(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 480: Details of Development Reform in Minnesota Part 1

This week we’re joined by Jim Kumon, Principal at Electric Housing, to discuss his work as a developer and urban policy educator in the Twin Cities. We chat about his sustainable development project, what St. Paul learned from Minneapolis 2040 and how zoning reform and transportation intersect.

Some websites of note from this episode:

Electric Housing | Sundial Building | Incremental Development Alliance

~~~

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is an AI generated unedited full transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood (40s):
Jim Kumon, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast.

Jim Kumon (1m 21s):
Hey Jeff, it’s great to be here.

Jeff Wood (1m 23s):
Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jim Kumon (1m 26s):
Yeah, absolutely. So my background is in Arctic and Construction originally, and I now an owner or partner in three different companies that do all kinds of things across the realm of real estate urbanism, planning, development, and design. So my wife and I, faith cable cumin, are co-owners of heirloom properties here in Minneapolis where I’m based. And we just recently finished up a 12 unit missing middle infill project here in the core of the city that’s called the Sundial Building. And it’s got all kinds of fun sustainability, net zero energy striving attributes, which we can probably get into some more. And then second, I have a consulting company called Electric Housing, which helps people build buildings like the Sundial Building.

Jim Kumon (2m 12s):
And I do a lot of work for government agencies and nonprofit developers. Also do some technical assistance for planning and housing departments who are trying to either make better rules or figure out what to do with money or we have a bunch of land, well how do we make missing middle housing happen? Oh, by the way, we want it all to be sustainable ’cause we’re gonna go chase IRA tax credits now. And so electric housing is trying to put housing on the board from all those different resources. And then just a year and a half ago now, joined forces with some of my previous conspirators in the Incremental Development Alliance where I was a co-founder and ran that outfit for about six years. And the new for-profit entity is called Neighborhood Evolution.

Jim Kumon (2m 54s):
And we’re picking up from some of the technical assistance pieces that we started doing at Ink Dev doing real estate development coaching and other technical assistance for, for-profit and non-profit small developers. So it’s not really a dull day. I hired an intern two summers ago and so every time that whole summer where they’d say, Hey, what are you doing this summer? And they would, they would start by saying, I work for this guy. And he does a lot of different things and

Jeff Wood (3m 21s):
Then does stuff

Jim Kumon (3m 22s):
Stuff right. Which is hilarious now because we’ve had some, you know, press about the building and things. And so she’ll send something along, she’s like, you see this guy, he does this cool stuff. It’s like, just shows up at NPR. So,

Jeff Wood (3m 34s):
So

Jim Kumon (3m 35s):
Something along those lines.

Jeff Wood (3m 37s):
That’s awesome. Well, let’s go back in time a little further. Like, did you always wanna be a developer? Like was that your main, you know, driving force or did you ever expect to be called a developer or an educator or a nonprofit executive director or anything along those lines? Entrepreneur, yeah, like all

Jim Kumon (3m 51s):
Entrepreneur, half of those things. No, heck no. I wanted to become some of them, but never thought I’d actually become some of them. My career started out working in a architecture and design and went pretty far down the road to become a licensed architect and did not, but started cut my teeth in California. And that’s like kind of how you and I sort of crossed paths out there. I I lived in LA at the time and you were, you were at, you’re still in San Francisco, but that’s how we first kind of met in, in the urbanism circles when I worked for one of the co-founders of the Congress for New Urbanism. And so really spent two years learning how to do what we now call middle housing, missing middle housing, right? That was just how we did things in the boom years free recession, boom years in Southern California.

Jim Kumon (4m 31s):
And there was a comp plan, master plan to redo in a city on every corner. And so I got to do urban planning and cool projects like that as well as courtyard housing was what we specialized in at Moll Pazos. And so I got to learn all kinds of cool stuff about housing and urban design. And the reason why I thought I wanted to become a developer one day is because of all the really terrible decisions that some of our clients were making about their projects. And I was like, man, like what are they thinking when they do these things?

Jeff Wood (5m 1s):
Can you give an example of something?

Jim Kumon (5m 3s):
Well, it, you know, or it’s just like, like very obviously money grubbing, you know, it’s like, oh, they’re, they’re doing this ’cause they gotta save costs and like, right. And of course I didn’t know anything about proformas or I didn’t know anything about that at that point in time. So some of it may have been justified. I was naive, but some of it definitely was not. But the whole point was that there are really great buildings you can build in the world. And that’s when I first started to realize why, you know, in Southern California with high, high land prices and high housing prices, there were things that we could do in that market that was being done nowhere else. And I didn’t understand why until I realized, well, high cost of housing allows you to do high cost things. And I grew up in southeastern Michigan and so we did not have anywhere near that kind of high cost of housing.

Jim Kumon (5m 47s):
So it was fascinating to be because I, I felt like I was living on another planet at that point, which is, which is always true, right? Things are happening in California 10 years. I actually chased this process. So I lived in Los Angeles and then I lived in Denver and then I lived in, in Minneapolis, you know, over the course of about seven years. And so I watched the movie repeat itself as housing prices, transit, you know, the, the transit investments that were happening when I lived in Denver during the recession. You know, huge transit investments that were going on at that point with RTD. So like I got to watch this movie of housing transit, active bike culture, active ydi culture. Like it kind of happened over and over and over through my career. And so I got to live it as just a human right, as somebody living in these places that were changing, but also as a professional really watch it and see what would happen.

Jim Kumon (6m 31s):
And so that was the first time I got to see these things go on and say, geez, gosh, if I got to make these decisions, how would I do it the same or different? And so building a 12 plex was kind of the pinnacle of well what would you do different? Huh, punk. Yeah. Like, you know, like shoes of the other foot now, huh? You think it’s so easy? And so that’s kind of the beginning of my full circle moment to say, okay, well when you have to wear all the hats from developer to designer to being somebody who wants good urbanism, good city stuff, you know, how do you fit all that deal? Oh, sustainability too. Let’s throw that on top, right? Let’s, let’s just make this, you know, steeper climb.

Jeff Wood (7m 9s):
So let’s talk about that project. The one that kind of looms large in your imagination, I imagine right now, especially since you’re probably sitting in it. Are you there? Yeah. You’re sitting sitting it right now. Yeah, you’re sitting in it, you live there. What is the Sundial Project? Can you give us kind of a background of its origins and And, what it is And, what it was meant to be?

Jim Kumon (7m 24s):
Yeah, so my wife and I are a literal mom and pot development company. We’ve lived in this neighborhood for more than 10 years now. And there was a vacant lot about six blocks away from our house that was a part of a larger, it was a nonprofit redevelopment tax credit project. And they were gonna build town homes on this lot, kinda was like off the side street. And they, lo and behold, can you imagine this, A affordable housing project ran out of money before they could finish out the whole project. And so this lot that

Jeff Wood (7m 52s):
Never happens, never

Jim Kumon (7m 53s):
Happens. It’s about 7,000 square foot lot, 65 feet wide sat vacant for 10 years after that. Because you can imagine that if you do big low income tax credit projects or you do, you know, affordable single family houses, right? There’s money, there’s buckets of money for each of those two scales. But there was no scale of money for affordable housing folks to build 6, 10, 12 units. And that’s one of the reasons why it just sat there is because it was owned by an affordable housing developer. They tried to sell it to two other affordable housing developers. None of them could figure out how to find the right monies to, to make a project happen. And so, because my wife has a day job working in affordable housing, it turned out we had a relationship with the person who became the director of the estate at the organization that owned it.

Jim Kumon (8m 38s):
And I sat on the local committee, our neighborhood committee that would oversee projects as they come through our neighborhood, especially ones that were asking for public funding, right? They’d come through the neighborhood organization and say, Hey, could you write us a letter of support? Right? So two of these nonprofit organizations came through that committee looking to do something on this property and six months later you get a, you know, you get a note in in your email saying, ah, shs, we didn’t get funded again, right? This did, didn’t make the cut, couldn’t make it happen. And so I went home one day from one of those meetings and talked to Faith and I said, you know, if three nonprofits have kicked the tires on the site in the last three years and nobody can figure out what to do with this, well what about us?

Jim Kumon (9m 19s):
I wonder if they’d sell it to somebody who wasn’t a nonprofit and well, here we are. So that’s, that’s how it got started. But this is the ethos like we, we really believe in, and, and this is part of the ink dev as well as the neighborhood evolution approach, right? Is, is to be present in your place, be working in an area and to be engaged in it. And so we are that unusual developer developing in their own neighborhood. And that’s kind of how we arrived in the 12 plex was that we need a heck of a lot of housing in Minneapolis and we knew that four units wasn’t the right solution. Heck, we couldn’t even make the numbers work for less than six or eight. And by the time you build a building about that size, you might as well max out what you can do with the building code.

Jim Kumon (10m 0s):
And so it’s a single staircase building 12 units, four units per floor. And this was before everybody was talking about, you know, this is the latest hot thing going on now there’s legislatures all over the country trying to figure out how to do what Seattle has done and make taller single staircase buildings and so, so cool that that’s happening. And, and maybe I would’ve done something a little bit different, had that rule been on the books, you know, three years ago. But we also are deeply committed to sustainability. And my background in green building stretches all the way back to the early days, we’re just talking about, I was doing lead buildings and was at accredited Press role, you know, in 2007 doing sorry, office rehabs in Simi Valley or wherever the heck I was at doing these like government buildings that all, you know, it was a new thing at back then all the government agencies are saying we gotta make lead buildings happen.

Jim Kumon (10m 46s):
We have no idea how, but we’re gonna, it happen. And California’s energy codes were actually really progressive at the time. Like the baseline energy code at that moment in time was actually higher, more stringent than like lead requirements were, right? And so I cut my teeth, you know, in those days learning how energy models worked because every building in California had to do one. And that wasn’t true of hardly any place else in the country at the time. So I kind of merged, it was a slow build of all these different things I got to do in my career up to this point, learning how to do energy models, learning how to do green building, starting ink dev with some really knowledgeable folks who I learned real estate from and then trying to put it all together for myself.

Jim Kumon (11m 27s):
So that’s kind of what turned into Sundial. We have, I’ll rattle off the rest of the nutrition facts. It was a long intro, but the, the rest of the nutrition facts are, it’s a 13,000 square foot building and it has three, three kw of solar all over the place. Every last square inch of roof. I actually made some extra roofs just to, to put more solar panels on. It’s an all electric building, which is a, a big to-do here in Minnesota cold weather climate because people are not aware that technology has changed in the last five to seven years. And you can get an air source heat pump to be a mini split to heat and cool your 600 square foot, 500 square apartment and they’re good down to 13 below, right? And so ev almost everybody person who walks into this building is like, but what about the winter?

Jim Kumon (12m 7s):
It, it’s so cold and it’s like, it’s okay, actually it’s fine. So the fun part about merging my wife’s world, which is capital A affordable housing gets free money from all over the place, is that she knows how to find these odd pots of free money. And so one of, one of the previous projects she did was a collaboration with our little watershed district. And so we were able to apply with our neighborhood association as our partner. ’cause they only give money to nonprofits. So as a for-profit entity, we couldn’t apply directly. So again, working those neighborhood connections, we were able to do something that no one else would probably be able to do. And so we got a pretty good chunk of change to put in a demonstration project for rainwater recycling and filtration and so forth. So we have rain barrels underground, above ground.

Jim Kumon (12m 49s):
So those are the main things we’re, we’re approaching passive house standards. We didn’t go all the way for it largely because I knew kind of who our construction team was gonna be and I wasn’t really confident enough that they’d be able to do it. And we have very few projects. We, the, the first one, the first market rate one just got finished up a couple months ago. So when I started this project, there wasn’t enough people I could talk to to figure out how to do that. And so I didn’t wanna sign up for something not knowing if anybody else besides me could help me finish that commitment. So, but now we’re looking forward, we’ll talk about that probably a little bit later. But that’s what the project ended up coming. And oh by the way, it’s brick.

Jeff Wood (13m 25s):
It looks like an old building. Like it, it looks like it fits. It was an old warehouse or something.

Jim Kumon (13m 29s):
Yeah. That’s one of the best compliments we get. Hey, is this a rehab? Yeah,

Jeff Wood (13m 33s):
Yeah, it looks like that.

Jim Kumon (13m 34s):
Yeah. And it’s the craziest thing when you build a human scale building with details that are human scaled. You know, I had baristas in the cafe next door, you know, I, I know the owner and so we were chatting about something and the lady who’s taking my money is like, oh, you own the building. Like, thank you so much for building a beautiful building. Like what? Who, who are you? You’re like 20 something in a barista and you’re like, but I like looking at the building every day when I come to work ’cause it’s beautiful, it’s handsome.

Jeff Wood (14m 2s):
That’s awesome.

Jim Kumon (14m 2s):
Who says that about housing in 2024? Like, it’s funny ’cause it’s like everyone’s like it can’t be done. It’s like, well it can’t be done if you don’t do it really carefully. And I think that’s one of the, the takeaways, a shout out to a mutual friend in urbanism, our architect Marcus King and fabric architecture, fabric design, I should say, out of Detroit. He was our architect of record for the project and he comes outta DC that’s where he cut his teeth in design. And so they do brick everything in DC So he knew the secret sauce. He’s like, you gotta get your windows lined up on the brick dimension, otherwise you’re cutting bricks all the way up and down your building. Like, oh that would be expensive. And we found out how expensive, by the way, ’cause our framers screwed up one of the windows and it was a little off.

Jim Kumon (14m 44s):
So they got to cut 45 rows of brick that inch and a half and it was like $7,000 for that little fix. So can you imagine if you just put a willy nilly all over the place. So it’s funny, like whether it’s sustainability elements and I have, I can do a whole podcast just about the sustainability lessons learned of this project, but it took a lot of careful planning and follow through and you know, multi-family housing doesn’t typically get that kind of attention. Yeah, right. And so it proves what can be done. Although certainly there’s, there’s more sweat that faith and I put into it than most developments are gonna get either. But we also didn’t need to try out 40 different things that were brand new. We could’ve done like four, it would’ve been fine.

Jim Kumon (15m 25s):
I would’ve slept a lot more.

Jeff Wood (15m 27s):
Well let’s go back, let’s go back in time a little bit more. ’cause I think this is actually a very helpful talk about in Dev Incremental Development Alliance. I’ve heard you use the shorthand for it and I was like, thank you. I think we’ve heard it a couple times, but I wanted to clear that out. But I wanted to like know what it means to, you know, do incremental development. Like what that means to develop in your neighborhood, to be a part of the neighborhood as opposed to like coming in later and you know, hopping in and hopping out, you know, that kind of stuff.

Jim Kumon (15m 52s):
Yeah. You know, this is really this idea of farming, I’ll start with that is really comes from my colleague and my business partner, Monte Anderson. He’s based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And he’s one of the co-founders of Incremental Development Alliance. And so that ethos is absolutely rooted in his own work. And I’m lucky ’cause I get to do some work with him now in his farms. He works in a couple different first string suburbs and other places in DFW where he’s worked for years now. And it is amazing. I’ll throw some of this stuff in here now because it, it’s related to talking about that. But you know, we talked about part of the reason why Incremental Development Alliance was so kind of refreshing, why people grabbed onto it seven years, eight years ago now, when we started in, that was 2015, I guess it’s almost been 10 years now.

Jim Kumon (16m 37s):
And that grew out of some of my time at Strong Towns when I was interacting with Mon and others who became involved in the project, grace and Johnson as he was a huge part of the early days of getting our marketing and our, our thought process together. And the ability to say the things that everybody supposedly wants to see happen. Everybody wants to have locally run businesses that are successful. Everybody wants to have, you know, a diverse range of housing so everybody can have a place to live. Right? There’s a lot of these platitudes that get put in cop plans and we all want to have active transportation and, and bus service. That’s really good because we have enough people living close to, like, it’s not hard to describe these things, right? But it turns out that it’s harder to make them happen in the 21st century than it used to be.

Jim Kumon (17m 20s):
And so we really created that organization to try to crack the how to nut, right? Everybody agrees these things are the right things to do. How come it’s so dang hard? And so we started a nonprofit organization largely because as from an educational perspective, it, there wasn’t gonna be a lot of money made. ’cause at the time, which is funny to think back now, this is actually, I’m glad you’re taking us through the past because it reminds me all the things that were happening, we were still an earshot of the great recession, right? People, the, the building industry was still crawling out of its hole of, you know, the, the smoking crater of death as John Anderson used to call it. That was the, the building industry in the recession. And so we were trying to, you know, be careful, right?

Jim Kumon (18m 2s):
Not do crazy things like what happened, you know, to the building industry. The home building is mystery especially. And, and so we were trying to respond to that because the building finance world had not yet responded, right? Like it was still hard to get loans in 20 13, 20 14, 20 15. I mean, it, it was two, three years only since the, the economy had sort of just even come out of the recession. And so we were trying to say, okay, well what can we do with what we have now? And how can we push that towards the platitudes that we say we want to have? And so that how to ness was the educational process because we weren’t talking about getting rid of single family zoning. Like that wasn’t a thing. Only as crazy urbanist people, you know, sitting around in conferences, like the ones we used to go to would talk about, gosh, one day wouldn’t it be great, you know, if we just didn’t have this, you know, repressive, you know, regulatory racist regime called, you know, single family zoning.

Jim Kumon (18m 55s):
And so it feels weird now to talk about that in past tense. ’cause that’s kind of what it is. I mean, it, we’ve passed the tipping point of, you know, even the kids who weren’t at the cool table feel forced to talk about it, even if they’re not gonna vote for it yet. Like they can’t run from it, right? It’s being brought to them, Hey, why do we still have the rules that don’t seem to serve the purpose that we think they should? So that I would say is one of the, the best things that I think, not that we can take, you know, any, there’s no way we can take credit for that happening. But I think many of the people who were involved in that organization were involved in their own hometowns that agitated those places.

Jim Kumon (19m 36s):
And then as a result, whether it’s Minneapolis or Raleigh or there were other Atlanta, you know, there, there were many of us kind of doing this in our backyards. And some of those places end up becoming more, some of the more progressive places that put a rule forth or got rid of the parking requirements or tried to do, you know, something along those lines. And then over time those added up. And so I think, you know, it’s become a lot easier, but still nothing’s easy Yeah. In development. And so I think that’s the thought process behind, you know, us going out and saying we should really try to do these things actually legitimize the idea that they could be done.

Jim Kumon (20m 16s):
And I think if nothing else as an organization through, you know, the first five or seven years of its existence to change the attitude towards an idea is an accomplishment in itself.

Jeff Wood (20m 27s):
Yeah. There’s also, I I’m also curious in your thoughts on kind of the Minneapolis 2040 process as well. I mean, you’re there and it’s happening at the same time as you’re doing, you’re thinking about these developments and, and things like that. So like what’s the parallel kind of lives that you lived when they were going through that and how were you involved

Jim Kumon (20m 46s):
The first step, the very, very first baby step towards that eventual goal. Lisa Bender was the linchpin politically as a council member, later council president at the time. We had a strong city council, which meant the city council president in some ways legislatively has more power than the mayor at that point in time. It was really true. That’s shifted because of a change we had to our city charter. But she sat on the planning commission, right, as a first term councilwoman, who is, oh by the way, a a trained urban planner and worked in, in your town in San Francisco for a number of years and came back to her, her native Minnesota. And my wife got to know her as they were co-founders of the bicycle coalition, later turned a biking walking commission coalition.

Jim Kumon (21m 31s):
And so in our younger days, in our twenties, right, this is what we did with our free time before we had kids, we, you know, agitated for some change and getting behind that campaign to get her into, you know, city hall was the first step and the first policy piece was trying to get an accessory dwelling unit. Ordinance passed. And that was 2014. And so, you know, baby steps, baby steps, baby steps, trying to work towards that. So it was, it was 20 18, 20 17, 20 18, even before the early stages of the plan. It was a two year process to do Minneapolis 2040, the comprehensive plan change. And that’s kind of when those fights were happening, right? But you gotta remember that like all these things happened.

Jim Kumon (22m 13s):
I always like to bring this up. People wanna talk about all the details of the planning, right? It’s like, no, that never happens. It never sees the light of day unless you get champions elected to office. Just doesn’t, there’s, there’s no way that happens and it doesn’t happen that quickly, even though it wasn’t quick. And so the major thing that was interesting that happened was there was a particular event that happened, sort of a social political event that happened in Minneapolis, which could have its own podcast, but in a sense that political event launched the career of three or four other council members who Lisa Bender showed up at this event that was kind of politically charged and supported some people who were making a case about something that was happening in our city.

Jim Kumon (22m 56s):
And two or three of the people who were involved in that endeavor ended up on city council the next cycle. And those were the votes that cast the majority to pass that plan. And so, you know, it was a process, right? To get to the point where we could even talk about, hey, should we have three that’s on a lot or four goods on a lot, right? But it didn’t matter what we thought about that policy, if we didn’t have the majority votes to take to cast in support of it. And it was four or five years of political organizing and two election cycles before Lisa Bend became city council president and could, you know, govern a majority to push that through. And I bring this up because that majority went out of favor and then has slowly kind of just by the skin of its teeth come back into the majority again.

Jim Kumon (23m 45s):
And so these things shift, right? Like, and the same people who were against it seven years ago, you know, put together a phony environmental lawsuit, which is still putting, I mean we’re coming out of it right now. Hopefully the state legislature is gonna put the tabs on a fix saying that, Hey, you know what, urbanisms a pretty good way, a pretty good best practice for environmentalism, right? If you actually don’t want us building to the hinter lens, we should maybe not do CQA kind of stuff for, you know, infill projects ’cause it’s a better idea. That’s the basis of the lawsuit that currently has us not able to actually use the zoning that’s been passed. That was what happened on a lawsuit. They cited environmental protection ground for why triplexes on every lot was gonna certainly ruin our environmental in the city.

Jim Kumon (24m 31s):
So it, it’s interesting how these ebbs and flows happen and we’re gonna to act of our state legislature to ensure that people don’t sue cities about their comprehensive plans. Like it, it, it’s, it’s crazy where this has ended up.

Jeff Wood (24m 46s):
So Minneapolis is in place, obviously there’s lawsuits going on, but then St Paul’s looking at similar things and watching from afar, what, what do they learn?

Jim Kumon (24m 55s):
Yeah. Well that turned out to be a fascinating process because they didn’t go quite as far, well, let me put a little context around this. So every 10 years, every city in the seven county metropolitan area of the Minneapolis St. Paul MSA has to submit a comprehensive plan. So, so we’re all in the same cycle in that way. So St Paul put some things in their comprehensive plan, but they did not enshrine this threshold that Minneapolis did. And so from that perspective, they maintained a little extra flexibility in some way because the great part about the comp plan policy saying we’re gonna have three hits per lot, was that it set the floor, but it also inadvertently set a ceiling because then it was more difficult to go above three units as well in a certain way.

Jim Kumon (25m 43s):
So St Paul ended up going down a different pathway. I, I can’t tell you for sure whether it was on purpose or not. I can only tell you about things that happened later when I got to know the people who were there involved. And so they got to watch about, you know, two years of this, you know, process play out, especially after the comp plan was passed and actual zoning ordinance had to follow, right? Remember, comprehensive plans have no rule of law, right? With development applications, right? You have to change your actual zoning rules to be in line with your policies. And so the problem happened was that there was a pretty big staff shift in between the time, see this, it takes like two years, right? This to happen. And some of the key authors of the comprehensive plan were no longer around at the city at the point in time where the zoning ordinance had to be put in place.

Jim Kumon (26m 33s):
And so there was a lot of watering down and political pressure started to change things and they got some things in place right before the end of the Lisa Bender term. She left office and then everything since then, kind of wet, watered down. And so St. Paul is watching this and saying, okay, well we have a different situation, And, what can we do? And Luis Pereira and others, you know, he’s a plan director in the city of St. Paul. And Emma, Ms. Sig worth as well was a principal planner in charter of my little project, which was assisting the city to revamp its one to four unit housing rules. And so they, their directive came from actually a transit oriented provision in their comp plan saying, Hey, we think we need to have higher land use intensity around our transit corridors here, planning department go make that happen.

Jim Kumon (27m 20s):
So they took the case of, well, we see what’s going on over here. And so they turned out hilariously enough, they had a new director at the time and she came from Oklahoma City where I’d actually done some work through Ink Jeff. And so she knew of me and was like, Hey, doesn’t that guy live in Minneapolis? This is, I could call. So she calls me up like outta the blue and I’m like, oh, you’re in St. Paul now, Nicole Goodman. And she’s like, yeah, I’d like to have you involved with this, you know, housing stuff that we’re doing, the zoning planning stuff. I said, okay, great. So I get hooked up with the, with the, with the planning department. And so that was interesting because what she wanted to do, what she was trying to bring to the table was this idea that I had been putting out through technical assistance products that we’ve been doing in, at Incremental Development Alliance, which was actually taking a proforma based approach, right?

Jim Kumon (28m 7s):
Let’s not just talk about what number we wanna pick out of a hat to put on a lot. What, what, what can we actually get done, right? If we pick four units on a lot, but we can’t make four units pencil, we’re not gonna get any quadplexes, or we’re not gonna get four units on a lot, you know, we’re gonna get only what the market can bear. And so that was the interesting outtake from, you know, Minneapolis having zoning rules in place for two years, was that we had like 15 duplexes and triplexes, you know, that were built right? Or were permitted, right? It’s not like there was an overwhelming number of these things. So we allowed this to happen. I think there’s 120,000, you know, single family lots in the city of Minneapolis and we got 15 new buildings, right?

Jim Kumon (28m 51s):
It’s, it’s not gonna be a tidal wave, right? It’s gonna take a long time in a city that’s mostly built out. We don’t have a lot of vacant lots. And so they were like, well this makes sense. Like the numbers are showing that we’re not gonna see a tidal wave. Why is that? Right? And so we were able to then take that a little further and say, well, what about two units in every backyard? There was a lot of concern in St. Paul, there’s some historic neighborhoods on the west side especially. And they were like, well, we have one and a half story bungalow houses. We’re not interested in, you know, tear downs, right? I said, well, you shouldn’t want tear downs and you, you, you have beautiful houses in these neighborhoods. But then that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to add more housing units, right? And so that’s, to me, some of the lessons learned from all of this is trying to make sure that we are less focused on a single thing, right?

Jim Kumon (29m 36s):
We got really hung up in Minneapolis. The narrative got hung up, at least like triplexes, triplexes are rather tricky things to build. And if you’re not in min in Minnesota where we have a carve out for smaller housing buildings that don’t need to not have sprinkler systems, most states in the country, you need to have a sprinkler system in a triplex. Okay? So that’s not the easiest thing to build nor is it the right scale. Most of what we need right now is like one bedroom apartments, those fly off the shelf, you can’t build ’em fast enough. And so we don’t really need more old houses that have three or four bedrooms, which is what most of Minneapolis is. We need smaller units and they can fit in your backyard.

Jim Kumon (30m 18s):
Heck, you could put two of them stuck on top of each other where your garage is at or, or next to your garage. And so that’s I think, the key part of where, what we were able to accomplish and they in, in October. So myself, and I want to shout out to Neil Heller neighborhood workshop, my, my co-conspirator helping out with this project in St. Paul. And we just were like, all right, we’re gonna take every cool thing we learned in Portland, in Seattle. And he works, he’s on the, in the west coast. And I was taking stuff from Minneapolis and, and our colleagues in Atlanta. I’m like, we’re gonna take every cool idea we’ve ever thought of and we’re gonna throw it at this project. We’re gonna be like, let’s just see what they think. And you know, they’ll pick a handful of them and we’ll, we’ll go on with life. The city of St. Paul didn’t pick a handful of them.

Jim Kumon (30m 58s):
They, they took darn near all of them. They, they took them to their commission and said, here we read a bunch of performas and we tested a bunch of actual buildings on actual lots, the ones we actually have in St. Paul, not the ones we wish we had. And here’s what it looks like when we try to build this stuff out. And so there’s a hundred page long staff report on their website, the one to four unit housing website, study website. And in there is some diagrams that we drew in SketchUp. And we said here, this is actually what it would look like. And so we did all these different permutations trying to do infill and backyards and adding on to, you know, houses that maybe are on big lots or all these different things to try to make that couple extra units happen. However it could fit into our existing built environment.

Jim Kumon (31m 41s):
And they found a way to code most of them into possibility. And I thought that was, it was, it was a dream to actually find a city who would think that carefully about how infill really works, right? And not this sort of argument about, you know, a building coming in and being plopped down, you know, that’s outta sky size or character with a neighborhood. So it was awesome. And my, my hat’s off to them that it was a seven oh vote. Like it was, it was amazing to watch it. ’cause I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. I’m like, there’s no way. I mean, we had, we still had, you know, a lot of derision here in Minneapolis even after we had the comp plan passed, you know, about these type of issues.

Jim Kumon (32m 24s):
And they got a seven oh vote, you know, with policies that went far and beyond what we ended up getting, having here on the ground right now in Minneapolis. So again, it’s always a little pol, it’s a little politics. It’s all about having good rules. It’s a little bit about having staff who were just fearless. My hats off to them for taking a chance, right? Especially after watching what happened across the river. Like, you know, they couldn’t be at the end of those pitchforks too. And they found a way to communicate the ideas that were just practical. ’cause to us, it’s data, right? It’s just like, look, this is what it is. And, and so to be able to, to translate that through bureaucratic channels to a 15 member planning commission, is it seven or nine? Nine member city council? You know, that’s a, that’s a doing.

Jim Kumon (33m 4s):
And so anybody who’s out there listening, who’s working and planning, please reach out to them on their approach to the work.

Jeff Wood (33m 11s):
And so now you have, you know, the Minnesota legislative session is, is almost finished. So I’m going through these kind of geographies here. Yeah. And I’m curious what you’ve been following there. And I know that the missing middle bill was just kind of, you know, pushed back a little bit. But I, I’m wondering what’s going on at the state after all of this stuff has happened in Minneapolis, St. Paul and other places?

Jim Kumon (33m 30s):
Yeah. Wow. I spent about three weeks at the capitol in, in March. It was, it, it it got, it got pretty interesting there for a bit as this was introduced. And I ended up being invited in by some of the cities who knew me. This is a strange part, right? When you are a YIMBY and you’re a developer and you’re a consultant to the cities who have the rules, right? This is the strange parallel universes I live in, right? Where like I was simultaneously working with the ybi groups who were working with the legislatures, bringing forward the initial language and then called in by the cities who were reacting to that language, some positively, some negatively, right?

Jim Kumon (34m 14s):
And say, where did this come from? And like, why didn’t people talk to us about this? And you know, obviously whoever wrote this doesn’t understand actual planning law and try to translate right between the intents and the rules and the state law that governs planning practice. So in short, right now, because things are complicated, right? There wasn’t enough time to sort of get everyone what they needed, right? So here’s the, here’s the rub. Rural places need housing like crazy and in most cases are like not worried about the zoning anymore. They’ll, they’ll throw the doors open. Anybody will build something in their town that doesn’t suck. The core cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul Bloomington, St. Louis Park, and the first week suburbs here we have, they already have passed rules trying to get duplexes and or, you know, two or three more units on a lot.

Jim Kumon (34m 60s):
And so simultaneously we’re trying to pass rules that wouldn’t accidentally disarm the cities who already passed good stuff while also trying to make sure that we were doing things at a scale that made sense for thousand person towns in northern Minnesota. Right? Because that’s the trouble when you try to do planning at a statewide level. But the real point of the spear was kind of poking at suburban communities who were not so welcome to a lot of housing, right? And so that’s actually politically where the thing has broken right now is that we have very slim majorities in our house and senate and basically two senators and two house representatives can break a bill right now in our state politics.

Jim Kumon (35m 42s):
And so it only took one, somebody fleeing for the hills to put the thing on hold because there’s no votes, right? If we have that margin. But the suburban areas are the ones that have the most space. They have lots twice the size. The ones here in Minneapolis, they can st Paul in, in the new zoning code they put together. They have both alleys and non alley lots. So we have all kinds of examples of how we can fit buildings in, but they’re the ones that are unsure, right? Because they haven’t made that local zoning code change yet. They don’t know what it means for these rules to come on high and they freaked out, right? So it, it’s interesting, I got to watch in the inside, you know, have these really, I spent a whole afternoon at the capitol about a month ago working with legislators who were like in completely well-intentioned, like these folks were like all into trying to figure out this problem and then had to li to this litany of the builders association and the, and the, you know, several different sizes of city governments and the multifamily housing association, you know, all pick this thing apart, right?

Jim Kumon (36m 44s):
Their brains are just melting at the level of minutiae that real estate and land use policy brings out, right? It’s really difficult. So I’m very torn. I don’t really believe in state law trying to be planning. Like it’s, it’s really difficult and you guys have had that same sort of conversation in California, but if that’s what it takes to get the communities who on their own, I mean there was people testifying, written testimony and other things, and then a lot of anecdotal stuff. ’cause nobody wants to be on the record. But basically there was all these anecdotes coming online of former city council people in the deeper suburbs, you know, saying, I couldn’t vote for this because I would’ve been literally run outta town.

Jim Kumon (37m 27s):
Yeah. I, I believed in this, this was important. And so they were supporting the state law because of their own inability to legislate at the local level. And I was like, that’s bizarre. That’s crazy.

Jeff Wood (37m 39s):
I feel like that’s a very common thing. And I think that that’s why here in California at the state level, you can get stuff done because you are not beholden to individual constituencies if you’re in the assembly or the Senate, right? You have larger geographies that you’re dealing with and so you can make some enemies but still be okay. Whereas if you’re in a city where the only population is some mountain lions and, and some rich people, then that might not be the case, right? Yeah. The rich

Jim Kumon (38m 6s):
People are way worse than mountain lions. Just

Jeff Wood (38m 8s):
That’s true. They are. They’ll they’ll eat your face earlier. Yeah. Their

Jim Kumon (38m 10s):
Lawyers are way more expensive than the mountain lions lawyers. And that was actually where the worst stories were coming from, by the way, the pricier enclaves, right? Where there was another set of legislation that wasn’t middle housing legislation, but was just like trying to open up more land to be eligible for multi-family housing. And that one’s still moving forward, thank goodness. But boy, like they just brought out the sob stories of affordable housing projects and, and like that were sabotaged by local land lease law and, you know, death by planning commission. Yeah. The worst ones were the projects that like started as like market rate projects and then something happened and then they reformulated the project as an affordable housing project and went from approval to denial. Oh wow.

Jeff Wood (38m 50s):
Yeah. Just gone, huh? Yeah,

Jim Kumon (38m 52s):
Yeah. Wild stuff. And you’re just like, it sounds like something outta the onion, right? It’s like, you know, switch, switch, you know, one word in a sentence and, and all of a sudden you go from everyone’s happy with you to everyone’s flaming mad. And that’s exactly what happened in these stories. And, and these are like nonprofit developers too. It’s like no one’s gonna make a dime off of these projects. And yet, you know, just the hate, I mean like just literally, I dunno else to describe that when you single out people based on where they’re trying to just have a place to live, but that’s the worst of those stories were coming in the places that had to plenty of money to go around to try to fight that. So it does need to have a solution at a level above local government if that’s, you know, what you’re gonna hear.

Jim Kumon (39m 34s):
And it, it wasn’t a one-off scenario. So I haven’t been involved in state level politics really in Minnesota, and it was pretty wild to be thrown into the back end of the, the actual, you know, nuts and bolts of, you know, the committee hearings are just like for show, right? If you have a majority you’re gonna get passed through. But to be in these sort of, you know, behind the scenes meetings that we’re trying to legitimately grind through paragraph by paragraph, how how do we make this a better bill? It was tough. It was really tough to try to figure out because as somebody who writes zoning code, I was just like, oh my god. Like how if you write this sentence and it’s for a whole state, right?

Jim Kumon (40m 15s):
And we were trying to tier it too at some point they were like, Hey, we can’t, there’s just, that’s not gonna work. We’re gonna have to write something for cities like this of a certain size or a certain complexity and something. And then, you know, but then there’s like, well, but you’re asking us to do more and we’re already doing more. Like there’s all this equity, fairness stuff going. So it’s like there’s all these different aspects to it. And so I was like, this is gonna take more than three months to work out. You know, like we, we need to have a whole year long dialogue, you know, to maybe come back. So I think, I think there’s a chance it’ll keep going in the next session. We only have part-time legislature, so we close up shop here by Memorial Day in Minnesota, so it’ll go on the burner and lots of behind the scenes conversations will happen this fall and we’ll see if it comes back in January in the next session.

Jim Kumon (40m 56s):
But it put me at the actual cross hairs of a like theoretical conversation. Like people have been talking ever since, you know, the California bill started coming around about, you know, what does it mean to have local control? And, and then you have to really take sides. You have to really see what’s the lesser of two evils.

Jeff Wood (41m 15s):
And this is just development, right? I mean this is just, you know, code for allowing the building of, of buildings and right as we kind of went around this the other day in terms of talking about, you know, the larger picture in terms of transportation, land use planning, but there’s something that, you know, you’re doing this in this, it’s not necessarily a silo, but it kind of is. And you’re trying to also think about how the process for transportation planning goes. And I know in Minneapolis and, and Minnesota writ large, there’s a big discussion now too about how you build new light rail lines and how you invest in transportation. And so for example, like somebody at the state wants min.to start planning light rail lines instead of the Met Council and things like that. And so, but all these things are tied together, right?

Jeff Wood (41m 55s):
Because you have to have the density, you have to have the people to ride the transit and you need the transit to be sustainable. So all these things are tied together and I find that fascinating as well.

Jim Kumon (42m 6s):
Yeah, it’s funny, so much of the like light rail dis discussion in twin cities got pushed forward. The unfortunate Bush era, you know, rules. And so that’s why we still have a green line that’s not open yet because, well, there’s a lot of really terrible mismanagement going on, but one of the real reasons why it’s taking so long and it’s been so painful, is because of the alignment that got chosen, which by the way, barely skirts the city of Minneapolis before it gets to downtown. It goes to these really, like, out of the way neighborhoods that are like basically surrounded by lakes, they’re, they’re not that dense because they’re just, they’re like physically pinned in. And so it’s funny ’cause I, that’s kind of the conversations that were going on when I first moved to Minneapolis in, in 2010, 11 was they were trying to make all these decisions about these light rail corridors, but they were still working off of the old rules until they got changed in the Obama years.

Jim Kumon (42m 55s):
And some of these alignments had been chosen years before and they were just sort of trudging forward trying to find money. And it came up even in this conversation we were just talking about. ’cause we were like, well how do you set the floor like statewide? How do you set a floor for land use? And someone’s like, well, shouldn’t we be, you know, using the rules of thumb for transit, right? Shouldn’t that be the way that we set a, you know, a minimum, right? Shouldn’t that be what we’re trying to support? So it’s funny, just like out of nowhere in a conver three hours into a work session, like how do we decide how much of what goes where? Well why shouldn’t we be? What’s the threshold? Like, well isn’t that the t So if everyone’s googling the threshold again, like look y’all, it’s like 10 units to the acre for this and right. And what’s BRT versus light rail and all this other stuff?

Jim Kumon (43m 37s):
Oh gosh. But in the meantime, because the light rail has just flails so badly, that’s being run by Metropolitan Council. We can get into that. It’s a whole podcast by itself. But in the meantime, what happened was the BRT was taken forward by a division of metropolitan council. ’cause our transit agency is run by vet council, but it’s not that council, it’s a subsidiary organization. And so those transportation planners within the transit agency decided to move forward because this is a time we’re still talking about streetcar. And so all the cities were taking up streetcar alignments and there was like conflicting maps and it was a mess.

Jim Kumon (44m 17s):
It was just that the hot streetcar years, right? And all that’s died, thank God. ’cause those were, I mean the, the, the line that would’ve come literally 50 feet from where I’m sitting right now, the Nicolette Central streetcar line would’ve actually made service go slower at its conclusion, right? So it was

Jeff Wood (44m 32s):
Because it had to be in the street with traffic, it has been

Jim Kumon (44m 34s):
The traffic street. And it was like, there was all kinds of other weird things that were going on with the alignment. And it was just like, it was just terrible. It was just terrible. And so the BRT won’t be on this line for a few more years yet, but the other ones we already have online are, are pretty swell. So it was interesting to see that the faster cheaper model, like has actually gotten through, they’ve gotten like four or five BRT routes open and we still don’t have the green line extension and it won’t be open until like a year and a half from now yet. Right? Yeah. So that played out, right, that that kind of land use planning conversation played out and you know, it’s hard for me to be a advocate of light rail anymore, you know, because we do it so poorly in this country at at large that, you know, in the meantime we got a whole bike lane network in Minneapolis as well as a couple of good BRT lines and a few more in the future.

Jim Kumon (45m 21s):
Like they only have so much money, but they’re like a hundred percent efficiency, right? They plan it, they get the money, they do it, they plan it, they get the money, they do it and like they just keep putting another one online and our light rail system, it just does not go that well. So

Jeff Wood (45m 38s):
Yeah, it takes, it takes too long. I mean, I agree with you. It’s hard. Like I as an advocate for light rail, I mean The, Overhead, Wire, I mean right? Let’s, what else am I right? Am I doing, but it’s tough. I mean I was a, I was a early street car evangelist too, and then you found out how poorly they ran in certain areas and how they didn’t work for folks because they wouldn’t go fast enough. And now it’s just, you know, I’m trying to figure out how you can get it done faster and cheaper too because we, I mean I keep on bringing this up and the people in Austin make me so mad, but they built a whole, you know, subway in Milan for 14 miles or 14 kilometers or whatever. There’s the same distance as what they’re gonna spend seven, $8 billion on for, you know, a couple, you know, less light rail surface level.

Jeff Wood (46m 20s):
So it’s just like frustrating to see that happen where, you know, in other places that they can get stuff done and there’s a whole thing you can go to, you know, if you want to, you know, we talked about that on the show before Jona and I have talked f Freemark and I have talked about it on the show. You know, we’ve had folks from, you know, and, and Marin Institute on the show as well. So there’s people working on that. But it’s also very frustrating if you’re watching, like for example, I mean when I was at Sea Todd, right, right. When we were at Sea Todd, we were working on the green line. We were doing, you know, walkability maps and looking at like the affordable housing potential for that corridor. Yeah. You know, not the green line between downtown Minneapolis and downtown St. Paul, but the one that goes down to Hopkins and beyond. To to the Hopkins. Yeah. And so, I mean, that was I, I haven’t been there for 10 years.

Jeff Wood (47m 1s):
Right.

Jim Kumon (47m 2s):
And the rail’s

Jeff Wood (47m 3s):
In. And so that’s a long time. The

Jim Kumon (47m 4s):
Rail’s in, but it would still be operational for more than a year, right?

Jeff Wood (47m 7s):
It’s crazy. It’s crazy. It’s too long.