Amid Minnesota’s housing shortage, should the state step in to require more density?

Everybody at the Capitol seems to agree that Minnesota has a housing shortage, which is driving up rents and making it harder to buy homes.

There’s less consensus on how to fix it.

Legislators are debating reforms as part of the “Yes to Homes” package, a bipartisan-backed set of housing measures that would, among other things, require cities to permit more types of housing in more places. The changes include more zones mixing residential and commercial, and allowing more accessory dwellings, townhomes and duplexes across the state.

“The status quo isn’t working. We currently are not building enough homes that Minnesotans can afford,” Rep. Michael Howard, DFL-Richfield, told the House Housing Committee, which he co-chairs.

But the pushback to the measures, similar to ones that failed last year, continues to be fierce, particularly among city officials who decry them as an attack on local control of development.

“The legislation seeks to broadly limit local decisionmaking authority on residential development and impose this rigid statewide framework, in some cases on all cities, and in other cases on a set of cities, based on population,” said Daniel Lightfoot, the League of Minnesota Cities’ senior intergovernmental relations representative.

While the bills passed easily through the chambers' housing committees this month, they could face hurdles at their next stops, the local government-focused committees where many of the legislators are former city officials.

“It just is a harder step,” said Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville, chair of the Senate Housing Committee and the lead author of one of the bills.

Advocates say they hope this year is different, after conversations and compromises with cities and other interested groups.

“We put some really good language in these bills to protect against cities getting steamrolled or stepped on when it isn’t going to work,” said Rep. Spencer Igo, R-Wabana Township, who co-chairs the House Housing Committee and is a lead author of one of the bills. For example, there are provisions for cities to deny projects where infrastructure is inadequate.

The bills are also broken into pieces, instead of being rolled into bigger legislation.

“These bills are way more focused,” Igo said.

Three bills make up the centerpiece of “Yes to Homes,” Port said. Here they are with some of their main provisions:

The bills include provisions that would streamline the review process for housing projects, restrict aesthetic requirements and bar cities from requiring or incentivizing properties to be part of homeownership associations. The bills also restrict cities' ability to require a certain number of parking spaces for dwellings, leaving it to developers.

Generally, proponents of statewide zoning reform say city zoning codes are a major barrier to the construction of necessary housing. At best, they say, city regulations make it too complicated and expensive to build. At worst, they say, cities use zoning and the permitting process to make it impossible to build housing they — or their residents — deem undesirable.

“Many houses in the city of Fergus Falls today would be illegal to build,” said Sen. Jordan Rasmusson, R-Fergus Falls, urging lawmakers to take a look at the powers given to local government. “These were built by veterans from WWII coming back with the GI Bill, who built what they could afford. Maybe that was a three-bedroom with 1½ bathrooms that didn’t have an attached garage, but that’s what they raised their families in.”

Cities and organizations that represent them counter that one-size-fits-all policies don’t work, and that cities are working to address the housing shortage.

Testifying in opposition to one of the bills, Eagan Mayor Mike Maguire said cities are working to promote the availability and affordability of housing locally.

“This legislation threatens to undermine those efforts by imposing broad, rigid mandates that fail to account for the unique needs and circumstances of individual communities,” he said.

He said efforts to streamline the process of approving homes removes community input.

“One person’s streamlining of a process is another person’s shutting out the community from the process,” he said.

Igo said he’s hopeful and ready to have conversations about what amendments are needed to gain legislators' support.

“There’s education there on both sides of the aisle to walk through the bills, educating legislators that these bills aren’t the bill from last year,” he said.

Igo listed some of the disparate groups backing the bills — including homebuilders association Housing First, the Sierra Club, pro-density Neighbors for More Neighbors and the limited government group Americans for Prosperity — to underscore his belief that housing reform is apolitical.

“Everyone is for local control, no one is for local out-of-control,” Igo said. The bills are “actually opening up the free market and private property owners rights.”

Lightfoot said that while the bills have bipartisan backing, they also have bipartisan opposition, and said cities will continue to discuss the bills' language with authors.

“We appreciate the authors and the Legislature continuing to work with us to identify those concerns and challenges and hopefully reflect those concerns in subsequent iterations of the bills,” he said.