{"id":46116,"date":"2018-12-10T03:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=46116"},"modified":"2018-12-09T15:01:27","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T20:01:27","slug":"minneapolis-abolishes-residential-zoning-to-combat-racist-segregation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/12\/10\/minneapolis-abolishes-residential-zoning-to-combat-racist-segregation\/","title":{"rendered":"Minneapolis abolishes residential zoning to combat racist segregation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve never actually been to Minnesota (despite being a lifetime fan of the Minnesota Vikings), so I didn’t realize that Minneapolis — and presumably other Minnesota cities historically instituted residential zoning to enforce racial segregation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much as any to entrench segregation, high housing costs, and sprawl as the American urban paradigm over the past century.<\/p>\n

On Friday, the City Council passed Minneapolis 2040, a comprehensive plan to permit three-family homes in the city\u2019s residential neighborhoods, abolish parking minimums for all new construction, and allow high-density buildings along transit corridors.<\/p>\n

\u201cLarge swaths of our city are exclusively zoned for single-family homes, so unless you have the ability to build a very large home on a very large lot, you can\u2019t live in the neighborhood,\u201d Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told me this week. Single-family home zoning was devised as a legal way to keep black Americans and other minorities from moving into certain neighborhoods, and it still functions as an effective barrier today. Abolishing restrictive zoning, the mayor said, was part of a general consensus that the city ought to begin to mend the damage wrought in pursuit of segregation. Human diversity \u2014 which nearly everyone in this staunchly liberal city would say is a good thing \u2014 only goes as far as the housing stock.<\/p>\n

It may be as long as a year before Minneapolis zoning regulations and building codes reflect what\u2019s outlined in the 481-page plan, which was crafted by city planners. Still, its passage makes the 422,000-person city, part of the Twin Cities region, one of the rare U.S. metropolises to publicly confront the racist roots of single-family zoning\u2014and try to address the issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of research has been done on the history that\u2019s led us to this point,\u201d said Cam Gordon, a city councilman who represents the Second Ward, which includes the University of Minnesota\u2019s flagship campus. \u201cThat history helped people realize that the way the city is set up right now is based on this government-endorsed and sanctioned racist system.\u201d Easing the plan\u2019s path to approval, he said, was the fact that modest single-family homes in appreciating neighborhoods were already making way for McMansions. Why not allow someone to build three units in the same-size building? (Requirements on height, yard space, and permeable surface remain unchanged in those areas.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve never actually been to Minnesota (despite being a lifetime fan of the Minnesota Vikings), so I didn’t realize that Minneapolis — and presumably other Minnesota cities historically instituted residential zoning to enforce racial segregation: Minneapolis will become the first major U.S. city to end single-family home zoning, a policy that has done as much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,13],"tags":[198,426,489,1020,99],"class_list":["post-46116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-equalrights","tag-housing","tag-minnesota","tag-progressives","tag-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bZO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46117,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46116\/revisions\/46117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}