Twin Cities suburban zoning favors single-family homes. Some cities want to add more options.

Lots of people would like to live in St. Louis Park, the first-ring suburb with easy access to downtown Minneapolis, the popular West End entertainment district and rows of tidy postwar homes.

The city would like to welcome them and has even set goals to build more housing. But it’s not so simple, officials have found, because of roadblocks in city code like large lot sizes and swaths of land that only allow single-family homes.

“We are working on expanding the housing options available in neighborhoods,” Rita Trapp, the vice president of HKGi, a consultant helping the city make the changes, said at an open house this summer.

Other cities, including Edina and Minnetonka, are discussing changes to align their zoning with their housing goals, too.

Minneapolis, St. Paul and other cities have already overhauled parts of their zoning codes to facilitate more housing. For example, Richfield and Bloomington have reduced minimum lot sizes and loosened restrictions on duplexes.

These types of overhauls are getting a funding boost. In the last week of former President Joe Biden’s administration, the federal government awarded the Metropolitan Council $5 million for grants to help cities analyze zoning policies.

“This program is really intended to support smaller communities,” said Lisa Barajas, the Met Council’s executive director of community development. “Typically those that have less staff capacity and are looking for some additional resources so that they can fit this work into their schedule into their budget.”

As St. Louis Park has worked to meet its housing goals for the coming decades, it became clear that zoning was an obstacle, Planning Manager Sean Walther said.

The city, for example, aspired to allow projects like one on Minnetonka Boulevard to develop four twin homes, totaling eight units, where there were previously four small, older houses. Because the city’s code didn’t match the plans, the project is going through a special approval process.

Under a new residential zoning overhaul ordinance, years in development, the twin homes would be permitted, provided they met basic requirements including height and setback, Walther said. The ordinance would also reduce minimum lot widths to 40 feet (previously 60 to 75 feet), and allow for more types of housing, as called for in the city plans.

Some of the changes hearken back to St. Louis Park’s pre-1950s zoning. The suburb’s first zoning code allowed duplexes in what are now single-family districts, which were later outlawed.

The city also has a history of racially restrictive covenants, which prevented non-white people from living in or occupying many homes. After they were struck down, the city enacted zoning reforms, such as increasing lot sizes, that put its housing out of reach for people of color in ways that were not explicitly racist, Walther said.

The city will hold a first reading of the new ordinance Feb. 18.

Edina has changed a lot in the 54 years since its last major zoning code ordinance, said Addison Lewis, community development coordinator. Over time with incremental updates, the code has become unwieldy and sometimes conflicted with itself.

That’s led to uncertainty for city officials and residents, and for developers seeking to build in Edina.

“It’s apparent that our zoning isn’t actually a true reflection of our vision,” Lewis told the City Council in December.

Like St. Louis Park, Edina has relied heavily on custom zoning districts to do the kind of development called for in city plans.

“We were just having to rely on that more and more, even for certain projects that really were just simple,” Lewis said in an interview.

Eight townhomes at 52nd Avenue West and Hankerson Avenue were approved through a special approval process, for example.

“If we want more of that, we can just have zoning that would better facilitate that,” Lewis told the council.

At that workshop last month, the council heard from HKGi, a consultant the city hired to audit its zoning ordinance. The firm’s recommendations included simplifying the code to align it with the city’s development goals.

The city plans to continue conversations about zoning in 2025. Rewriting it would require hiring a firm to help and seeking public input, Lewis said.

Minnetonka has added nearly 3,000 housing units in the last five years, according to Julie Wischnack, director of community development.

But the city has been discussing a zoning overhaul and received a Met Council grant that will help fund it.

The goal, said Assistant City Planner Susan Thomas in a December City Council meeting, is to simplify the code and align it with the city’s development goals.

An April report from the firm ZoneCo suggested several reforms, including reducing minimum lot sizes, allowing more housing sizes, and considering allowing more kinds of housing, especially “gentle density” everywhere possible.

This month, Minnetonka appointed members to a new city work group that will rewrite the city’s zoning ordinance with the help of ZoneCo over the next 18 months.

Wischnack said it will be up to the workgroup to determine where to focus the rewrite efforts.