The St. Paul City Council convened on October 22, 2025, to review four major items: the launch of a new housing toolkit for adding dwelling units, a request to release a tax covenant on a single-family property to facilitate early childhood education expansion, proposed amendments to the Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) to spur downtown office-to-housing conversion, and a detailed budget update regarding inter-departmental transfers. The meeting featured significant debate regarding the balance between federal tax credit flexibility, long-term affordability commitments, and the unique economic challenges facing downtown St. Paul.
Here. Yang. Six present, one absent. That is Commissioner Kim. Staff reports. Item number one, staff report 25-223 presentation on new dwelling toolkit. Adding a housing unit to your St. Paul property. All right. Well, I'm looking forward to this presentation. I also see congratulations is in order. I'm like, I know there was some conversation over there as well, but from one expected mother to another, congratulations. And welcome. Thanks. Yeah, good afternoon, Chair and Commissioners. My name is Emma Brown. I'm a city planner and PED, and I'm excited to provide an overview of the newly completed new dwelling toolkit. All right, so this document is a resource to help property owners plan for, design, and build another housing unit on their property. This could be an ADU, accessory dwelling unit, or a standard principal unit. And these are in the H1 and H2 zoning districts that I'll talk about in a second. Meant to be a living document to be updated continuously. We want to really make this clear and easy for people to understand. All right, so I mentioned that we are focusing on the H1 and H2 zoning districts, that these are the most prominent zoning districts. You can see the yellow and kind of the darker yellow. These were implemented in 2023 with the one to four unit housing study. So it is now a lot easier to add a housing unit to properties in these zoning districts. Need a mid-on lot size of 2,000 square feet or 3,000 square feet for two principal units, and then also it's very easy to add up to two ADUs for each single family home on a lot. Alright, so starting with the introduction section, this provides a lot of helpful background information about uh zoning code terms. So we have a lot of terms like principal and accessory, um, so that would be buildings, uses, and dwelling units. So this helps lay out all of that. Um help you choose between an ADU accessory dwelling unit or a principal dwelling unit. All right, so this is a flow chart, um kind of like in those magazines, maybe not as maybe not as fun. Um, but it does help you determine um if you should build an ADU or a principal unit on your property. Uh so the unit types do differ in their maximum height and square footage, and uh whether you can sell the unit separately, and also the the occupancy limit. So this walks you through which property type would or which unit type would be appropriate for your lot. All right, uh looking at an overview of the process stages for getting your housing unit constructed. So this walks you through planning to move in, and there's a section for each of these one through seven in the in the guidebook. All right, so in the getting started section, uh walks you through the process of thinking about what you want for this unit, looking for inspiration, doing a sketch of your property, uh also discusses things to consider early on, uh like your neighbors, sharing your space with someone new, historic district rules, uh parking, and then also um considerations for connecting to utilities, which is a really important thing that needs to be looked at early on. All right, learning the rules. Uh, this section helps you understand the basics of your property, how to figure out the area of your lot, uh, the zoning district of your lot, and all the zoning standards for accessory dwelling units and principal dwelling units. Uh also talks about other important regulations like design standards, parking, uh, fire safety, utility connections, short-term rentals, also variances. So these things are likely to come up with your uh construction of your unit. Budgeting and finance. Uh the section lays out options for um for financing the construction of your new unit, um, summarizes different loan options, uh, has links to different types of loan programs that you might consider for building these types of units. Section four, uh designing your unit. This lays out options for designing your housing unit, talks about um purchasing a pre made plan set, different construction methods like site build or prefabricated modular housing. Also talks about the different types of professionals that you might hire, an architect, contractor, different engineers. Just to give people an idea about that. Also the basic stages of designing your housing unit. All right, permitting and approvals.