Minneapolis City Planning Commission (meetings, agenda items, members, etc.)

[phop]

Do you track St. Paul too, or just Minneapolis?

[alexschief]

Just Minneapolis.

[alexschief]

The upcoming CPC Committee of the Whole meeting will feature a presentation from the City Attorney's office (memo) on the importance of making solid legal findings in order to deny an application, and a presentation from the the CPED Code Development office (memo) on the legal preeminence of the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan when evaluating requests to change the existing zoning.

Make of this what you will.

[seanrichardryan]

[alexschief]

I wrote a thread on Twitter about the results of the CPC's 2022 calendar.

The key takeaways are:

1. The CPC gave final approvals to 3,836 units of housing this year. That's about average for the past decade. It represents an increase from last year, but still a fairly substantial decrease from the three year period of 2018-2020, when the CPC was approving roughly 6,000 units a year.

2. Partly because of what we saw in past years, this dip in approvals might not be extremely visible for a while, if ever. There's still a significant backlog that builders are working through. In downtown, for example, there are well over 1,000 units of housing under construction, but also there has also been fewer than 1,000 units approved in each of the past two years.

3. The biggest news in the year is probably the plunge in the rate of car parking spaces to housing units. For 2022 approved projects, that rate was 0.58, which is a fall of a full 0.1 from the previous year. Obviously policy (removal of parking minimums) is a factor here, but I think it's important that policy is moving in concert with other factors. The region is continuing to invest in non-automotive travel. Meanwhile, developers and builders are being squeezed by interest rates and possibly other factors like IZ. Reducing parking spaces is one of the simplest ways to reduce costs.

I think we can expect this momentum to continue, in part because those trends will continue and also because as completed projects from past years show leasing success with lower parking rates, banks may be increasingly willing to support low parking ratios in the Twin Cities.