Matt states "I'm curious how people see the Minneapolis 2040 plan as
"experimental." Nearly all of our city was built before single-family
zoning, before use-based zoning."
First, even the New York Times highlighted the 2040 plan because no other
city in the country has done what Minneapolis proposes to do, thereby
defining "experimental."
Second, our zoning restrictions were fairly early (1913 and by 1924) and
huge areas of the city were either not yet built by the time zoning
restrictions were imposed or the 19th-centuiry structures that pre-dated
1913 have been demolished and replaced by much more recent, and usually
much cheaper, housing stock.
Minneapolis was far from built out in 1913, when a bunch of neighborhood
groups pushed for, and got, a new system of restricted zoning to protect
upscale residential areas and to establish industrial-only zones like the
Minneapolis Industrial Area and the Midway area. One after another in the
immediate pre-World War I era, resident groups and planners carved out
areas that could not have either commercial or industrial uses for the
land. Residential-only areas could have churches and schools and parks, but
the city drew strict lines around blocks or streets where one could
install, say, an automobile service station. Much less a factory or a
warehouse. Nobody wanted to live next door to dirt, grime, noise, and lots
of movement of people and vehicles.
And nobody wanted to live next to a "tenement," either. Those were
multi-family apartment buildings built in a strip of attached dwellings.
Most of them were inhabited by economically marginal populations of the
city (like the men who worked for the railroads or in the flour mills, for
example), and that kind of apartment dwelling was not permitted in the
upscale areas. You couldn't have an apartment hotel either. Tight
strictures. The parts of Minneapolis where you have an oil-and-grease
manufacturer or a farm machine factory right next to a three-bedroom
residence pre-date 1924. [My neighborhood was not restrictively zoned until
1919, and we still have some remaining side-by-side pre-zoning anomalies
like that.]
The first zoning map of Minneapolis was issued in 1924--with a great deal
of controversy, because there was graft involved, etc. (we had a dirty city
back then); the war had interrupted lots of stuff, so the complete
working-out of the zoning code was delayed. The Planning Commission was
established, and one of the men who had pushed for city-wide restricted
zoning, James T. Elwell (a real estate developer; what's new?), was named
the first president of that Commission.
So city control over what got built where was fully set up a hundred years
ago. Minneapolis was more densely populated in the 1930s-1950s, before
interstate highways demolished thousands of residential structures in the
heart of the city in the late 1950s and 1960s. Further, nobody mentions
much how the University of Minnesota MInneapolis campus expansions have
destroyed thousands of houses and apartment buildings, too, in too many
cases just for athletic facilities. Very expensive quasi-dormitory
apartment buildings have replaced houses and small apartment buildings in
Prospect Park, for instance.
Given the history of the development of our city, I disagree with Matt's
assertion that most of today's Minneapolis was built before restrictive
zoning.
Huge swaths of South and Southwest Minneapolis, plus lots of North and
Northeast, had yet to be built in 1924--I refer people to the very late,
post-World War II addition of much of Richfield into Minneapolis where
there were dairy farm fields and barns into the 1960s in undeveloped
parcels. The entire northern fringe of Minneapolis was similarly un-built
until after 1945, both west and east of the Mississippi River (there's no
"north side" of the river in our city).
Our zoning code was loosened in the early 1960s to permit practically
anything, and much of the developers' irritation and impatience with the
city restrictions are due to the 1988 tightening of the zoning, which
reasserted single-family neighborhoods as viable.
Perhaps Matt means to refer to the post-1988 re-imposition of residential
zoning restrictions, which were neighborhood-driven, and developers'
complaints about those restrictions these three decades. I do agree: Most
of the remaining Minneapolis was built before 1988.
Connie Sullivan
Como, 1882, but built out only in the 1960s