Josh Mandelbaum represents Ward 3 on the Des Moines City Council.

Housing is one of the most important issues facing our community and our country right now. Nationwide, we have failed to build enough new housing to keep up with demand. In places where this trend is most pronounced, housing has become increasingly unaffordable, and more and more folks are housing burdened (more than 30 percent of their income goes towards housing) or simply priced out of where they want to live.

Compared to the most extreme examples, Des Moines is a relatively affordable community. But if we continue on our current trajectory, we will become less affordable and experience problems that we have seen elsewhere.

In that context, the city is working towards our first housing strategy plan. At our May 12 Council work session, Council heard a presentation on the draft plan. Since then, I have had a chance to read the entire draft plan. The housing strategy draft falls short of a comprehensive housing strategy and instead focuses almost exclusively on how to increase existing property values. The strategy lacks vision and a comprehensive approach to make housing better quality, more accessible, and more affordable for everyone in our community.

A Vision for the Future of Housing

The draft plan spills significant ink trying to make the case that because most of the housing that will exist in our community 20 years from now exists today, our approach to housing should focus on improving existing housing stock. This argument is premised on stagnation, lack of growth, and a failure to recognize what Des Moines’ strengths are when competing across the metro. The draft housing strategy is a missed opportunity to lay out a vision for how housing can help create a growing and vibrant Des Moines.

A vision for the future of housing in Des Moines should start with our residents and their needs. I believe that no matter who you are or what stage of life you are at, you should be able to find the type of housing that you need at a price that you can afford in Des Moines. That means we need to think about how we build housing of all types at a variety of prices points. It also means we need to acknowledge and address the particular need for more affordable and workforce housing. Fundamentally, a housing strategy needs to provide a vision for how we grow—how we build more housing.

The vision in a housing strategy should do more than provide a roadmap for how we build more housing. It should also provide a bold vision for how housing can help shape the future of our community.

For example, a growth vision for housing should include an ambitious goal for housing downtown. We should want 30,000 people living downtown by 2040. To accomplish this, we will need to build a variety of housing options. We will also need to build vertically on surface parking lots –taking parcels worth nominal amounts and investing millions of dollars to provide housing for dozens or hundreds of people. This is actually a much more efficient and cost-effective way to maximize property values and build tax base. It also happens to be a great way to create more vibrancy in our downtown and give employers more reason to locate or stay downtown.

The vision for how housing can shape our community does not need to be limited to downtown. We have seen housing contribute to a more vibrant Ingersoll district. Housing should be part of a vision for a South of Gray’s Lake District, a revitalized Southwest 9^th Corridor, how we build on the strengths of our colleges (Drake, Grandview and DMACC), and more. Housing is central to a stronger, more vibrant community that enhances our strengths – but only if we build more of it.

Make it Easier to Build Housing

One of the challenges to implementing any housing strategy is having the necessary resources. Budgets are tight, and most housing strategy actions require a significant investment. The resource challenge makes actions that do not have a cost even more important to housing strategies like this.

I expected that the draft strategy would identify policy changes to make it easier to build housing, but unfortunately, these low or no-cost actions to facilitate housing are missing from the current draft. At a minimum, a housing strategy should recommend evaluating policy changes that would make it easier to build housing. Here are several examples policies that Des Moines should be discussing.

Housing Ready Toolkit – The organization Strong Towns provides an easy starting point for policy change with their Housing Ready Tool Kit that includes six policies that cities can implement. Of those six, Des Moines currently only allows accessory dwelling units (ADU) with some restrictions. The recent passage of Senate File 592 will improve upon Des Moines’ ADU ordinance and make it easier to build ADUs throughout the city.

We should look at the other policies identified in the tool kit. For example, eliminating minimum lot sizes in existing neighborhoods would make it easier to build infill housing. I had requested the City Manager consider this change over a year ago, and he indicated that the development of the housing strategy could address it. It should.

Single stair reform is another example of a policy change that eleven states and three cities have addressed since 2023 (it’s also common in many European cities). Single stair reform refers to changes in building codes or regulations that allow residential buildings—typically up to a height around six stories—to be designed with only one staircase, rather than the previously required two.

This approach provides greater design flexibility and creates more space for housing out of a building footprint that would be used as hallway under existing code requirement. A change like this will make it easier to provide a greater range of housing options without increasing costs.

YIGBY –I recently learned the term YIGBY or Yes in God’s Backyard as a shorthand for zoning changes to allow for housing options on land currently zoned and used as religious institutions. This type of change would allow religious institutions to help be part of the community’s housing solutions. Much of this land is located on corridors that make it a good candidate for new multifamily or missing middle housing options.

This type of policy change would also take land that is currently tax exempt and provide a path to adding that land back to the tax rolls while helping solve a pressing community need.  

Creating a Community that Works for Everyone – Affordable Housing

Creating a community that works for everyone has been a guiding principle for how I approach policy and public service. In the conversation around housing, creating a community that works for everyone necessitates addressing affordable housing so that Des Moines residents can find housing that meets their needs at a price they can afford. The strategy continues a couple of positive initiatives to address affordability in the ION (Improving Our Neighborhoods) and the community land trust, but falls short of a comprehensive strategy on affordability.

My biggest concern with the draft housing strategy is that it not only fails to comprehensively address affordable housing, but it makes recommendations that would reduce access to affordable housing in Des Moines.

The strategy recognizes that Des Moines residents face a significant affordability gap. The plan notes that Des Moines has over 34,000 households with an income below $50,000, and that of those households over 23,000 spend 30 percent or more of their incomes on housing and are therefore considered cost burdened. About 4,200 households received some form of assistance to address housing cost burdens.

Instead of addressing affordability, the draft strategy casts blame on these households noting that “their concentration within Des Moines is also part of the city’s market gap.” (Draft Plan p.30) This is part of the justification for the whole block redevelopment strategy that targets entire blocks of largely affordable single-family homes for redevelopment to predominantly market rate housing.

This would significantly reduce affordable housing stock in Des Moines. If this concept were part of a plan that had other strategies to develop a significant amount of new affordable housing to replace what was lost, this approach could make sense. But the strategy specifically states that “proposed new subsidized housing – ranging from Section 42 LIHTCs (Low Income Housing Tax Credits) to other NGO-sponsored projects – should not receive city support until a fair share balance of subsidized housing across all of Polk County has been achieved.”

It would in effect be an indefinite moratorium on affordable housing projects in Des Moines. Combine a moratorium on new affordable housing with a reduction on existing natural affordable housing, and implementating this plan would leave a large number of current low-income residents with no place in Des Moines.

I cannot support this type of approach to affordable housing in our community. Affordable housing is part of what makes our community work for everyone. The folks who need affordable housing are the barista at the coffee shop, the waiter/waitress at our favorite lunch spot, the checkout clerk at the grocery store, the construction worker rebuilding our roads, and many more. These folks make our community work, and our community should work for them too.

What Else is Missing from the Housing Strategy

There are other noteworthy omissions in this plan. For example, it does not discuss homelessness in the plan itself—though it does include Homeward’s Blueprint to Address Homelessness in the Appendix. (That’s a thoughtful, comprehensive and data driven plan). The Blueprint includes an action item to “identify current affordability gap and specific number of additional new housing units required at a city level to meet the forecasted demand for affordable housing over the next five years.” If the city is going to be a participant in implementing the Blueprint, the city housing strategy should address this.

There is also no discussion of sustainability and climate action in the housing strategy. This is a clear example of the gaps created with the city’s elimination of the sustainability office earlier this year. AdaptDSM, our climate action plan, has specific actions related to residential energy efficiency and land use that would need to be incorporated into a comprehensive housing strategy if the city is serious about implementing our climate action plan. If Des Moines still had sustainability staff, they could have helped ensure that the housing strategy addressed the relevant climate actions.

What You Can Do

The housing strategy is still a draft. You can provide feedback by taking the survey here. You can also contact the Council. I’ll be working to make improvements in the strategy before it comes to Council, and you can too.