The Legislature Needs To Say No To The Suburban Mayors, And Yes To More Homes [OPINION]

By J. Patrick Coolican and Cole Hanson, Minnesota Reformer

May 11, 2026

Ask a Minnesotan under 40 about trying to buy a house, and they’ll inevitably share a nightmare about bidding wars and multiple cash offers, forgone inspections and huge mortgage payments for a starter home.

Meanwhile, your attached garage in Lakeville has to be a whopping 480-square feet, and the city’s response to mild pushback from state lawmakers aiming for more building was to pass a moratorium on applications for new housing construction for a year.

Most Minnesotans understand that these two phenomena are connected — expensive government mandates and the screeching of “Not in my backyard” neighbors have constrained the supply of homes even as demand has risen.

By an iron law of economics, this has pushed up prices.

Great for incumbent homeowners.

Bad for Minnesota’s young families who want to buy a home, bad for students and schools being re-segregated by restrictive housing policies, bad for job growth, bad for our future.

Minnesota needs another 100,000 homes, part of the nationwide shortage of 2 million homes.

Thankfully, a remarkable bipartisan coalition of business, labor, clergy, developers, and low-income housing advocates has rallied around a bill called the Starter Home Act (HF3895) at the Legislature, which would make a tiny bit of progress by stopping cities from pulling up the ladder on young families.

The bill would merely mandate that cities speed up permitting to prevent the endless filibustering that make building so difficult and expensive; prohibit onerous design standards and lot sizes; allow flexibility for “accessory dwelling units,” i.e., mother-in-law suites; and force cities to accept some apartments, condos or senior housing in or near commercial districts.

It’s not turning Lakeville into Manhattan.

These kinds of reforms would help catalyze the building of more than 10,000 homes per year, argued two housing analysts in the Reformer this year.

Unfortunately, local government mayors and city councils are jealously guarding their prerogative to enforce their exclusionary policies, so they’re pushing hard on their state legislators to oppose even these mild reforms. In 2024, local governments spent an eye-watering $13 million lobbying other governments, and a hefty portion of that was cities lobbying the Legislature to obstruct housing reform.

As you can tell from the broad-based coalition, however, the reforms have popular support, which explains how they’ve passed in red states and blue, from Montana to Washington State, California to Texas, and, famously, Minneapolis, which eliminated single-family zoning and other regulations like parking minimums that drove up building costs.

There’s already decent evidence to show what would seem to be intuitively obvious: Eliminating burdensome rules spurs building, which creates downward pressure on home prices and rents — at all levels.

Austin, Texas, is home to a thriving YIMBY movement — that’s “Yes in my backyard” — that’s reformed zoning and building regulations and seen a rapid increase in supply, accompanied by falling rents. According to a recent paper from the Pew Research Center, Austin’s median rent fell from $1,546 in late 2021 to $1,296 by early 2026, all while the city was growing.

The authors also share data that shows increasing supply will affect everyone on the income ladder, with rents declining about 11% in older non-luxury buildings that cater to lower-income renters.

This isn’t complicated: If you want to lower the price of a commodity, you need more of it, and government can help by reducing compliance costs, which is exactly how we should think of lengthy permitting battles and onerous rules.

In addition to ameliorating Minnesota’s housing shortage, ending local governments’ stranglehold on building is also the best long-term solution to another pressing problem: School re-segregation.

As Axios reported on the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, in the early ‘90s, Minneapolis and St. Paul schools “barely registered on an index of racial segregation” whereas today segregation between white students and kids of color in both cities is comparable to places like Atlanta and New Orleans.

This is bad for students of color and white students alike.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but it starts with segregated housing, and restrictive zoning and building regulations contribute to high-cost, exclusive, segregated development.

“Existing patterns of school segregation are driven by access to housing,” said Will Stancil, a local policy expert on school segregation issues. “If you can make housing available in Edina and Minnetonka, people will move there.”

And, if you want to stop the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school segregation lawsuit from imposing draconian mechanisms like forced busing, you should start by showing a good faith effort at housing desegregation by increasing the supply of housing in mostly white suburbs.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, highlighted this issue during her first policy rollout Sunday: “We can streamline building codes and set deadlines for housing permit reviews to make it easier to build more houses — lowering costs for owners and renters alike.”

So, a note to House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who is a frontrunner to be the Republican nominee: You can steal this issue from Klobuchar by passing the Starter Homes Act before the legislative session ends May 17.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..