Slate =Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.
The City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city’s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.
Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today.
1 comment:
I have plenty of doubt about how much banning single family zoning will help. Where I live, once the single family zoning was removed, at first the result was affordable housing was built when the neighborhood was low income and mixed race. Over the past 20 years, the neighborhood has become more "desirable" and all the new multi family housing has become high end "pocket neighborhoods" that function like mini gated communities. There is a real risk that most of the older multi family units will be turned into similar gentrified developments over the next decade, as there is a really noxious developer who has targeted my neighborhood for his greenwashed "pocket neighborhood" gentrified developments. For profit developers always find a way to ruin the best civic efforts to build affordable housing.
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