, here’s a chart from the Met Council’s latest report on housing trends. It shows the average rents charted against the ever-tightening rental vacancy rate: Here are the key points from the report about this chart: The region’s rental vacancy rate has been under 5% since the fourth quarter of […]
Announcing streets.mn’s new Mission and Core Values: To foster positive connections and inclusive conversations about better places in Minnesota As Bill Lindeke said in this intro to the new Mission, “Throughout the process of coming up with the mission, we uncovered a larger conversation about the shared values that tie together the writers, readers, commenters, […]
The battlefield of the urban housing crisis is a confusing place to find oneself these days. At a time when American politics are as starkly divided as they have been in a century, housing politics do not fit comfortably into the familiar right-left narrative. Among a variety of constituencies, from older homeowning liberals to younger […]
MPR News published an excellent article yesterday about the lack of housing for people with Section 8 vouchers. It contained this eye opening chart about the state of the rental market in the Twin Cities these days. Here’s a quote from the piece: Voucher holders usually have just a few months to find an apartment […]
Contrary to most of the commentary, Minneapolis 2040, this decade’s comprehensive plan re-do, is about a lot more than allowing fourplexes in all of Minneapolis and skyscraper apartments in your neighborhood. It starts with 14 basic goals adopted by the City Council to provide direction to staff in the development of the draft Comprehensive Plan. The 97 policies in the Comprehensive Plan flow from those goals. Under […]
Minneapolis needs more homes. That idea is one of the core tenets of the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan. For a number of reasons (demographic, economic, cultural, etc.), more people are, and soon will be, living in the city. We need enough homes for everyone who is choosing to live here, or we’ll continue to see […]
In 2009, my wife and I were looking for a house. I had just finished law school. I had temporary work as a law clerk and wasn’t sure where (or if?) I’d find a permanent job—the legal job market had cratered along with the rest of the economy. So we looked for a place near […]
This is the second in a series of posts addressing the arguments against Minneapolis’s Draft Comprehensive Plan; the first is here. It Doesn’t Achieve “Affordability” I’m not an economist, or an affordable housing expert. So I want to start with a link to this post by Atrios, who is (or, at least, has been) an […]
Let’s talk about ADUs. First the definition from the City of Minneapolis: An accessory dwelling unit (ADU) – also referred to as a granny flat, mother-in-law apartment, or carriage house – is a self-contained living unit that can be located within the walls of an existing or newly constructed home, or that can be an […]
Word has leaked of a very preliminary plan to legalize fourplexes in virtually every neighborhood in Minneapolis. It’s one part of a larger draft comprehensive plan that hasn’t yet been made public. If implemented, it would be the boldest land-use reform in the country, reversing a decades-long trend of restrictions that have contributed to higher […]