Bloomington has spent the last two years quietly rewriting its zoning code to make room for housing types that used to be effectively illegal here — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, small multiplexes, detached townhouses and cottage courts clustered around a shared green space. The city calls it the Missing Middle Housing project, and it wrapped its second and final phase when the City Council adopted the Phase II ordinance on March 23, 2026.
Phase I, adopted back on May 19, 2025, dealt with housing types Bloomington already allowed — accessory dwelling units, duplexes and townhouses — and loosened the standards around them to make them easier to actually build. Phase II went further, writing entirely new rules into the code for triplexes, fourplexes, multiplexes, detached townhouses and cottage courts, housing forms the city didn't have a clear path to permit before.
The idea behind "missing middle" housing is that the market has a gap between the single-family house and the big apartment complex — nothing in between. Duplexes, triplexes and small fourplexes fill that gap, in theory giving empty-nesters, young families and multigenerational households more options without changing the basic look of a neighborhood block. Bloomington's stated goals track that logic: housing for residents at different life stages, support for multigenerational living, and denser housing near businesses and transit that cuts down on driving.
Bloomington isn't doing this alone. Golden Valley has now become the latest suburb to move down the same path, with its City Council expected to decide by year's end whether to make its own missing-middle vision official policy.
That regional push isn't just goodwill toward density for its own sake — missing middle housing has become the preferred way to add housing without upzoning entire blocks to apartment towers. But the early track record is modest: in the years since Roseville, Richfield and Bloomington first started allowing duplexes on previously single-family lots, only a handful of proposals have actually come through those cities' halls, and none had been built as of the last check-in on the trend.
Whether Bloomington's newly expanded rules — now covering everything from a simple duplex up to a fourplex or cottage court — change that math remains to be seen. The ordinance is on the books; it's now a question of whether builders take the city up on it.