Single-family zoning is actually a historical anomaly: much of it dates to the 1970s. Supporters of the 2040 plan's housing provisions pointed out that many "single-family" neighborhoods in Minneapolis already contain duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, and even small apartment buildings scattered throughout. These houses are "grandfathered in"—illegal to build today, but legacies of a time when neighborhoods were allowed to evolve and fill in incrementally even as the city also expanded its borders.

This is the traditional development pattern—incrementally up, incrementally out, and incrementally more intense. And it is a tried and true recipe for building real, sustainable wealth in a place over time.

The 2040 plan is a huge step toward a return to that recipe.

The Choice: Concentrate Change or Distribute its Impacts

Political pressures, mandates from the regional Metropolitan Council, and the stated priorities of Minneapolis's mayor and most city council members meant that improving housing affordability and accommodating growth were going to be priorities of the 2040 plan. But there were multiple ways that priority could have been expressed.

The city could have gone with the orderly but dumb approach of even further concentrating new development in a minority of neighborhoods, by offering dramatic upzones [increasing the building height and/or density of housing allowed] in relatively few areas as a way of trying to meet density and housing production goals. This would have been the path of least resistance in many ways. If you promise homeowners in wealthy neighborhoods that you won't mess with anything on their streets, you don't get an insurgency of apocalyptic yard signs. If you don't rock the boat in North Minneapolis, whose residents are sensitive to the question of gentrification and who will benefit from change, you probably don't help a whole lot, but you don't upset the status quo a whole lot either.

Large, established developers would have liked it just fine. These are companies that know how to work the system and are happy to build large projects—100, 200, 300 apartments—in locations making the rapid jump to a much greater development intensity. Indeed, at least one prominent Twin Cities developer dismissed the triplex proposal as "silly"—i.e. not anything that would turn him a profit. It's much smaller-scale developers that tackle projects like triplexes in neighborhood interiors.

Big developers would rather stick to the handful of hot neighborhoods. When an entire city's worth of demand for new homes is concentrated in a few locations, the resulting rapid transformation of those locations allows the biggest development players to squeeze would-be small developers out of the market by outbidding them for land (and driving up land prices, as long-time owners seek a windfall).

Meanwhile, the rest of the city would continue to be more and more off-limits to many current and aspiring residents.

The Answer: Spreading Out the Benefits and the Discomfort

The blanket-upzone approach—allow a little bit of change everywhere instead of a lot of change in a few spots—is different. Instead of orderly but dumb, it's chaotic but smart.

It's far less likely to create speculative windfall gains for a few well-connected land owners, because this approach doesn't pick winners. Instead, it mitigates the tendency toward "hot" neighborhoods absorbing all of the new development, and lets a more organic form of feedback show us where people are eager to live. And it can benefit the whole city in different ways:

In the wealthiest neighborhoods, parts of town where million-dollar home price tags are a clear indicator of huge demand, people have already been willing to pay a lot to tear down an old house and build a big house. It's not unreasonable to think some triplexes will now be built instead. More people will get to live in these neighborhoods. And the added population will support transit service and thriving commercial areas.

For middle-class neighborhoods: This plan will hopefully take some upward price pressure off existing housing, as there will be less competition for it. These areas are often the "second choice" neighborhoods for those who can't quite afford Southwest Minneapolis, so they should see a pretty direct filtering effect.

For "hot" neighborhoods, this plan may represent a chance to breathe a little, as some developers turn their attention elsewhere. One important observation is that if this comes to pass, it will better distribute the burdens of growth on the city's public infrastructure. Right now, a rush-hour bus ride from downtown to Uptown, a distance of about two miles, can take 45 minutes. Meanwhile, the streets in much of the city have plenty of excess capacity.