Let’s Talk About Austin and Minneapolis:
DOES New Construction Lower Rent?
And Why Would Richmond Allow Zoning That Wouldn’t Pass as an SUP?
Richmond is trying to eliminate onerous Special Use Permits (SUPs). I get it: I too hate paperwork! But I value more and respect the community voices that determine if something is a benefit… or a detriment to them.
That is why SUPs are important.
In Richmond, all of the following six SUP criteria must be met to pass:
𝟙 It won’t be detrimental to the health, safety, morals and general welfare of the community involved.
𝟚 It won’t create congestion in the streets, roads, alleys, and other public ways and places in the area involved.
𝟛 It won’t create hazards from fire, panic, or other dangers.
𝟜 It won’t cause overcrowding of land and undo and an undue concentration of population.
𝟝 It won’t adversely affect or interfere with the public or private schools, parks, playgrounds, water supplies, sewage, disposal, transportation, or other public requirements, conveniences, and improvements, or
𝟞 It won’t interfere with adequate light and air.
“And if any one of them is not met, the special use permit is not permitted,” confirms Rodney Poole, chair of the Planning Commission.
Code Refresh must maintain these same protections of our existing communities… or be rejected.
IF CODE REFRESH DOESN'T EVEN PASS AS A SPECIAL USE PERMIT (which allows more than the baseline of zoning) why would Richmond pass it as zoning?
Always evaluate the benefits or negative impacts to your community when making decisions on change!
Similarly, policyswayers are loudly holding up Austin & Minneapolis as examples where increasing housing supply lowered rent. So let’s look at them!
Policyswayers tell us that if we build a bunch of housing, prices will fall. In Richmond WE observe prices and taxes jump up in newly labeled premium districts that USED to be affordable housing, displacing residents. They cite Austin and Minneapolis as success stories.
I looked into it, and they’re right! Overall, prices fell! Let’s see how these two cities are bucking the trend of skyrocketing rents and displacement near luxury development, and instead became beacons of success.
Austin
In Austin, home prices are down 26% in the last 3 years, dropping 6x more in this crash than in the 2008 crash. See, in 2022, the collapsing rental bubble became a crash market with 40-50% discounts. In short, developers overbuilt condos & apartments by mistake. It peaked, was 50% overvalued, and locals couldn’t afford to buy houses. Then slowed migration and higher mortgages created another Austin crash.That crash, which is bad enough, permanently scarred the city’s local ownership and attractiveness: over 3,500 homes (including single-family and multi-family) were demolished between 2019 and 2024 to make way for Austin’s “better” denser, Anywhere USA development.
Austin’s Black population declined to 7.5% by 2024–2026, down from over 12% in the 1980s - almost half of what Austin used to vibrantly be!
Is this the healthy density you want for Richmond?
Minneapolis
Minnesota recently experienced a net loss of native residents to other states. Between 2020 and 2022, the state lost over 37,000 people to domestic migration due to high income taxes, crime, and weather, with notable outflows in middle-to-high income brackets to Florida and Texas.A new report from the Minneapolis Fed shows the Twin Cities came up short on all three of its annual affordable housing goals, raising concerns about the region’s progress in building homes and closing the homeownership gap.
With institutional investors purchasing increasing shares of single-family homes, Black homeownership rates continued to drop. Experts say high costs and interest rates are major challenges. The Twin Cities region has one of the largest gaps between Black and White homeownership rates in the country, with white households at 77% and Black households at 29% in 2024. The goal had been to increase Black homeownership to 45% by 2030, but after years of improvement, the share of homes with Black owners dropped from 34.3% to just over 29%.
In 2026, migration had a significant, traumatic contraction following "Operation Metro Surge," the largest federal immigration enforcement operation in the agency's history. See, like Richmond, Minneapolis was drawing newcomers from elsewhere, in this case California, newcomers who were attracted to the lower cost of homes. Immigrant communities now have a significant footprint in the Twin Cities, including roughly 9,000 business owners, accounting for 12% of all business owners in the region.
While overall Minneapolis rents went down, it is important to note WHICH rents dropped. Similar to Richmond, new apartment units are usually studios to 2 bedrooms (in an extraordinarily decreasing amount of square footage). Only 8% of new apartments built in the Midwest (not just Minneapolis) were three-bedroom units as of 2024.
3-Bedroom Units, which I assume are mostly in existing, older housing stock (if only 8% of new builds have them), saw a 8% price increase in the past year.
4-Bedroom prices increased by a significant 32%.
While Minneapolis increased its housing stock significantly between 2017 and 2022, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve reports in 2026 that rent prices are still rising in the Twin Cities, and that slowed rent growth is often linked to demand weakness rather than just housing supply increases.Downtown Minneapolis has lagged with occupancy rates forecasted at 92.1% by late 2025, even with new buildings offering 1–2 months of free rent to attract residents.
Its office vacancy rate is 30% in 2026, suggesting fewer people want to live or work in the city.
Declining birth rates and an aging population have led to fewer new households. The region's population grew by only 2.7% between 2020 and 2024, with annual growth rates in the 2020s considerably lower than in previous decades.
