Minneapolis Residential Discrimination: Why Eliminating Single-Family Housing with Neo-Liberal Zoning will Fail

The spatial distribution of housing in Minneapolis and all of the Twin Cities metro area is a

product of race and class.  Yet curing this discrimination does not reside in the elimination of single-family housing through changes in zoning or a comprehensive plan.  Such an approach, call it neo-liberal zoning, is destined to achieve the same results in land use that neo-liberalism achieved economically over the last 40 years domestically and internationally.
Residential housing patterns are the product of discrimination.  Private discriminatory preferences coupled with market decisions were enabled by racial covenants, government redlining, and zoning to produce the segregation patterns we see today. Countless books, such as Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s classic American Apartheid, tell this story well.  Nearly 25 years ago at the Institute of Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota, I helped author a study pointing to the Twin Cities Metro region being the third most segregated urban area in the nation.  More recently, the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity located  persistent segregation in the placement of low income housing and education policy choices that concentrate low income people of color in specific neighborhoods and schools.
Fixing this segregation demands a metro-wide solution.  Yet Minneapolis has acted on its own via its 2040 comprehensive plan to address this problem.  It solution mostly includes elimination of single-family zoning, believing that intensification of land use along with market incentives will encourage the building of more housing.  Presumably this market-driven approach will mean more housing in more places, thereby fixing the economic and racial residential discrimination.
Both the New York Times and current Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson laud this market-driven fix.  Unfortunately, this approach will fail, exacerbating existing problems.
The Minneapolis approach to liberating the market to address its housing woes is neo-liberal zoning.  Neo-liberalism is the term used to describe a series of US domestic and international economic policies that begin with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (in the UK)  and continued through Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and into the present with Donald Trump.  Neo-liberals believe that a return to market fundamentalism–cutting government regulation and business taxes along with globalization in free trade–would rejuvenate domestic and world economies.  The reality, as many economists such as Thomas Piketty, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz have described and statistics show, is that neo-liberalism has produced the greatest gaps between the rich and poor in the US since before the Great Depression.  The rich have truly gotten richer, with the middle and lower classes gaining little.  Maybe we are overall richer as a nation as a result of neo-liberalism, but the externalities of these policies have produced powerful economic inequities that overlap with race.
The elimination of single-family zoning to encourage intensified land use across the  city rests on a similar logic that will yield parallel results.  In theory the breaking up of  large single family houses in South Minneapolis will produce more housing, but it is doubtful it will be low income or affordable.  Conversely, permitting the break up of existing homes in North Minneapolis into multi-family units or their demolishing and replacement with multiple units too will not guarantee affordable housing in integrated neighborhoods.  This is a recipe for gentrification as developers will enter areas, buy homes, and dislocate current residents by building  more high end units. 
The Minneapolis comp plan fix ignores the realities of how housing markets  work.  While there may be a local demand for affordable housing, housing is also a national market  sensitive to price, profit, and cost issues that often are not local.  Developers have few incentives to provide affordable housing, and Minneapolis’s neo-liberal zoning amounts to no more than government sanctioned market red lining.
Beyond the fact the neo-liberal zoning will not fix the segregation problems, elimination of single family zoning will produce additional problems.  One, there is an inherent value in preserving  a mixture of uses both from a historic preservation perspective, but also in terms of how a multiplicity of uses, ages, and styles of buildings and residential options appeals to the widest variety of individuals.  As Jane Jacobs, perhaps the greatest 20th century scholar on cities wrote in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, cities are generators of diversity, it is that which makes them interesting and centers of commerce.  Two, phasing out single family zoning does not eliminate a demand for these types of units and people seeking them, often middle class and those starting families, will flee to the suburbs. Three, for many, single family homes represent a sense of community, connectedness, and stability that are worth preserving.  Finally, given how interconnected  residential and education discrimination are, tackling one without addressing the other dooms solving both problems.
Minneapolis’s population is exploding and more housing is needed to address that demand.   This housing needs to address all income levels and needs, and be spatially distributed in a way that is economically and racially fair.  Unfortunately, Minneapolis’s neo-liberal zoning policies will do little to address these issues.

PS:  David Schultz is Hamline University Professor of Political Science.  He is a former city director of code enforcement, zoning, and planning and  a former housing and economic planner.  He also served on the St. Paul Housing Board of Appeals, appointed to it by then Mayor George Latimer.