Unlike other places, the city of Sioux Falls, SD has been building an awful of housing. This trend started off in 2016, and exploded after the pandemic. Since 2015, the town has built more apartments, duplexes, and townhomes than single family homes.
This increase is in response to population growth since the pandemic, which has primarily skewed towards younger residents. Adding all parcels with more than one unit, there are approximately 39305 total multifamily units in the city, which means as many as 36% of existing units were permitted in 2015 or later.
When my friends started moving off-campus during college, I was curious about where they would end up considering this new growth. Suprisingly, I found several were moving to the edge of town. In fact, almost everyone I’ve met who moved from out of state lives in housing far from the city center.
One would expect housing density to be most intense near the center of town, tapering gradually as one leaves downtown. At this point, it’s clear that Sioux Falls’ recent explosion in multifamily units has inverted this expectation.
The map below shows the number of units per multifamily lot, according to parcel data from the City of Sioux Falls. It illustrates that vast portions of Sioux Falls’ multifamily housing exists on the edges of town — to rent a high-rise apartment, you might have to move to the suburbs.
This outcome makes sense because exurban land is very cheap, and infill development doesn’t produce a lot of units. But while it’s understandable why we got here, this situation if far from ideal. The point of multifamily housing is that it is cheap and accessible. While these new units may be cheap, they are certainly not accessible. Setbacks, large parking lots, and subdivision-based designs make many of these neighborhoods self-contained, homogeneous, and exhausting to navigate without a car.
The manner in which these new neighborhoods are cut off from Sioux Falls’ denser downtown street grid is clear in a population density map. The visual below shows the ratio between a parcel’s number of units and its land area. The densest areas of Sioux Falls (in white) are the center of downtown, a series of large apartment complexes where I-225 meets I-85, and small pockets on the southern edges of town cut off from the city center by dark-red, low-density neighborhoods and the I-225 beltway.
In short, residents of new multifamily housing in Sioux Falls are getting the inconveniences of both suburban and urban living — their neighborhoods are sparse and hard to navigate without a car, but they also live in close proximity to their neighbors and have little personal green space. This isn’t exactly a crisis — people will still be able to drive places within 15 minutes or so. However, this situation will create problems if the city ever shifts away from the car-centricity that has made larger cities unbearable.