Minneapolis Isn't All That Despite What They Want You to Believe

Kenny Moc · January 10, 2025

In 2019, Minneapolis made many headlines for abolishing zones limited to single-detached housing:

How Minneapolis Became the First to End Single-Family Zoning
Published by PBS News

How Minneapolis Freed Itself From the Stranglehold of Single-Family Homes
Published by POLITICO Magazine

Minneapolis Will Become the First Major U.S. City to End Single-Family Home Zoning
Published by Slate

Big-Minneapolis might want you to believe that it is an innovative, forward-thinking, groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting city.

However, it seems a little-known city named Edmonton, Alberta did this a year prior, in 2018.

Charter Bylaw 18638

As of writing this blog post, I found just one article on the matter [1] [2].

Footnotes

  1. Actually, this article implies that Minneapolis did it first. This is a half-truth. The Minneapolis City Council adopted a resolution to transmit a plan (to the Metropolitan Council) to abolish single-family zoning. This was done three (3) days before Edmonton. HOWEVER, this plan was not approved and finalized until TEN months later, in October of 2019. Even then, this was just a PLAN to eliminate single-family zoning. The actual ordinance, Ordinance No. 2019-048, was adopted on November 8th of 2019. And this ordinance was only in effect starting January 1st 2020, more than a full year after Edmonton adopted the change, on December 10th 2018.

  2. The research into the previous footnote was painstaking. It was very difficult tracking down the actual ordinance number for the change in Minneapolis’s zoning code. Edmonton actually does a really good job in cataloguing its changes and making them accessible and searchable.

Twitter, Facebook