Planning Issues in the Twin Cities Metro Area

Myron Orfield

Curt Johnson, Chair, Metropolitan Council

The political realities that form the context for everything we have been listening to and discussing are really tough. If we drift very far into this analysis without remembering them, we will take a cold bath, inevitably, later. One of the realities is that much of the moving around is driven by a fear of crime and a quest for a better educational situation for kids. To be sure, crime is magnified by the media far beyond the proportions that may actually exist, and schools are probably more even than they are different, but the perceptions are powerful, and they drive behavior.

We have an intense worship for local government in Minnesota. We want it close, and we don't like it if it gets very far away from us. We don't realize that we are unusual. If it weren't for Illinois and Pennsylvania, we would have the dubious distinction of having the most local government per capita of any state. On many issues, it serves us well. On these issues, it serves us poorly.

Though we still bask in the tradition of "Minnesota nice," we have had a tendency to take issues like this, demonize people or constituencies, and divide up along certain lines. The best way I can illustrate that to you is to suggest that more than any place I know about, we do policy discussions in Minnesota like church: we convene mostly the people who already agree on certain fundamentals, then we have the discussion. We give evidence time and again that we are a little shy about intellectual conflict. For example, I'm trying to count the number of Republicans in this room, and I'm still working on my first hand. At the conferences orchestrated by the Center of the American Experiment, I get the opposite feeling.

To make progress on these important regional challenges, we have got to get together across lines more often. If we can accomplish that, then we have to move some mindsets toward some middle ground. In the suburbs, in town meetings there, or planning commission meetings, when something comes up and the code word "affordable" arises, or if it is compounded by the terminology of "rental and affordable," it's not much further in the discussion that one encounters the stereotype of what that might mean to the property values and to the tranquillity and safety of that community. The introduction of more affordable housing into many of the places where most of our growth has gone and our jobs are concentrated today is linked with a vision in the minds of the people there that is ugly, unfair, and prevalent. They don't stop to think, when they fight a modest proposal for affordable housing, that the folks involved are just like they are; that many have the same values and goals, but are just working for low wages.

We tend to talk about this with a familiar, almost liturgical, ring. We don't talk much about the stereotypes in the center city: that all those folks "out there" are selfish, racist, and almost unfailingly affluent. That is just as dangerous a stereotype. The folks in the center cities driving these issues politically do not stop and examine some of the inherent hypocrisy and blindness that afflicts their own stereotypes. For example, ask the folks who are trying to redo the zoning in Minneapolis and St. Paul what some of their greatest challenges are, and they will tell you that they are pressured to turn the center cities, on a redevelopment basis, into something that looks more like the suburbs, planning for ever lower densities.

Meanwhile, we have a region that, like Portland, is destined to absorb nearly 700,000 people in the next twenty years, and we have to take 33 to 63 thousand of them, at a minimum, into the center cities. Moreover, we have now encumbered ourselves with multiple layers of regulatory barriers to the point that I can't go anywhere to try to bring business into the center cities without hearing horror stories about regulations and financial penalties that cause investors to back away, even though their potential work force lives there. Similarly, the businesses that would locate in the suburbs find that there is not housing affordable to their potential employees, and decide to locate elsewhere. This tells you that what we are dealing with, while it is undeniably a social issue, is also a matter of sustainable economic development. Why are all those barriers there? I think some of it is simple entrapment of decent public officials in a system that is obsolete. I suspect that in our two core cities it is also a lot of protectionistic arrangement--keeping the livelihood and advantages for a few people, no matter what the consequences. The greatest difficulties siting things and the greatest NIMBYism happen in Minneapolis and St. Paul, not the suburbs. We need to get rid of these stereotypes at both ends of the spectrum.

Once we've had the meetings, conducted the arguments as civilly as we can in Minnesota, we have to try things. An example of this is the Livable Communities Act of 1995. This is where our regional government is currently focusing to try to make progress, in a plan that connects directly with efforts to alleviate poverty and redistribute property appropriately. The first part of this Act concentrates on getting affordable housing into the places where it tends to show up least. Most of the sources of money to do this have disappeared. The spirit of this goes to the whole question of whether an appointed Council can engage in a partnership with volunteer communities and get any accountable results. We don't know yet, but we have deliberately rigged the game for measurement to try to find out.

The second piece is, how can we take the mobility and choice part of this strategy and combine it with revitalization at the core? What's really holding us back on this is polluted land. We have at least three thousand acres of polluted land to deal with, much of it located in areas of high unemployment and underemployment. We need a long-term clean-up plan, starting with the easiest sites, to immediately increase the income and viability of these areas. Many people want to move from these neighborhoods, but many others don't. Some people have strong roots in these communities, and are willing to wait until they can find someone who will come in and restore job opportunities and help with cleanup of brownfields. Minnesota could take a leadership role in this kind of planning and redevelopment.

The third piece is an effort to demonstrate that there is more than one way to develop if you're growing, or to redevelop if you're trying to renew old areas of the region. Financial incentives can be offered to planners and developers to support progressive, sustainable development elements, such as higher density; mixed-use, commercial combined with residential; and encouragement of more public transportation or walking.

In the end, if we can meet more together, be serious about trying things that can be started in today's plausible politics, we will get closer to finding a way to re-knit all of this and the sense that we are all in this together; meeting anonymity with intimacy, meeting strangeness with real encounters. The Met Council is an experiment going on now since 1994. Can we combine operating some of the region's most vital services, while continuing to have a sensible, forward-looking focus on planning for how we use land? We don't know yet. It's a lot harder than it first looked. Can we confront this community with what the metropolitan area has become and interest our lawmakers in discovering what a metropolitan area is? Can we get a Minnesota version of a state-wide land-use law, so that it's possible to have an intelligent conversation about the way to use our natural resources? The discussion has to be increasingly framed in terms of "How do we keep the Minnesota economic development success story going?" We are not going to do it if we let our center cities fall into an economic sinkhole; yet, we have been chasing the sprawl, and feeding it with infrastructure. We're not going to keep doing this, because we cannot afford to. The roads we have now are, by and large, the roads we hare going to have in the next 20 years. We cannot afford to let the development practices of the last twenty years persist into the next century.

Rep. Myron Orfield, Minnesota Legislature

These are tough issues. Nothing that faces American society is tougher than the issues of affordable housing, tax-base equity, and metropolitan land-use planning. When we first passed tax-base sharing in 1971, it went right into litigation, and was there for six years before the U.S. Supreme Court finally upheld it. At every session of the Legislature since 1971, people have tried to repeal our tax-base sharing law. Just because the issues are tough, however, does not mean that we have to put them away, and think about them later.

In these regional issues, where we have acted, on affordable housing, tax-base sharing, and less strongly, on land-use, in every case, it hasn't been just the central cities that have been supported, but more than half of the suburbs as well. In the worst bill that we've passed--a fair housing bill in 1994--we had more than half of the suburbs in support of it. If you were going to say anything that was about a stereotype of our coalition, you wouldn't use a stereotype of central cities, because there are only eighteen members in the House who could vote for it. There were about thirty-four suburban members who voted for it. So if you were going to stereotype our coalition, it would have to be as a suburban coalition with a strong central city component. It's tended to be the older suburbs, the middle-income suburbs, the blue-collar suburbs; but it is the majority of the suburbs. We've gone through a lot of catharsis in the Legislature. We've had some terrible debates. The debate on fair housing in 1993 was the most terrible debate I've been in in my life. It got a lot better in 1994 when we had four hundred churches around the region supporting us. Nineteen ninety-five seemed like a picnic compared to 1993.

The Legislature has made a pretty firm statement that it believes in regional plans for affordable housing and tax-base sharing. We haven't gotten everything past the governor, but we've gotten a number of things signed. The Livable Communities Act was a bipartisan compromise, and a gentle step forward in housing. Policy 39, when it was an ordinance, wasn't well enforced. Now that it's a statute, it's not well enforced. One of the cases I would like to point out is the one in Maple Grove. It is a famous city in this region because it had a very strong public demonstration about some market-rate affordable housing that was going to go up in 1993. It was about seventy units of one and two bedroom apartments, renting at about $550 to $650, and they turned it down. The Livable Communities Act says that the Met Council will take into consideration a community's record on affordable housing in allocating expenditures for new infrastructure. After the Livable Communities Act had passed, and after the affordable housing units were rejected, the city of Maple Grove requested a sewer interceptor that cost $43 million (which will build to $71 million over time). The new sewer meant that they could move from 11,000 to 17,000 sq. ft. density limits. The only real commitment Maple Grove made to the Met Council was a signed commitment to lower their overall density limits. They also made a promise to try to get up to 25 percent rental housing, but with no real commitment to do so.

The Hollman lawsuit provided new resources for affordable housing in the suburbs--a ready-made pile of money. It was there, and it could have been used in Maple Grove. There was no desire to use that Hollman lawsuit, and the very mention of it was too controversial to consider. So, we have rewarded Maple Grove with a $43 million interceptor. We have set a pattern in the Livable Communities Act that allows very low-density, single-family home construction, and no strong commitment to rental, or affordable housing. In many ways, we have taken that catharsis that occurred in the Legislature, in terms of building coalitions and reaching compromise, taken a lot of the trust that was resolved, and not made progress on that issue.

We will have to move forward on that. We have to think about this in clearer, more definitive terms. If we are going to provide so much infrastructure in the region in the future, so many roads and sewers, if we're going to eat up so much forest and farm land, we are going to have to get some firm commitments on affordable housing. We are going to have to make sure that developing communities have housing for the jobs that are being created there, for the divorced mothers, and the senior citizens. Sometime, long into the future, we will hopefully have a broader and somewhat more open society, where people can choose where they want to live and move throughout the region. It is important to move on the most bipartisan basis that we can, to engage every community, to speak in every forum. It's important to talk about all of these issues throughout the community. Sometimes these issues will be difficult. The Legislature has taken some of these steps; now we have to enforce some of them.

We do provide a tremendous amount of infrastructure on a regional level. In the last decade, we spent about a billion dollars on new freeway capacity. Of that money, about 85-90 percent went to a corridor of communities that created about 70 percent of the region's new jobs. We've spent about the same amount of money on new sewers, in the same pattern. They went mostly to the southwest suburbs that created most of the new tax base for the region, and most of the new jobs. These are very large subsidies; they are one hundred times as much as we are putting into other types of things, such as affordable housing. It's not unreasonable to say, that in exchange for those types of subsidies, that we can expect some openness in terms of housing markets, that we can expect some more change, a little less resistance to affordable housing. We can't afford, even on fiscal terms, to continue to build on 17,000 sq. ft. lots. We can't afford it in terms of land, in terms of traffic, or in terms of its impacts on the central city society.

There are barriers in the central cities, and the regulatory pattern has to change. We passed a law that said that building permits have to be turned around in sixty days. That's a fairly major step in that direction. We also passed a bill the governor urged to study barriers to central city housing redevelopment. We must overcome those NIMBY impulses in the central cities. On the other hand, those efforts we have made to reduce barriers in the developing suburbs have been very strongly rejected. The Livable Communities Act didn't have a barrier-reduction component. Essentially, what we've been asking for for a few years, and which we are going to have to achieve in the long run, is to reduce those non-market barriers to affordable housing: to allow builders to build multifamily housing where there's a demand for it, to build on somewhat smaller lots, to use the land and the infrastructure somewhat more efficiently. That commitment to barrier reduction is something that has come from the words of people like Jack Kemp, and a number of prominent Republican spokespeople, who think that these barriers are very large drags on the U.S. economy.

In terms of land use, we have 133,000 acres that are fully sewered and ready for development. That's more than metropolitan New York has. Nevertheless, we spend, every year, somewhere between thirty and one hundred million dollars adding new sewer capacity to the system. That's crazy, particularly in a time of declining resources. We have to start, as Portland is doing, to fill up that capacity, not at a density like Manhattan's, but maybe more like Edina: something like 7500 square foot lots, with 20 to 30 percent rental, so that you can make a bus system work. If we're talking about tough resources and declining resources, and a declining federal commitment, that's one of the places to start. The Livable Communities Act has been tested now, and it needs to be strengthened. We have to move forward on the most consensus-oriented basis that we can; but we can't say that when 10 to 15 percent of the region, at most 30 percent, says absolutely not, that we have to stop all progress.