Weeks into New York’s rent freeze, the argument over it has moved to a Manhattan courtroom, where landlords and City Hall are fighting over text messages and whether the mayor leaned on the board that voted it through.
The court will decide whether the freeze was approved properly. What no court can change is what a freeze does: It protects the tenants who already have a lease and adds not one home for the people who don’t. For them, the useful evidence is 1,000 miles west, in Minneapolis, six years into the country’s most closely watched zoning experiment.
In January 2020, Minneapolis became the first large U.S. city to rid of single-family zoning. About 70% of its residential land allowed one house per lot. The 2040 Plan allowed three, let bigger apartment buildings rise along the main corridors, and a year later dropped parking minimums. None of it forced anyone to build. The city just stopped saying no.
Both sides said what they expected, which means we can check. Mayor Jacob Frey, making the pitch in May 2018, noted that anyone could already knock down a modest ranch house and put up a mansion, and said the plan merely let the same lot hold “something more affordable.” Minneapolis for Everyone, the residents’ group that organized against the plan, predicted it would “make our city less affordable.”
Six years is enough time to find out who was right. In a new study with two colleagues, we followed Zillow’s home values for every Minneapolis neighborhood from 2013 through 2024 and compared them with three yardsticks: The 50 cities most similar to Minneapolis, the big cities of the Midwest, and, since the plan’s first year was also the year of the George Floyd protests, the cities that had large protests of their own. Pick whichever yardstick you like, the answer barely moves.
Continue reading at The Washington Examiner.
Vitor Melo, PhD, is a Regulatory Policy Fellow at the Archbridge Institute and host of “The Cause and Effect,”“ a multimedia channel that translates academic research into clear insights for policymakers and the public. His research examines how labor regulations shape economic opportunity. Dr. Melo received his Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University.
Economics of Flourishing
Weeks into New York’s rent freeze, the argument over it has moved to a Manhattan courtroom, where landlords and City Hall are fighting over text messages and whether the mayor leaned on the board that voted it through.
The court will decide whether the freeze was approved properly. What no court can change is what a freeze does: It protects the tenants who already have a lease and adds not one home for the people who don’t. For them, the useful evidence is 1,000 miles west, in Minneapolis, six years into the country’s most closely watched zoning experiment.
In January 2020, Minneapolis became the first large U.S. city to rid of single-family zoning. About 70% of its residential land allowed one house per lot. The 2040 Plan allowed three, let bigger apartment buildings rise along the main corridors, and a year later dropped parking minimums. None of it forced anyone to build. The city just stopped saying no.
Both sides said what they expected, which means we can check. Mayor Jacob Frey, making the pitch in May 2018, noted that anyone could already knock down a modest ranch house and put up a mansion, and said the plan merely let the same lot hold “something more affordable.” Minneapolis for Everyone, the residents’ group that organized against the plan, predicted it would “make our city less affordable.”
Six years is enough time to find out who was right. In a new study with two colleagues, we followed Zillow’s home values for every Minneapolis neighborhood from 2013 through 2024 and compared them with three yardsticks: The 50 cities most similar to Minneapolis, the big cities of the Midwest, and, since the plan’s first year was also the year of the George Floyd protests, the cities that had large protests of their own. Pick whichever yardstick you like, the answer barely moves.
Continue reading at The Washington Examiner.
Vitor Melo
Vitor Melo, PhD, is a Regulatory Policy Fellow at the Archbridge Institute and host of “The Cause and Effect,”“ a multimedia channel that translates academic research into clear insights for policymakers and the public. His research examines how labor regulations shape economic opportunity. Dr. Melo received his Ph.D. in economics from Clemson University.
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