Zoning laws can be make-or-break for housing, businesses

NINA MOINI: A secondhand store in Arden Hills, a North Metro suburb, may be forced to shut down or relocate after finding out zoning laws actually banned thrift stores from certain areas of the city. Odds & Ends Again is a resale storefront that helps seniors downsize and sell items they no longer need. The owner, Brett Foss, says he didn't realize the zoning rules for his store would be different than other retail spaces. Take a listen.

BRETT FOSS: There's a lot of issues going on within the city of Arden Hills with the zoning processes and the layers that they have. And also, it's a little bit hard to figure out. For us, yeah, it'd be fantastic to work with the city, obviously. That is our goal and our intent, never to create any issue of any sort.

NINA MOINI: Arden Hills mayor, David Grant, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the city had given Foss all the information he needed about city zoning rules. Joining me for a wider conversation about city zoning and the impact it has on communities is Evan Roberts. He's an assistant professor with the University of Minnesota and is leading a project called the Minnesota Zoning Atlas. Thanks so much for joining us today.

EVAN ROBERTS: Yeah, thank you, Nina. It's great to be here.

NINA MOINI: So I think people hear the word "zoning," and they're like, what is going on? What is that about? So maybe we should just take a step back. Can you explain what zoning is and some of the different types of zoning that are present in cities?

EVAN ROBERTS: Yeah, that's a great question. And obviously, when you talk about city government, sometimes people zone out. But zoning is perhaps one of the most impactful regulations shaping our day-to-day lives that we're not aware of. So zoning is done by cities. It's a power which the state grants them to be able to do. And it says what you can do with a piece of land.

The classic way in which zoning is done in a lot of cities, and largely this is what Minnesota cities do, is this high-level division into residential, commercial, and industrial uses. But then within that, cities apply a lot more specific regulations. So if you've said something's residential, cities go far beyond saying that's the only thing you can do. They're very specific about the types of homes you can build, their size, their design in some respects. And then the story with commercial, cities have a range of approaches to what different commercial uses they allow in different areas.

NINA MOINI: Right. So it is a part of everybody's life, for the most part. And it's pretty influential. Tell me a little bit about the work that you do with the Minnesota Zoning Atlas. What is the goal there?

EVAN ROBERTS: Yeah, so this is part of a national effort, the National Zoning Atlas. And people can search for that and find the website on the internet. So it's a federated project around the country. City ordinances about zoning are, in some ways, very, very visible. You could go to a city website for most cities. Townships often a little harder to find. They might not have a website up with their zoning.

But for most cities, particularly in the metro area and larger cities in regional Minnesota, this is on the internet because it's public law, city ordinances. But it's all presented in very different formats. There's no centralized recording of what's allowed where.

In the metropolitan area, in the Twin Cities, the seven-county metro, the Metropolitan Council does some standardization of saying, this is an area where you can only build single-family homes. This is an area where you can do different types of multi-family. Pretty high level classification of commercial. But the details, they haven't looked as much about that. And that's the situation around the country. We're really trying to integrate that, map it, and make it a little more transparent what the rules are about, particularly around housing. So we're focusing on what the rules are for what kind of housing you can build where.

NINA MOINI: And that's because of some of the historical context, right, around why the different zoning laws exist and how they exist and who they benefit?

EVAN ROBERTS: Absolutely, yeah. It's really with recent housing affordability pressures, understanding how are we using our land, what are the possibilities for using land slightly differently, and for incremental change in homes. And I think a really important thing that people may or may not know is just how profound this regulation about the only use of residential land that you can make is single-family homes.

So in the Twin Cities metro, 75% of the land area where you can build a home, the only thing you can do on that land is a single-family home. And so that's a pretty significant law about what people can do with their land and where you can build homes. Yeah.

NINA MOINI: Right. And so I've heard of things before. So that's residential. 0 I've heard of things like cities will say, you cannot build this liquor store across the street from a school, things like that. But I'm curious about I had never heard of treating thrift stores differently. Why do you think that might have been?

EVAN ROBERTS: Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of the much more specific regulation of different types of retail came to development in the 1950s and '60s and '70s. This story from Arden Hills is quite interesting because it is a much more recent example of regulating a very specific type of retail store and essentially trying to limit the number of secondhand stores, thrift stores that can exist in Arden Hills.

Cities have done this for a range of reasons. In some cases, they're trying to create predictability, certainty, about what kinds of stores will go where. In other cases, it is a motivation to not have particular types of businesses in their city. And land use regulation zoning is this really powerful tool to achieve this regulation that would be maybe harder to do if you just said, well, we're not going to allow this at all. If you drive it into a small number of areas, people will go to another city and look to relocate there.

NINA MOINI: Mm-hm. It's also kind of fascinating that Odds & Ends Again was able to get going in the location with these laws on the books and that nobody really caught that. And from your reporting, it sounds like the City Council is willing to make some changes. Or what are you seeing as the future for this business?

EVAN ROBERTS: Yeah, so I just want to give a tribute to Greta Kaul from the Star Tribune, who reported the original story. And so he was able to open the store. It's zoned for retail. It obviously got to that point. And so no one's stopping him at that point. And now he's got this open business in an area where he cannot legally operate a secondhand store. And so it puts both the owner and the City Council in a slightly tricky position.

Cities are sometimes reluctant to make these changes after the fact. And at other times, they do take a step back and realize that, oh, what was that regulation for? Are we regulating this in the most appropriate way possible? And they will revise things at a broader level. That's often the direction that would be taken of, say, OK, let's take a bigger picture. Because then you're not dealing with just this one person and the perception of corruption. It could be there. Yeah, so--

NINA MOINI: Remains to be seen, it sounds like.

EVAN ROBERTS: It does, yes. Yes.

NINA MOINI: Right. And so-- oh, go ahead.

EVAN ROBERTS: Oh, no, go on.

NINA MOINI: Well, I was just going to say, generally, this story, this situation, it's one example. There are so many. With the work that you're doing, why do you think it's so important to focus in on zoning reform?

EVAN ROBERTS: I think, as I mentioned at the start, this is a really important set of regulations that impact how we live our day-to-day lives, what we can put where. It really impacts housing affordability and how we build homes for our changing population. And this is why there's state legislation that's been introduced by a bipartisan group this session just to address some of these issues.

NINA MOINI: Mm-hm. All right--

EVAN ROBERTS: --we think-- oh, yeah, sorry.

NINA MOINI: I was just going to say, I think that we'd love to have you back. We're out of time for today. But please come back and tell us more about what's going on at the state level as well, because I think that would be great to focus in some more on your work, particularly around housing. Thank you, Evan.

EVAN ROBERTS: Fantastic. Thank you very much.

NINA MOINI: That was Evan Roberts, an assistant professor with the University of Minnesota and the leader of the Minnesota Zoning Atlas project.