It’s easy to feel hopeless about the housing crisis, especially if you live in St. Paul, where any hint of new housing on the horizon seems to fade like a mirage. But I have seen it with my own eyes: Little Mod, a (mostly) market-rate project providing 12 homes affordable at 50% of the area median income (AMI), built by a new development team called GRO. It’s a lovely, modern “net-zero” infill project, with solar panels providing all of its energy. Halfway between West 7th Street and the Mississippi River, the new homes are close to transit and a dozen small businesses.
If that sounds too good to be true, there’s a catch. In this case, residents rent “suites” of individual bedrooms and bathrooms, sharing the rest of the apartment’s kitchen and living space between them. It’s a “co-living” housing model that might just offer the kind of “one small trick” type of hack to untangle part of the Twin Cities’ housing dilemma.
Cheap rent and community
The unique aspect to the new building on Stewart Avenue is that it’s technically a duplex, but with each “unit” boasting six individually leased bedrooms, each with personal bathrooms. That makes 12 new homes built on a 48-foot-wide lot that, according to the developers’ research, has always been empty. In a way, it’s an ideal example of urban infill.
“Twenty- to 30-year-olds, that seems like who’s targeting us,” said Jake Zikmund, the project architect. “I’m a millennial, and Gen Z-ers, [we] have substantial amounts of debt. This is affordable housing, so if you’re poor, you can’t afford a studio. Where do you live? With everything that’s happened — COVID, mental health — we’re trying to create a space where people can be together.”
Related: St. Paul poised to allow triplexes almost anywhere in the city; debate less heated than in Minneapolis
Zikmund points specifically to the years after college, when young people saddled with loan debt enter the workforce and start experiencing the reality of 40- or 50-hour work weeks. In this context, cheap rent and informal community can be a godsend.
Each of the two duplex units contains six “suites” with rents for (most of) the units set at $850, plus a $75 all-encompassing utility charge. Combine all the suites together and you get two six-unit duplexes: 200 square feet of private space and 1,000 square feet of shared kitchen, a living room area, a washer and dryer, and a few nooks in which to lounge about. There’s also a small outdoor area behind and underneath the back of the building.
It’s different. I’ve not seen anything like it in the Twin Cities other than century-old single-room occupancy living designs. But though this is affordable, it’s quite nice, with granite countertops and modernist detailing. It turns out that these kinds of “duplexes” are more common in coastal cities, where housing crises have tightened the screws on young renters. Given the lack of new housing, they might also make sense in the Twin Cities.
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Residents rent “suites” of individual bedrooms and bathrooms, sharing the rest of the apartment’s kitchen and living space between them. Credit: MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke -
Each of the two duplex units contains six “suites” with rents for (most of) the units set at $850, plus a $75 all-encompassing utility charge. Credit: MinnPost photo by Bill Lindeke -
Inside the duplexes, each suite has a small one-bedroom space with a window and a lock on the door, a spacious closet, and (this is key) a personal bathroom and shower.
Good rental value
The two unique facets of St. Paul’s zoning code make it possible to build this unique building. The first are recent zoning changes allowing up to three- or four-unit buildings on any residential lot. St. Paul recently enacted sweeping reforms to restrictive zoning, allowing more density into neighborhoods formerly restricted to single-family homes, ala the vast majority of mid-century suburbia. In St. Paul’s case, the new zoning code allows up to four- (or six-) unit buildings to be built throughout the city. Without that change, building this duplex would not have been possible.
The city’s other zoning nuance is its unrelated adult provision, which caps the number of non-related people in each unit at six. That’s higher than in most suburbs, which cap the number at three or four. (By contrast, a few years ago, Minneapolis replaced its unrelated adult limit of four to five with a new “intentional community” provision. Ironically, that makes it ineligible for this kind of duplex housing.) From there, the duplex math is pretty simple.
Inside the duplexes, each suite has a small one-bedroom space with a window and a lock on the door, a spacious closet, and (this is key) a personal bathroom and shower. Outside, in the shared space, tenants will find modernist spaces spread out on two floors including granite-counters and a dual-fridge kitchen. It feels a bit institutional, like an elevated dorm, but for people who are open to co-living, offers good value for the rent.
General demographic change forms part of the context, alongside young people facing high rents and student loan debt. Over the generations, household sizes have sharply decreased, with more single people needing places to live. Many of these folks don’t need an entire detached house to themselves, at least not in their younger years.
And the selling point remains the affordability: 50% AMI is below a lot of the larger subsidized affordable projects elsewhere in St. Paul. In this case, the GRO development team got a pair of Ramsey County grants — one small start-up grant, and another that subsidized two of the units at 30% AMI — but that’s a good return on investment for local housing dollars.
“The outcome of this is you have 200 square feet to yourself, 1,000 square feet of common space, [which makes] 1,200 square feet for 850 bucks,” explained Alex Zikmund, the lead for GRO Development. “I think that is a compelling argument as opposed to even a well-done apartment complex like the Victoria [Flats] next door [across Otis Avenue].”
Related: A welcome St. Paul residential project exemplifies how buildings with varied pasts can find new life
A sustainable model
The other appeal for young people is the project’s sustainability. While infill density is inherently “sustainable” all by itself — carbon footprints of new homes built by walkable transit are much lower — in this case you also have a “net zero” carbon footprint. In other words, the building produces more energy than it consumes, thanks to its structural insulated panel (SIP) construction and the solar panels on the roof. Combined with how the building is cantilevered over stormwater infrastructure, the environmental impact is impressively small.
“I’m an architect, so design matters,” said Jake Zikmund. “This site presented a lot of challenges, with 18 feet of grade change: How to build it into the valley? How to mitigate water runoff? How do we put solar on the roof? But we were able to shed all our water into rain gardens, and put all the solar on the roof and accomplished the task.”
The other key variable, it must be said, is the lack of off-street parking, also made possible by 2021 reforms to St. Paul’s onerous off-street parking requirements. Asked about that, Alex Zikmund pointed to the high cost of off-street parking, where building underground parking would have almost doubled the rents.
“Anything [more that] we do is going to increase rent,” explained Alex Zikmund. “The question you have to always ask yourself is, is the resident going to pay for that? We’re to a point where, with expensive construction, are you building a place that’s affordable to live? Or are you going to build a place [where] you can park a car and keep it warm? Something’s gotta give.”
Personally, I remember “co-living” in my post-college period when I shared a rented house (aka a “college house”) with a revolving group of 20-somethings. I loved it at the time. Given how the housing crunch affects young people, there needs to be more diversity in our housing stock.
Living in a 200-square-foot bedroom and sharing a kitchen with five other people is obviously not going to be for everyone, even if there are two fridges. But for certain folks at certain points in their lives, this is an encouraging new development. Elsewhere, subsidized housing takes years to construct, occupies whole city blocks, and single units often require half-million-dollar subsidies. In that light, this unconventional duplex is intriguing.
Construction on the Little Mod project wraps up in about a month, and the first completed duplex is slated to start receiving tenants as early as next week. According to Alex Zikmund, initial leasing is the hardest part for a duplex like this, but there’s been a lot of interest so far. Once it’s fully leased, and tenants begin figuring out the everyday nuance of “co-living,” filling vacancies sort of happens by itself, a lot like how it worked in my 20-something “college house.”
The developers are planning on another project after this one is complete, a few blocks away. Let’s hope this trend picks up steam in St. Paul, filling in vacant lots around the city with affordable homes for folks willing to try something new.
