Minneapolis Population / Density - General Discussion

[MNdible]

[winky face emoji]

My point, which I guess I implied but never actually got to, is that I think Minneapolis probably already has more households right now than it ever did before, and given the slim chance that a bunch of families living in SFH's decide to start having lots and lots of kids, number of households may actually be a more useful metric for comparison.

[alexschief]

It's true that household sizes are very different today than they were back then.

That being said, I think Minneapolis should have a public policy goal to reach a new peak (or at least 500,000) population. It's a target shoot for that would indicate a pretty significant increase in vitality. One of the city's more productive qualities in the past decade has been an enthusiasm about growth that is far from shared by some of its peers.

[Mdcastle]

So, given that a lot of people are living alone or with one other person in a single family detached house, by what policies do you think 500,000 population is doable? Given that so far ADUs and triplexes have been met with yawns from homeowners and developers alike and there's only so much vacant or underutilized land for large new apartment complexes? I live in a house I share with my sister, the person across the street lives in a house alone, and two houses down is a huge old house with two people living in it. Kitty corner form me the elderly homeowner finally went to some sort of assisted living, but he lived their alone in a four bedroom house for 15 years. My perception is that this wasn't common when I was a kid, and probably not when Minneapolis had 500K.

[StandishGuy]

Ummm... I would want to see some documentation before buying that Minneapolis has more households now than 1950. There were thousands of homes destroyed to construct the freeways and huge numbers of apartments / SRO's were demolished in and around downtown during urban renewal. There remain a huge number of surface parking lots throughout the City that once housed people whether in homes or above commercial structures.

Also, Betsy Hodges did articulate a goal of reaching 500,000 residents when she was Mayor not too many years ago. The Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan doesn't spell out a goal of 500,000, but would allow Minneapolis to go well beyond 500k if built out. There remains so much underutilized land throughout the City and the population density is only around 8,000 per square mile. Lots of room for growth.

[MNdible]

Per quick googling, in 1950, the Minneapolis population was 521,718 and there were 3.2 people/household. Doing the math, that means there were 163,037 households in 1950.

Per current census numbers, there are 178,886 households in Minneapolis now.

[MNdible]

To put things a little bit differently, if Minneapolis had its current number of households but its 1950 household average size, the city's population would be 572,435.

[alexschief]

So, given that a lot of people are living alone or with one other person in a single family detached house, by what policies do you think 500,000 population is doable? Given that so far ADUs and triplexes have been met with yawns from homeowners and developers alike and there's only so much vacant or underutilized land for large new apartment complexes?

There is, in fact, a ton of vacant or underutilized land for medium and large apartment complexes. Some of that underutilized land is currently occupied by single family homes. Developers buy and redevelop parcels like these all the time.

But your question got me thinking about if we can make a back of the napkin estimate about the number of new housing units that would need to be built in order to accommodate a population of 500,000. According to the 2020 Census, there are 187,670 occupied housing units (of 199,143 total, a vacancy rate of 5.76%) holding a population of 429,954 people in Minneapolis. That's 2.29 people per unit.

So to house a population of 500,000 people, Minneapolis would need 218,244 occupied housing units. That would mean an increase of 30,574 occupied units (or 19,101 housing units overall, but while there's probably nothing wrong with most of the vacant units, not all of them will come onto the market and a vacancy rate of 5-7% is stable).

Of course, you also have to factor in what Monte alludes to above, which is that the new units will probably be disproportionately smaller and likely home to a different household size than the housing stock as a whole. Minneapolis needs to add 70,046 people to reach 500,000 residents. If we assume that the newly built units are only occupied by 1.75 people per unit, then we'll need roughly 40,000 new occupied housing units to hit that goal.

The range of 35-40k additional housing units strikes me as a good guess. Is it achievable? Between the 2010 Census and the 2020 Census, Minneapolis gained 20,856 housing units. But that span of time incorporates at least a couple years where housing construction was virtually non-existent due to the housing bust and the Great Recession. As I showed in my post on the past page, housing production only began to recover in 2012. In the past decade for which we have data (October 2012 to September 2022), Minneapolis permitted 31,553 units. Most, but not all, of those permitted units were probably built. Let's assume 90% are constructed, giving us a rate of 2,840 new housing units starting construction per year. It would take about 14 years at this pace to build the necessary number of units.

These are extremely casual estimates, which strip out a lot of other critical factors like demographics and economic health, but they can give our expectations some grounding. Can Minneapolis hit a population of 500,000?

> If you expect roughly the current pattern and pace of urban growth to continue, it should hit that mark by 2035-2040.
> If you expect the current pattern and pace of urban growth is somewhat aberrant, and that the spatial trends of the post-war 1900's will reassert themselves, then it might take beyond 2040 to hit that number, if ever.
> If you expect that the current pattern and pace of urban growth represent an increasing trend of re-urbanization and more traditional spatial agglomeration, then it could achieve that population goal by 2030-2035.

[Tyler]

That^^^

Minneapolis isn't any where close to being out of space, so if/when we hit 500K it will be due to other factors. I'm guessing 2032 since I'm an optimist and I like good things to happen. The next 100K in growth is going to have dramatic, positive impact.

[BigIdeasGuy]

Are there any good reasonably objective measures of how close a city is to being out of space? I feel like there is a good amount inherent subjectivity to that measure depending on how space is defined and if that space is at it's highest and best use.

[Tom H.]

Minneapolis population density is 8k per sq mi. For reference, Chicago is about 12k and NYC is about 30k. From that perspective, Minneapolis is nowhere near "full" but it's not like you could density to those levels without significant changes either.

I wonder if it's possible to calculate the max population of Minneapolis if every parcel was upzoned / built to its maximum allowed by right under the zoning code?

[BigIdeasGuy]

I was thinking about this over the holiday weekend would it be possible to create a color coded map classifying each parcel in a city on some scale from unused to highest and best use based on context of it's location. So for example a SFH in Longfellow would be highest and best use while the same house along Lake in Uptown would be coded differently. Similarly an office building DT would be graded differently than office building surrounded by parking.

It could get as detailed as anyone would want to it to be but a super interesting project and give a decent idea of how close to full any city actually is

[Tiller]

I think someone made a map like that years back on streets.mn, but based on land value per unit of housing?

[BigIdeasGuy]

I think this https://streets.mn/2018/08/13/map-monda ... -freeways/ is what you are referring to, unfortunately it doesn't look like it's still active.

[StandishGuy]

The US. Census Bureau released 2022 population estimates for cities this week. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time ... skip-local

They estimate that Minneapolis grew slightly in 2022 from a big drop in 2021.
2020: 430,6684
2021: 424,635
2022: 425,096

[StandishGuy]

The Metropolitan Council released their 2022 population estimates this week for cities in the region: https://metrocouncil.org/Data-and-Maps/ ... px#content

Unlike the estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Met Council shows healthy growth in Minneapolis over the last two years reaching 436,934.
The two estimates are 10,000 off from one another, which is pretty significant. If I remember correctly, the Met Council's estimates were more accurate compared to the official 2020 Census.