Centering Equity and Inclusion in City Planning
Minneapolis, MN
Population: 300,000 - 500,000 | Government type: City | Topic: Minneapolis 2040
OVERVIEW
In Minnesota, state law requires communities to update their city planning documents, including their land use and infrastructure plan, every ten years. The Minneapolis City Council opted to use their plan update as an opportunity to take a more nuanced approach to address a wide range of issues, from race equity and housing affordability to climate change and improving transportation equity. The Minneapolis 2040 plan, adopted in 2018, serves as the City’s legal land-use plan. It updated the city’s infrastructure and policy framework, which informs budgets and policy changes moving forward.
The Metropolitan Council is an appointed governing body comprising 17 members. Currently, the council oversees high level goals and planning in the region relating to transportation, housing affordability, infrastructure (such as sewer capacity), and many other regional planning goals. They also plan and operate the region’s transit system. Transit is not operated or funded by the city and they have no control over the allocation of transportation funds from the state legislature or County sales tax revenues. One of the main motivations for the in-depth 2040 planning process stemmed from the city’s desire to articulate its own vision for land use and transportation, grounded in the city community’s data and goals.
Prior to Minneapolis 2040, the city passed a complete streets policy in 2014, in addition to creating a protected bikeway and eliminating parking requirements. The subsequent Transportation Action Plan, adopted at the end of 2020, prioritizes a complete streets hierarchy of pedestrians, bikes, transit, and then single-occupancy vehicles. For the past several decades, many neighborhoods have prioritized fast car travel through communities over other forms of accessibility and transit. This recent reprioritization marks an important shift toward focusing on sustainability, equity, and accessibility for the city’s most vulnerable communities.
While the Minneapolis 2040 Plan’s infrastructure policies built off of the already existing complete streets policy, Climate Action Plan, and other adopted policies, housing policies were less developed and were, therefore, a primary focus for the engagement and development of the 2040 plan. During the several years of community engagement for the plan, Minneapolis was growing quickly. As a result the city had low vacancy rates and rising rents, both of which had a disproportionate impact on BIPOC and low-income communities. The plan’s land use and housing policies responded to this issue with a clear community priority by addressing housing stability and affordability.
It’s important to note that the city did not carve out areas to be treated differently for housing and zoning. Instead, the council felt it was critically important to take a city-wide approach in order to adequately address housing affordability.
The 2040 plan included:
A proposed zoning map for Minneapolis, from the city's new 20-year plan. The light yellow areas allow for up to four-unit apartment buildings. Even taller buildings with more units would be allowed in the darker areas (Source: City of Minneapolis)
Allowing small multi-family buildings city-wide, allowing up to three units on any lots throughout the city. This in effect eliminated single-family zoning, which was historically used to increase racial disparities and facilitate segregated neighborhoods. This change also made it easier to build along transit corridors across the city as part of a transit-oriented development approach, along with an inclusionary zoning requirement for affordable units.
Policies to support race equity and climate justice with a strong tie between destinations and transit access. The city articulated a clear priority to enhance transit, particularly through local bus service.
The city made a significant investment in its community engagement process which intentionally included outreach to cultural communities. It also included more typical public meetings as well as direct outreach at street festivals and digital outreach. As a result of this robust engagement plan, along with the Minneapolis 2040 framework, city departments now use the plan to guide strategies on planning and policy work including budget proposals, ordinances, and implementation plans. Input from the community helped create a vision of where residents want to be in thirty years’ time. This vision covered climate change, a new public safety system, race and equity, housing across all price points, and more.
As a guide for policy, 2040 is helping Minneapolis become more resilient and able to do proactive work, including pre-crisis work. These documents are very effective in driving policy change, particularly around housing. For example:
The city now has policies around homelessness in place that helped them respond to Covid-19, housing residents in hotels and ensuring shelter.
The city wrote a “renter first” policy, which was modeled after their complete streets policy, which ensures the city will prioritize the health and stability of renters in housing above all other priorities.
It is now a priority to leverage tools such as rental licensing to ensure safe and healthy conditions for rental apartments. As a result, city employees focus on stable housing, as well as safe, clean, and healthy environments. They also use city resources to track complaints in order to ID and sue landlords that aren’t complying with maintenance requirements.
The city is pursuing a range of housing policies, such as renter protections, inclusionary zoning, legalizing certain types of housing such as single-room occupancy hotels, building shelters, increasing supportive housing, and pursuing rent increase caps (although they are currently preempted).
The plan ensures a standard housing development policy across the city instead of a project-by-project negotiation and requires affordable housing in all buildings over 20 units citywide.
Collaborative Governance
The city developed its community engagement plan internally in 2015 and the council approved it prior to the public launch in 2016. This approval vote ensured the body was in agreement as to the goals, priorities, and methods that would be used in the engagement process. The framework emphasized intentional engagement of underrepresented communities. At the time, neighborhood associations had historically been very engaged in development and land-use decisions, and this plan sought to engage less traditional voices along with white affluent stakeholders who had more traditionally been involved.
In hopes of gathering a diverse set of voices, the city took numerous steps to ensure they were engaging with residents that traditionally do not engage in the political process. In addition to putting out ads targeting certain communities, they also worked to recruit residents to attend forums through their relationships with cultural and community-based organizations. To make them as inclusive and robust as possible, these forums catered to residents with childcare needs, provided food, and engaged with local artists. Staff also attended all types of events at different phases of the engagement process to reach residents where they were at.
The goal of these forums was to offer basic statistics and lesser-known information about the city. Central to this education was a very clear understanding of the city’s history of racial restriction in housing, including maps of redlining and racially restrictive covenants. The forums invited valuable experiences and opinions from residents with a variety of backgrounds to put in front of the council. The council and city staff expected friction around housing, so the forums offered insight into the problems residents were facing and created a space for advocacy groups to plug in alongside individual community members, allowing them to offer solutions to the problems with which they were intimately familiar.
Emphasis on equity
In its public messaging, the city was intentional in emphasizing the impact of racial exclusion created and reinforced by housing regulations.. Community presentations shared visuals of the redlining map, racially restrictive covenants, and the city zoning map. In one exercise, planning staff produced a visual map revealing red lining from the federal government and asked residents to put a pin where they lived to see if they lived in an area that had historically been redlined. This opened a conversation about how these historical practices continue to impact the city’s BIPOC communities.
So many health outcomes and upstream factors—such as asthma rates, lead poisoning, health and wellness, renter status, and income—are easily mapped. In many cases, the maps overlap almost perfectly. The patterns we see today are the direct result of redlining and other policy decisions of the past, currently codified in city law and zoning policies. Minneapolis 2040 is a plan to dismantle the policies and rectify decades of their inequitable impacts.
Analysis
Preemption: Cities are required to update planning documents every ten years in Minnesota and other states may also have similar requirements. The state of Minnesota does regulate various policy areas such as housing - for example, they preempt rent control except for a direct vote of the people, which the City Council is currently pursuing - and the Metropolitan Council plays an outsized role in transportation at the regional level. As the city lacks authority for transit planning, this process tried to compensate for that by setting a long term vision to help guide the county’s work.
Local government dynamics: The Minneapolis City Council is currently fairly progressive as a body, a shift over the past decade. As with many governing bodies, issue areas are not all equal when it comes to decision-making. The council successfully deliberated on and decided on the scope of the 2040 planning process prior to embarking on the effort. As a result, the outcomes enjoyed broad enough support for the plan to pass with a vote of 12-1.
Policy strength - Minneapolis 2040 is one of the country’s foremost examples of comprehensive planning, centering community voice and racial equity as the foundation of planning a vision for the city for the next several decades. The innovative citywide approach to permit multi-family properties across the city ensures flexibility and options for growth management as the population increases.
Last updated: January 25, 2021
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