Part 3: Neighborhood-scale housing: facts matter
In this blog series, we take a deeper dive into the 1-4 housing study. Learn the “why” behind this study and how you can get involved.
Fact: Legalizing more neighborhood-scale housing choices in every neighborhood will mitigate displacement. Our city isn’t building enough homes to keep up with the number of people who want to live here. This imbalance is a primary reason why rents and home prices are climbing so quickly in Saint Paul, especially in working-class neighborhoods like Frogtown, the North End, and Payne-Phalen. It also causes a “spillover effect,” whereby people who can’t afford home prices in expensive neighborhoods purchase homes in slightly more affordable neighborhoods, causing prices to increase even more and displacing long-time residents. Legalizing the construction of neighborhood-scale housing types throughout Saint Paul will help to correct these problems.
Fact: Neighborhood-scale housing fits in seamlessly alongside single-family detached houses. The most common neighborhood-scale housing types – duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, and rowhomes – are similar in height and bulk to single-family detached houses. In some cases, they are indistinguishable from single-family houses, except by the presence of two or three mailboxes or water meters. Take a stroll around an old neighborhood like Cathedral Hill, Dayton’s Bluff, Payne-Phalen, or Frogtown, and see for yourself! Neighborhood-scale housing doesn’t “ruin a neighborhood’s character,” as some anti-housing folks claim. It strengthens it.
Fact: Small-scale multi-family buildings provide affordable pathways to homeownership. Did you know you can buy a building with as many as four units with a regular residential home mortgage? A person who cannot afford the monthly mortgage payments for a single-family house on their own might be able to attain homeownership by purchasing a duplex, triplex, or fourplex, and renting out the other units. Various financial institutions and organizations are working to create loan products specifically designed to help families buy homes in this way, and to help equip them to be responsible landlords.
Fact: Building more homes at all price points is an indispensable step to solving our housing crisis. Our crisis of housing affordability is a complex problem, not a simple “supply-and-demand” problem from an Econ 101 class; and it will not be solved only by building more housing. We will need a broad set of policy solutions to provide stable, affordable homes for everyone, including various types of tenant protections and increased funding for affordable housing from all levels of government. But a housing policy plan that ignores the need to encourage private-sector housing development is incomplete.
Fact: Our current zoning policies in Saint Paul encourage McMansions, and disallow smaller, more affordable housing choices in most neighborhoods. In many Saint Paul neighborhoods, modest homes are torn down and replaced by gargantuan single-family homes, affordable only to millionaires. This dangerous trend threatens to exacerbate wealth disparities and gentrification in the city, and the zoning code should be changed to discourage it. The most obvious first step is to legalize fourplexes, rowhouses, and other types of buildings that provide multiple, more affordable homes in the same space as one McMansion.
Fact: Our current zoning rules exclude renters and working class people from living in certain neighborhoods. Not everyone can afford to buy or rent a single-family house with a yard. But on most residential streets in Saint Paul – especially within its wealthiest areas – a single-family house with a yard is the only type of home that is legal to build. In effect, this rule is exclusionary: it makes it impossible for anyone except the wealthy to afford to live in certain parts of the city, and reinforces the race and class disparities created by redlining and racial covenants in the 20th century. Legalizing more affordable types of homes like duplexes, small apartments, and townhomes on every residential lot is a simple but indispensable step towards mitigating disparities of wealth and poverty in our city.
Fact: Saint Paul’s current housing policies and procedures favor institutional corporate developers. Legalizing more neighborhood-scale development will re-empower regular people to participate in the development of their own neighborhoods. Saint Paul’s zoning rules and permitting processes are complicated, inflexible, and time-consuming. As a result, almost all new homes in Saint Paul come in the form of large buildings of 50 units or more, built by corporate developers with institutional financing. To create a healthier housing ecosystem, with more local ownership and participation, we need to remove the obstacles that make it nearly impossible for regular people to build neighborhood-scale homes in their own neighborhoods. The first step is simply making it legal to build more types of neighborhood-scale homes throughout the city.
Fact: Legalizing more homes in every neighborhood will help improve the city’s financial resilience. By increasing the number of homes in Saint Paul, we can increase the number of people who share the burden of paying for the maintenance of the city’s streets and sewers, parks, schools, rec centers, libraries, and other municipal programs and services.
Join our campaign for more housing choices!
We’re organizing a coalition of organizations and residents to show our support for the City’s proposed amendments to the Zoning Code stemming from their 1-4 Unit Housing Study. Please join us! Here are a few ways you can take action:
Visit our Get Involved page to sign up for our email list, join our Slack channel, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to receive updates about the campaign, action alerts to testify at City Hall, and more.
Send us a note if you’d like to play a greater role in organizing our campaign, or if you’re part of another organization that would like to consider joining our coalition.
Help spread the word! Tell your friends and neighbors about the issue, and invite them to check out our website to learn more.
Share your “neighborhood housing story” with us! Have you ever lived in a duplex, an ADU, or a small apartment building? Write to us and tell us why you support more housing choices in your neighborhood.
