St. Paul’s heavily single-family neighborhoods could soon be a thing of the past.
An effort to rewrite the city’s zoning codes to allow denser housing like duplexes in all of the city’s residential districts is gaining steam at City Hall with the support of many housing advocates and to the chagrin of some of the city’s traditionalists.
More than half of St. Paul’s housing stock is composed of single-family homes, and more than a third is nestled inside sizable apartment buildings. City planners see a “missing middle” — ample opportunity to “upzone” the entire city for more duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, as well as townhomes, mother-in-law apartments and small cottage-style houses clustered around a courtyard.
“This is really about increasing the supply of housing,” said Luis Pereira, planning director in the city’s Department of Planning and Economic Development, during a public hearing on Friday.
In fact, 72% of the city’s residentially-zoned land only allows detached, single-family houses, a major impediment to housing growth at a time when the Twin Cities are believed to be short 80,000 units to meet housing demand. St. Paul’s shift toward single-family zoning took place in 1975, and some say it’s time to lift those restrictions.
“The new housing being built isn’t the more affordable starter homes,” said Emma Brown, a senior city planner, during a March 28 presentation on the proposed changes.
Few options in housing styles
The concern is that at a time when household sizes are fluctuating widely — including a growing number of singles living alone and an uptick in multi-generational families — St. Paul residents have few options in housing styles to choose from. And limiting choice decreases affordability. In the Twin Cities, the gulf in homeownership rates between whites and Blacks is among the worst in the nation.
To enable missing middle or “neighborhood scale” housing, the city council would have to update zoning codes to soften regulations that currently divide residential areas into districts that favor single-family homes or large apartment buildings but often skip over options in between.
Proposed zoning amendments comprise a large part of the city’s “1-to-4 Unit Infill Zoning Housing Study,” a sweeping plan that some opponents have characterized as the end of single-family neighborhoods in St. Paul.
The St. Paul Planning Commission held a public hearing on the study Friday and kept the record open until Monday for further written comments. After further review by the commission, the study and associated zoning changes likely are to come before the city council in June for approval.
On the web:
1-4 Unit Housing Study: tinyurl.com/MiddleHousingStp2023
St. Paul webinar: tinyurl.com/MissingMiddleWebinar
The city, which has created a website dedicated to the housing study and proposed zoning changes, held 90-minute webinar presentations on March 28 and March 30, among other community outreach. Among key changes, the city would allow duplexes in all residential districts by right, which is in keeping with the city’s zoning regulations prior to a sweeping update in 1975.
During Friday’s planning commission hearing, critics like architect Gaius Nelson of Mac-Groveland warned about the “unintended consequences” behind incentivizing real estate development without the right design standards. He worried that developers will tear down the cheapest housing and build pricier new units.
And in relatively high-end neighborhoods like his own, developers may continue to favor building large single-family homes because they net a lot of money.
“Just because you build new housing doesn’t mean it’s going to be affordable,” Nelson cautioned.
Karen Allen, a Midway resident who owns a Summit-University duplex, argued otherwise. Anything that makes it easier to convert an attic into an apartment or a garage into an accessory dwelling unit would help provide financial stability to homeowners while creating new housing for tenants, a win-win all around.
“If I could put an ADU on my garage, that’s not taking space away from anybody,” Allen said. An ADU is an accessory dwelling unit.
The majority of the speakers on Friday praised the study recommendations or said they could go even further in promoting density. The study calls for “modest densification,” said Nick Erickson, the director of housing policy with the homebuilding association Housing First Minnesota.
“It’s kind of a first step,” agreed Jeff Chermak, a Desnoyer Park resident who owns multiple duplexes and empty lots throughout the city. He called zoning a major barrier to entry for small, local developers.
“We’re trying to hold off on building another single-family property in order to do something more creative.”
Proposed zoning changes
Pereira, the city planning director, noted that the proposed zoning changes open the door to more options but they don’t prevent new single-family housing from being built. In fact, by loosening restrictions such as allowing tiny homes or construction on oddly-shaped lots, zoning changes could encourage more single-family units.
Existing residential zoning districts marked R1, R2, R3, R4 and RT1 and RT2 would be consolidated into just three districts — H1, H2 and H3 — with the goal of simplifying zoning and loosening restrictions, especially along major transit corridors.
- The new H1 districts would replace R1-R3 districts and allow a maximum of three units on an interior lot, or a maximum of four units on corner lots, for a maximum 40% lot coverage. Overall, the H1 district would allow single-family homes, two-family dwellings and larger multi-family structures.
- Up to two additional units could be installed on a lot through a special density bonus. The bonus would be unlocked either by providing affordable “workforce housing” — housing aimed to residents earning no more than 80% area median income for 15 years — or by including at least one or two principal units that include at least three bedrooms.
- An H2 district would replace R4-RT2 districts and allow a maximum of four principal units on a single lot, or two additional units through a density bonus, for a maximum 45% lot coverage.
- H3 districts would be located within 1/8th mile of a designated “neighborhood node” intersection or light rail or bus rapid transit corridor. They’d allow up to six principal units on a single lot, as well as 50% lot coverage. New single-family homes would be limited to 2,500 square feet.
On lot sizes of up to a half-acre, developers would be allowed to install single-family, two-family, triplex or fourplex dwellings in a cluster-style development organized around open space and connected by a pedestrian path, provided the dwellings cover no more than 55% to 60% of the lot. One accessory dwelling unit would be allowed per single-family dwelling.
In cluster developments, a conditional use permit for tiny homes under 600 square feet would allow even greater density.
Still other proposed zoning changes speak to accessory dwelling units, lot splits, setbacks and maximum heights.
Earlier phase approved by city council in 2022
An earlier phase of the “1-to-4 Unit Infill Zoning Housing Study” was approved by the city council in January 2022. That first phase called for loosening zoning restrictions to allow for physically smaller homes, reducing restrictions on accessory dwelling units and allowing more than one residential building per lot.
In short, the approved zoning tweaks allow more housing on smaller lot sizes, including oddly-shaped lots.
Housing advocates and even city staff at the time called those changes “low-hanging fruit” mostly comprised of technical amendments to codes that were often sidestepped anyway through zoning variances.
The study’s second phase is likely to draw more questions, and potentially more pushback.
Pushback over tree loss, parking and overcrowding
Former St. Paul City Council Member Tom Dimond has raised concerns about overcrowding, conflicts over parking, tree loss and excess water run-off negatively impacting the environment as real estate development covers more surfaces. He noted most families living in cramped quarters gravitate to roomier digs with a yard as soon as they can afford to move.
“The city must retain single-family neighborhoods so you can relax and recharge with your family,” wrote Dimond, in an open letter on Wednesday. “The Planning Commission is considering a radical and ill-conceived housing ban. … Single-family residential neighborhoods would be prohibited in St. Paul. Single family neighborhoods are the economic backbone of the city.”
Others see a city top-heavy with single-family homes. Pointing to the homeownership gap between whites and Blacks, Isaac Russell, a policy director with the Center for Economic Inclusion, called the zoning proposal “an important first step” and “an essential reimagining of how we build our city.”
When city officials took a hard look in 2017, single-family homes made up 54% of the city’s housing supply. Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes made up just 11%, while multifamily housing with 20 or more units made up 31%.
What’s more, officials discovered that the missing middle has been growing even more scarce.
From 2000 to 2017, the number of duplexes decreased by 17%, and triplexes and fourplexes decreased by 11%. All three were likely victim to homeowners and developers purchasing older properties so they could build large new single-family homes or larger apartment buildings.
