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2020-08-25 c
Mistakes Were Made II - Mogadishu on the Mississippi Destroyed by Progressives

Before the Storm in Minneapolis

A needlessly racialized zoning fight offers some cautionary lessons for supporters of housing reform.

In the months before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a small group was doing its best to spread the message that the city was deeply racist. They were not protesters or looters, or the organized African-American community of the city’s soon-to-be-burned North Side, but rather the mayor and city council. Their focus was what might have seemed an obscure and technical topic: zoning. They were led by one-time San Francisco city planner Lisa Bender, president of the city council, a position considered almost as powerful as that of the mayor.

“We’ve inherited a system that both for decades has privileged those with the most and forgotten the people that we really have left behind,” Bender said. “And housing is inextricably linked with income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.” She put forth a plan to relax single-family zoning and to permit more multifamily home construction in a city that was—at least pre-George Floyd—attracting millennials and increasing its population, anomalously for the Upper Midwest. Mayor Jacob Frey shared Bender’s view. The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies implicitly through our zoning code.”

What might have been both an effective consensus reform and a change that could inspire other cities and suburbs to follow suit backfired, thanks to being tied—unnecessarily and unjustifiably—to alleged racism. The plan did not originate in the city’s black community, and black leaders in Minneapolis have not even mentioned it as part of what the city must do to expunge racism in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was driven by the city’s white progressive leadership.

Yet loosening land-use policy has appeal across the political spectrum, not just among progressive urbanists. Indeed, the Trump administration has committed itself to increasing construction and housing supply by making it easier to build. “Owning a home is an essential component of the American Dream,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson has said. “It is imperative that we remove regulatory barriers that prevent that dream from becoming a reality.” “We’re all hoping for Minneapolis to succeed,” said a representative for the National League of Cities in December, at a Department of Housing and Urban Development conference in Washington. The ingredients to build a coalition for change were in place.

Instead of seeking political consensus, those promoting Minneapolis 2040—a “comprehensive plan” that includes both the citywide rezoning and a “mandatory inclusionary-zoning” law, requiring apartment developers to include lower-priced units in every new building of 20 units or more—made the reforms inseparable from racial issues. As a result, the law divided liberals in this deep-blue city, which has been growing for the past decade, though its population remains well short of its 1950s peak; President Trump critiqued the plan as typifying a Democrat plot to destroy suburbs. Opponents of the plan, many of them residents of the relatively few neighborhoods where single-family homes predominate—though not to the exclusion of two and three-family homes—suddenly found themselves attacked as the heirs of Jim Crow, notwithstanding census data that clearly demonstrates significant racial diversity, even in the city’s affluent neighborhoods.

Thus, because of how the issue was framed, an inherently good idea—reassessing zoning for its effects in suppressing the housing market—became a hot-button issue. (read more)

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