It’s December, budgets have been passed, and cities turn to introspection. Despite the 50-degree temperatures, it’s a great time to hole up with a cup of cocoa and look back on the 12 months in Twin Cities urbanism. In case you missed them, these are the largest stories that omitted my desk in 2023.
Ongoing housing crisis
For the umpteenth 12 months in a row, that is crucial urban story all across the U.S. and Canada. Housing prices keep rising, and rents together with it, as an ongoing shortage of homes that has grown more acute within the last 15 years has led to a Darwinian housing market (i.e., survival of the richest).
What to do about it’s one other matter: Cities and counties all through the metro area have invested significant dollars in improved reasonably priced housing funding — see this 12 months’s $18 million investment from Minneapolis — and the state government approved almost $300 million in funding for reasonably priced housing subsidies and preservation. Still, it’s not nearly enough.
Other than perhaps gasoline (sigh), housing costs are the first driver of individuals’s perceptions of inflation. This sort of emergency footing should shift city planning priorities — for instance, minimizing the design regulations I wrote about in July or accelerating zoning reforms just like the ones I wrote about in March. There are not any easy state and native solutions for this widespread problem. On the very least, cities have to do more to spice up housing construction; without that, another programs are fundamentally kneecapped.
Environmental lawsuits and comp plans
On a related note, the yearslong legal saga over Minneapolis’ progressive 2040 Comprehensive Plan plan is a nasty sign for each climate motion and housing affordability. I wrote about this back in September when Judge Joseph Klein issued one other injunction that put a stop to housing projects all across town. As described within the Star Tribune, the reversion to the 2030 comprehensive plan jeopardized things like desperately needed housing for unsheltered people.
Environmental review challenges for comprehensive planning pose an enormous problem for housing and another issues that cities might reasonably be tasked with solving. By applying the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA) to a comprehensive plan update — inherently a vague document — the litigants and the proceedings in Judge Klein’s courtroom have set a dangerous precedent for applying environmental review to broad-scale municipal zoning.
The worst-case scenario could be something like what California has seen with the misuse of its California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) law, where an almost Alice in Wonderland irony has emerged of the most effective policies for climate motion being halted within the name of environmental protection. The Minnesota Legislature needs to repair this before another comp plans get tied up in similar frivolous litigation. Minneapolis, too, must get denser zoning back on the books as soon as possible.
Post-COVID offices and downtowns
The longer term of downtowns are probably the largest unknown factor for cities, with huge ramifications for the longer term of municipal finance and concrete life. No one really knows how shifting paperwork trends will impact the central business districts, where a lot transportation infrastructure comes together. Loads depends upon the habits and preferences of companies and employees, and there’s no real strategy to predict exactly where those behavioral relationships will land.
It seems clear that change is sweeping through Twin Cities downtowns and likewise, as I wrote about in April, suburban office parks. One big impact will probably be a discount within the business tax base, and in a way that will probably be unevenly distributed. In some ways, downtown Minneapolis is likely to be more resilient to disruption than the remainder of the region’s business real estate market, but with such high valuations, additionally they have much farther to fall.
Meanwhile, the continued labor shortage hasn’t made it easier to ask employees to “come back” to the office. For instance, the overwhelming majority of St. Paul government desk jobs are still fully distant, leaving City Hall a ghost town. If city staff are missing in motion, it doesn’t bode well for St. Paul’s downtown economy. Incentivizing housing conversions, as I wrote about in August, or improving downtown public space seem critically essential.
Adjusting the freeway / transit balance
This 12 months was a banner moment for legislative policy, with one-party control and an enormous budget surplus that removed normal constraints on government ambition. Behind the scenes, too, the DFL “trifecta” allowed a long-postponed shift in transportation policies. Since then, we’re getting a way of how all this recent money might play out. Thus far, it’s not nearly so simple as I’d imagined.
For instance, due to the complexity of developing a brand new bidding process, it’s going to take years for the portion of the metro-area sales tax dedicated to biking infrastructure to truly affect city and county budgets. Transit funding, too, is just not as straightforward. The brand new money shifts responsibility for operations away from counties and into the Metro Transit budget, which impacts in another way across the region.
Yet recent dedicated revenue puts Metro Transit in a distinct spot than a lot of its peer agencies across the country, who’re facing a “fiscal cliff” with the disappearance of federal relief money. Most U.S. cities will likely need to make harmful cuts to service; the largest barrier for Metro Transit, however, will remain staffing and attracting post-COVID ridership.
Meanwhile, the Legislature’s recent carbon emission reduction policy for freeway expansion should eventually nudge our roadway improvements toward reducing carbon pollution, although straight away it looks as if it’s going to take years to return dividends. MnDOT has been quietly expanding freeways across the region, for instance, adding a lane to Interstate Hwy. 494 through Richfield and Edina through an accumulation of “auxiliary improvements.” The agency’s “Corridors of Commerce” fund allows the Legislature to bypass usual process and earmark highways like I-94 near Monticello for expansion. Even when freeway removal is placed on the table, it’s really hard to place an end to business as usual after a century of freeway consistent construction.
Met Council governance
Finally, there’s a possible transformation to regional planning, long a relative strength for the Twin Cities over the country’s mass of disorganized metros. The state’s Metropolitan Governance Task Force has been meeting for the reason that summer to choose whether or not, or how, to alter the best way the Metropolitan Council functions.
The committee is strange because among the members would love to see the Met Council weakened, while others would love to see it given a stronger ability to set policy around transportation and land use within the Twin Cities. While this makes for odd debates and reflects state politics, the regional consensus is prone to be different in an increasingly Democratically aligned metro area.
In conversations with each Met Council members and staff through the years, I’ve seen a whole lot of frustration on each side, and something should change. Many options appear to be on the table, including breaking off Metro Transit governance from other council duties and/or shifting to an elected level of presidency. The present system isn’t broken a lot as within the doldrums, but it’s going to be critical for the duty force to get this right since the Met Council is a possible huge asset to the Twin Cities.
There’s a public listening session with the Metropolitan Governance Task Force at 2 p.m. today, Friday, Dec. 8, at St. Paul’s Wilder Foundation headquarters, plus more next week. The duty will probably be presenting a few of their work, hosting panel discussions, and giving community members a probability to weigh in.