In response to Gene Tierney’s opinion piece “In Defense of the 2040 Plan,” I’d like to offer a few observations.
First, it’s important to recognize that the actual City of Minneapolis is a postage stamp surrounded by the contiguous Twin Cities metropolitan area. Minneapolis covers about 59 square miles as compared to the 3,000 square miles of the Twin Cities metro area.
Minneapolis has a population of about 430,000 people compared to some 3.7 million people in the Twin Cities metro area (my numbers are pulled from a Google search; I welcome corrections).
The city of Minneapolis cannot solve, and should not be expected to solve, problems that belong to the entire region.
It is unreasonable to think, as Mr. Tierney suggests, that workers at workplaces and businesses within Minneapolis proper must depend only the housing available within its boundaries. Workers do and can and will commute from surrounding areas that have lower cost housing — and to do so will require functional and efficient mass transit, as well as well-maintained roadways for automobiles.
Bike lanes are a boutique gift (already costing Minneapolis many millions in street reconstructions) to mostly young, mostly male, mostly white bike riders. Bikes and bike lanes will never move enough people to justify the huge costs already incurred and planned for the future.
Bike lanes, as any unbiased observer will note, move only small numbers of persons in summer and, for good reason, are mostly empty in the winter. Bike lane dollars should go to creating a smart mass transit upgrade of our existing system of roads and buses.
That said, we do want more affordable housing within the City of Minneapolis. However, there is good reason to question the wisdom of disrupting older neighborhoods in order to replace naturally occurring affordable housing with triplexes containing small rental apartments owned by absentee landlords (locking persons into long-term if not permanent renting with no creation of equity).
I note that a letter in today’s issue laments a modest home once owned by that writer, a $150,000 starter home of 1450 square feet that “survived only two more owners before being torn down and replaced by an $850,000 home with 3,000 square feet.”
Were the 2040 plan serious about affordable housing, it would have blocked such destruction. It is not environmentally sound to raze dwellings with good bones, built to last a century or two, with buildings that will likely last only decades. The carbon cost of bulldozing existing homes, wasting the embodied lumber and labor, disposing of the wreckage, and rebuilding with new materials outweighs gains.
Finally, I have never seen the proponents of the 2040 Plan address the unfair and onerous burdens placed on the individual homeowner who suddenly finds that a developer has purchased next door and will replace a small home with a triplex that takes away the homeowner’s open sky, sunlight and shade with its large footprint, height, tarmac and removal of mature trees.
I’ve lived in Minneapolis since the age of two, and over some 40 years have invested thousands of dollars and hours upgrading an older home. I trusted the integrity of Minneapolis’ zoning regulations to make these investments worth it. If a triplex goes up next to me, I will have to consider selling out at a loss rather than losing the living spaces, inside and out, that my wife and I have created over many years and dearly love.
