Beyond the picket fence: How one city is creating more affordable housing

A decade ago, as a newly minted college graduate with a job in the film industry, Linnea Goderstad saw career opportunities and a creative vibrancy in New York City. What she didn’t find was a path toward affordable housing.

After abiding the rigors of an expensive one-bedroom apartment for a few years, Ms. Goderstad and her husband, David Blomquist, decided a change was needed. They moved back to their native Minnesota, calculating it would combine proximity to family, promising career paths of its own, and – importantly – the opportunity to live in something other than a platinum-priced shoe box. 

The journey has been promising. They’ve found good jobs and are now several years into owning a tree-fringed town house in a neighborhood they love in downtown Minneapolis. But if anything, what surprised them was how hard it was to find that dwelling, even after moving to a place far from robust coastal real estate markets such as Silicon Valley and New York. Between their own student debt and tightness in the supply of homes here in Minneapolis, they had to exercise both patience and bidding-war boldness to land their town house.

“You shouldn’t have to have an MBA to buy a house,” says Ms. Goderstad. “We’ve messed up as a society if that’s where we’re at.” 

The city around her broadly agrees. Minneapolis is now the scene of what may be the nation’s most ambitious urban experiment in trying to tackle the challenge of housing affordability.

Officials here are starting to implement an overhaul that ends “single-family zoning,” which has long reserved large sections of the city – like others around the United States – for detached one-family homes. In tandem, the city’s comprehensive “2040 plan” calls for new

Time for different ideasOther costs of living Low supply, between the coasts Widening the scope All the activistsWhy it might not workSkepticism of private investmentAn easier rehabCrisis at the bottomAn eye on what’s next