So, given that a lot of people are living alone or with one other person in a single family detached house, by what policies do you think 500,000 population is doable? Given that so far ADUs and triplexes have been met with yawns from homeowners and developers alike and there's only so much vacant or underutilized land for large new apartment complexes?
There is, in fact, a ton of vacant or underutilized land for medium and large apartment complexes. Some of that underutilized land is currently occupied by single family homes. Developers buy and redevelop parcels like these all the time.
But your question got me thinking about if we can make a back of the napkin estimate about the number of new housing units that would need to be built in order to accommodate a population of 500,000. According to the 2020 Census, there are 187,670 occupied housing units (of 199,143 total, a vacancy rate of 5.76%) holding a population of 429,954 people in Minneapolis. That's 2.29 people per unit.
So to house a population of 500,000 people, Minneapolis would need 218,244 occupied housing units. That would mean an increase of 30,574 occupied units (or 19,101 housing units overall, but while there's probably nothing wrong with most of the vacant units, not all of them will come onto the market and a vacancy rate of 5-7% is stable).
Of course, you also have to factor in what Monte alludes to above, which is that the new units will probably be disproportionately smaller and likely home to a different household size than the housing stock as a whole. Minneapolis needs to add 70,046 people to reach 500,000 residents. If we assume that the newly built units are only occupied by 1.75 people per unit, then we'll need roughly 40,000 new occupied housing units to hit that goal.
The range of 35-40k additional housing units strikes me as a good guess. Is it achievable? Between the 2010 Census and the 2020 Census, Minneapolis gained 20,856 housing units. But that span of time incorporates at least a couple years where housing construction was virtually non-existent due to the housing bust and the Great Recession. As I showed in my post on the past page, housing production only began to recover in 2012. In the past decade for which we have data (October 2012 to September 2022), Minneapolis permitted 31,553 units. Most, but not all, of those permitted units were probably built. Let's assume 90% are constructed, giving us a rate of 2,840 new housing units starting construction per year. It would take about 14 years at this pace to build the necessary number of units.
These are extremely casual estimates, which strip out a lot of other critical factors like demographics and economic health, but they can give our expectations some grounding. Can Minneapolis hit a population of 500,000?
> If you expect roughly the current pattern and pace of urban growth to continue, it should hit that mark by 2035-2040.
> If you expect the current pattern and pace of urban growth is somewhat aberrant, and that the spatial trends of the post-war 1900's will reassert themselves, then it might take beyond 2040 to hit that number, if ever.
> If you expect that the current pattern and pace of urban growth represent an increasing trend of re-urbanization and more traditional spatial agglomeration, then it could achieve that population goal by 2030-2035.