GRAND FORKS — Gov. Doug Burgum has a vision for North Dakota’s cities.

Mom-and-pop coffee shops and grocery stores in residential neighborhoods. Apartments on top of every strip mall. Walkable, bikeable city streets, even in the deep winter, like in European cities across the far northern hemisphere.

Helping to build “people-friendly cities” — as opposed to the car-dependent communities that now dominate the state and the vast majority of the U.S. — in order to keep property taxes down and attract people to move to North Dakota is part of what inspired him to run for governor, he said. He has been an advocate of that vision throughout his term, and earlier this year, he described it at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association in a

roundtable discussion

on the high cost of housing.

As American cities have sprawled outward from their dense urban centers and into the empty land surrounding them, he said, city leaders have accidentally created communities that are unhealthy and isolating to their residents, and expensive to build and maintain.

“That was great for people who build roads and it’s great for the car companies, and then we’ve built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people,” Burgum said in a viral video clip of the roundtable discussion. “We’re making developers rich, and we’re not helping the workforce.”

In Grand Forks — a city that has spent decades sprawling southward — feelings about the governor’s philosophy appear mixed. City Administrator Todd Feland, for one, says city leaders have felt empowered by Burgum and his Main Street Initiative to push ahead with efforts to make the town more vibrant in recent years. Others — City Council President Dana Sande among them — say charting a city’s future isn’t as simple as encouraging dense urban development and discouraging edge growth.

According to Grand Forks City Planner Ryan Brooks, however, the goal as described by Burgum more or less aligns with the way the local market appears to be trending. In recent years, as young professionals increasingly delay having children, homeownership appears to have become less desirable to them, Brooks said, and more and more often Grand Forks residents in their 20s are opting to rent or purchase condos in the downtown or other dense, walkable areas.

“We knew it was coming. There’s been a lot of interest in this coming,” he said. “We were anticipating that this was going to be a desire of the market, and it did happen.”

According to Burgum, the typical pattern of development in North Dakota cities — and cities across the Midwest — goes something like this.

A taxing entity, like a school board or a park board, buys cheap land in the country, on the edge of town. The city chases the new development with brand new “greenfield infrastructure,” or new infrastructure built on undeveloped rural land. Over time, new single-family housing developments surround the greenfield infrastructure.

To Grand Forks residents, this will sound familiar — the city’s south end has been expanding, driven largely by single-family housing developments, toward the city’s outer limits for the past 50 years. 

Now, as the city reaches its southernmost limits, there is concern about expanding past the city’s flood protection system. Additionally, that once-rapid growth has slowed as single-family house permits

have dropped

amid sky-high interest rates and building costs, Brooks said.

He suspects that plays a large part in young residents’ attraction to relatively cheaper properties downtown.

“It’s getting very expensive to build a single-family home,” Brooks said. “That is out of reach for some people.”

As the city stares down the barrel of a population boom — Grand Forks’ population is projected to be 96,326 in 2050, a 59% increase from the 2020 population of 60,543 — the conversation has turned toward efficient land use, Brooks said.

Part of that will certainly include in-fill development in the downtown area — or redeveloping and building on top of existing infrastructure — but the city also has its eyes on developing the west side of the city.

“We’re never going to completely abandon people interested in having a new single-family home in a new subdivision on the edge of town,” Brooks said, adding that the conversation in his office generally focuses on providing a variety of development and housing options.

Although the city has grown upward in recent years — five of the

city’s tallest buildings

have been constructed in the last decade, and three more are under construction — there are a number of reasons Grand Forks has historically grown out instead of up, Sande said.

He said the soil in Grand Forks is particularly soft, making it difficult to build higher than five or six stories. Many local developers already own large swaths of undeveloped land at the edge of town. And the downtown area is relatively compact — while Sande said it would be a good thing to expand the downtown footprint, doing so would also likely mean that older houses in the city’s near-north neighborhoods would eventually have to come down.

Beyond that, he said, not everyone wants to live in a dense urban setting, and it takes willing buyers and willing sellers who are interested in taking on the risk of building in a dense area of town.

And there’s the financial aspect, Sande added. For example, the

long-troubled Columbia Mall

is often named as a site that should be torn down and revitalized from scratch, and zoned for new, dense residential and commercial developments.

“It takes huge money to do that,” he said. “Those are things that take hundreds of millions to do, and I don’t see the governor dropping millions in Grand Forks.” 

Ultimately, Sande said planning for the coming decades in Grand Forks will be about striking a balance.

“We need both. We need a good mix of housing stock,” he said. “We’re trying to attract people to live and work in our community, and people want multiple types of living options. I think we’ve been doing a good job up to today, and I think we’ll continue to do a good job of encouraging both.” 

Even as homeowners in edge growth developments complain about high property taxes, those taxes don’t cover the skyrocketing cost of infrastructure, Burgum said. As cities expand outward, they have to build and staff new fire stations, build new water and sewage lines, and maintain, patrol and plow new roads. As it becomes impossible for residents to move around their sprawling city without a car, roads expand to accommodate traffic and costs continue to soar, Burgum said.

He believes North Dakotans don’t fully appreciate how wide and flat their cities are, he told the Grand Forks Herald, and emphasized that there are other options. At 49.82 square miles, he said, Fargo has a larger city footprint than major metros such as San Francisco or Boston — 46.87 and 48.34 square miles, respectively, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. Grand Forks had a 2020 land area of 27.89 miles, up from 19.90 in 2010. Fargo grew about one square mile in the same time frame.

“(Fargo has) enough lane miles to plow that when they plow, they’re plowing from Fargo to Bangor, Maine,” Burgum said. “And they could plow Bangor, Maine, streets when they get there.”

The difference in costs not covered by taxpayers is covered either by the state of North Dakota, or by residents in older, more central neighborhoods in town, who don’t have new homes or new schools, and whose tax dollars are going to support the edge growth of the city, Burgum said.

“I’m not opposed to people, quote, living where they want to live,” he told the Grand Forks Herald. “But we’re not allocating the cost correctly, because we’re charging people in the older neighborhoods to pay for the newer neighborhoods, and that’s just a fact.”

But the way Sande sees it, it’s been true that growth has been expensive for as long as Grand Forks has been a city — that’s nothing new.

“I don’t think people are any more worried about that than they have been in the past,” he said. 

Rising costs for taxpayers as the city expands has previously been a topic of discussion by the City Council. Sande said in the past several years, there has been discussion of commissioning some kind of study to examine rising costs associated with urban sprawl, but to his knowledge, there are no concrete plans to pursue such a study at this time.

He hopes those discussions will continue in the future.

“I think we should, as a community, have some of these discussions, and actually take a look at what the incremental cost is for building developments farther from downtown,” Sande said. “The city still does pick up a considerable amount of the tab. The farther we get away from the city, should there be a metric related to, perhaps, you should pay more, or a higher percentage?” 

On the other hand, he said, considering that the city is in a situation where, in his words, “we desperately need additional housing built in our community,” it is perhaps counterintuitive to ask developers to pay more for infrastructure.

“We’re desperate trying to get them to build,” Sande said. 

In the days following the NGA meeting, the clip of Burgum speaking went viral on social media, driven at least in part by users who expressed surprise to hear urbanist views advocated for by a conservative politician from a rural state.

To Burgum, however, that politicization is odd.

“This is about economics,” he told the Herald. “It’s not about politics. Certainly, designing cities that have lower property taxes is the fiscally conservative approach, but I mean, Democrats, independents, Republicans, everybody would like to have lower property taxes.”

The way Burgum sees it, ultimately, the goal is vibrant, dense neighborhoods where groceries, schools and other gathering places are easily accessible without a car. He emphasized the need for more mixed-use housing developments — such as apartment buildings with commercial space on the lower floor — and more mixed-use zoning, to allow some businesses to open in residential neighborhoods, as well as investment in intermodal transportation.

In many ways, Feland said, Burgum’s vision aligns with City Hall’s long-term goals, especially as city leaders grapple with ways to make Grand Forks an attractive place for young workers to settle.

In 2019, the city developed a Downtown Action Plan to help guide its strategy to create a vibrant, healthy city — highlights included creating public spaces, animating street life downtown, improving access to the downtown area and spurring development in emerging areas.

In creating the plan, the city toured and studied a number of other successful downtowns, but particularly Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Fort Collins, Colorado. Some of the revitalization efforts in Town Square and downtown winter events in recent years especially drew significant inspiration from Winnipeg’s The Forks, a downtown food and shopping hall and adjacent outdoor public space along the Red River, Brooks said.

Feland can rattle off a dozen more active or recent projects that further the vision laid out in the Downtown Action Plan without hesitation — the

Franklin on Fourth,

Pure North

and

Hyslop at Memorial Village

are all major mixed-use developments in the city’s center or on the north end, as is the two-building

Beacon by Epic

complex and its planned public square downtown.

There have been extensive beautification efforts along the University Avenue Corridor and downtown, and efforts to add transportation options through bike and scooter share programs. The city has also made significant investments in projects such as the

Career Impact Academy,

the

Altru Sports Complex,

the

Grand Forks Children’s Museum

and the new in-fill

Altru Hospital.

Feland added that Grand Forks residents have made clear their preference for walkable neighborhood schools. He also noted that the redevelopment of the former downtown wastewater treatment plant will be the last major project to be completed in the city’s 20-year post-flood redevelopment plan. That area, near the fork of the Red and Red Lake rivers, is slated for significant mixed-use development with public space that will likely amount to a new district of the city, Feland said.

The city plans to put forward a more concrete plan for the land in the next nine to 12 months.

Burgum particularly praised the Pure North development — the downtown Hugo’s with market-rate and low-income apartments above it — and the newly opened Olive Ann Hotel, built in an existing building downtown.

“There are a lot of smart things happening in Grand Forks,” he said.

The Downtown Action Plan that has guided many of these developments was created in large part to help attract and retain Grand Forks’ workforce, a challenge that has dogged the city and the state in recent years. Earlier this spring, the Grand Forks EDC was the recipient of two Regional Workforce Impact Program grants from the state

totaling more than $323,000.

The grant money will be used to conduct a study on workforce needs and implement a three-pronged approach to retain talent in the region.

Ensuring the city is a desirable place for young workers to live will be a critical element of that, Feland said. The way he sees it, in the coming decades, being mindful and efficient with greenfield development at the same time as building up the downtown neighborhoods will be key to the city’s future.

More young professionals already appear to be moving to and settling in Grand Forks, Feland said. Keith Lund, CEO of the Grand Forks Economic Development Corporation, citing numbers tracked by the city and the EDC, said Grand Forks’ 25- to 39-year-old population has grown 24% in the last 12 years, more than double the national average of 11%. The city’s school-age demographic has also increased 11% in the same time, compared to 2% nationally.

Looking forward, Feland believes the city’s future is bright.

“We’ve made a more attractive city where people want to stay and grow and develop,” Feland said. “It’s attracted so many economic sectors, from agribusiness, to UAS, to medical, that we’re a more attractive city to stay and work and play in.

“It’s one of those things, too — you can’t just stop. You have to keep trying to improve your community,” he continued. “That’s the other thing Gov. Burgum and (Grand Forks Mayor Brandon Bochenski) always insisted — let’s not stop, let’s make our communities more attractive. … We’re always improving in Grand Forks. We’re never just settling for what we have. We’re always looking to make our community better.”