DP. If you read closely you’ll see it’s a regional analysis. Most cities in the region didn’t adopt the new rules that Minneapolis did and some adopted rent control. Maybe it was the rent control. |
+1 |
New York City has been “upzoning” for 350 years |
You can tell because it’s so affordable now. |
How about this: "It’s become much cheaper to rent in Minneapolis over the past few years, particularly when you consider rising incomes and consumer prices generally. " https://onefinaleffort.com/blog/a-detailed-look-at-minneapolis-housing-supply-reforms Or this: "upzoning along commercial and transit corridors and eliminating minimum parking requirements have made housing development cheaper and easier. In other places that have expanded the availability of apartments in commercial areas and eliminated parking requirements, more housing has been built and affordability has improved." https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2024/01/04/minneapolis-land-use-reforms-offer-a-blueprint-for-housing-affordability |
According to the fed report, housing production was in middle of the pack among peer regions. It wasn’t remarkable one way or the other so it looks a lot more like correlation than causation. |
You picked out the one phrase that indicated it was still in the middle of the pack on the metric of housing units per 1000 residents, though housing production is steadily improving that number. You ignore everything around it that says that that rents are more affordable and homeownership is second highest among peers, which was the issue in question. "rents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA have increased at a rate lower than that of most of our peer regions. The region’s five-year change in the typical market-rate rent was among the lowest, second only to that of the San Francisco MSA, which has the highest rent." |
I picked out the part of the report about supply increasing to refute the claim that supply increasing caused those other good outcomes. Austin is a better example of supply increasing and prices falling. |
OH got it. Two things then: 1. If we are talking about increasing supply, the more relevant information is in goal one and goal two of that report. They show that the supply has been increasing significantly. True, the region may still have less units than half their peers overall, but the relative supply in the region has increased. 2. I do agree with you that upzoning alone won't make a huge difference. But the original claim in this thread was that "NIMBY policies" make housing more expensive. The other two sources cited do a god job of showing how the combination of different "NIMBY" tactics (parking, transit-oriented development, and upzoning) all come together to make housing more affordable. |
If the supply increases in Minneapolis were sufficient to drive prices lower then other markets that built even more housing should have seen steeper price drops. The point is the supply increase in Minneapolis wasn’t significant or out of the ordinary among pet markets. In MoCo, housing has gotten more expensive (even after adjusting for inflation) since it started adopting YIMBY policies 25 years ago. That’s neither debatable nor surprising because they reduced the amount of land available for housing (reducing supply of something makes it more expensive) and then focused development on the most expensive type of housing per square foot (high rise). |
To be fair no one actually wants to live in Minneapolis. It's a terrible city and it has no redeeming qualities. |
Lots of tendentious arguments here about cities none of us live in.
You could, instead, just look around DC. Neighborhoods where the housing stock has greatly increased over the past decade or so have gotten a lot more expensive, not less expensive. Look at Navy Yard. Look at U Street. Look at 14th Street. Look at H Street. Look at Shaw. Look at Logan Circle.... |
Reasoning from a price change: rookie mistake! |
I don't know why everyone decided to replace the word "gentrification" with "upzoning." It's the same thing (and, no, just because you *wish* we could build giant apartment buildings in Georgetown doesn't change that). No one doubted what gentrification did to housing prices, and no one should think the result will be any different just because you've relabeled gentrification as "upzoning." |
DC leads the country in gentrification. No major city has become whiter, faster in recent years than dear old DC. |