Vacant Residential Land in the Twin Cities, by City

What this measures

A parcel is counted as vacant residential land when all of the following are true in the county assessor's own record:

• No meaningful building value. The assessor records no building value on the parcel, or less than $1,000 of it.
• Land value above zero. It is a real taxable parcel, which excludes most road right-of-way, open water and public land.
• A residential or undeveloped use class. The assessor's use classification reads as residential, vacant, agricultural, rural or lakeshore.
• Not classed as something else. Parcels classed commercial, industrial, apartment, church, charitable, common area, utility or railroad are excluded.

That is the whole test. It runs identically on all 186 municipalities in the dataset, from a single extract dated April 1, 2026.

What this is not

Specifically, the measure:

• Cannot see land that could become buildable. Assembling neighbouring parcels, subdividing an oversized one, and taking down an existing house are how most new homes appear in a built-out city. None of them are visible here, which is why a city near 0% is not a city that has stopped building.
• Counts a farm field and an infill lot the same. One parcel is one parcel whether it is a fifth of an acre or forty acres. The outer-edge cities at the top of this table hold larger parcels on average, so their share overstates how many individual homes the land represents relative to a city of small lots.
• Includes platted outlots. An outlot is the drainage pond, wetland buffer or common area a developer plats alongside the buildable lots, and it usually cannot be built on. In the 40 cities where we have checked parcel by parcel, about 7% of these vacant parcels carry an outlot designation.
• Is a snapshot. Parcel records change continuously. Treat one city's number as of April 1, 2026, not as a live count.

We do run a further buildability screen — checking geometry, frontage, flood and wetland indicators and a setback envelope — but only in the 40 cities we have ingested in detail. There it retains 72% of these vacant parcels (14,138 of 19,643), removing about a quarter. That screen has not run on the other cities in this table, so its result is reported here as its own scoped figure and is never mixed into the comparison.

The pattern the ordering shows

The ranking is not random, and that is the main reason it is worth publishing. The cities at the tight end are the fully built-out post-war suburbs of the first ring — Richfield, New Hope, Saint Louis Park, Brooklyn Center, Robbinsdale — where the residential land was platted decades ago. The cities at the loose end sit on the developing edge, where agricultural parcels have not yet been converted: Dayton, Rogers, Linwood Township, Nowthen, Corcoran.

For anyone planning a build, that ordering is the practical finding. It says where buying a lot is likely to mean competing for a scarce one, and where it is more likely to mean choosing among several — without claiming to know how many of either exist.

All 92 cities

Sorted by vacant share, lowest first. Choose a column heading to re-sort. Cities with a link have individual lot pages in our lot finder (37 of 92). Municipalities under 2,000 parcels are left out: with a denominator that small a single new plat moves the percentage several points, and a number that unstable is not worth quoting.

Method, and where every number comes from

The source is the regional parcel dataset, which aggregates the seven metro counties' assessor and GIS records. We applied the test in What this measures to every municipality in one pass from a single extract dated April 1, 2026, so no city's figure is computed differently from another's.

Two things are worth stating because they would otherwise be invisible. Seven cities cross a county line — Blaine, Chanhassen, Hastings, Saint Anthony, Shorewood, Spring Lake Park and White Bear Lake — and appear in the source data once per county. Their rows here are combined, because reporting only the larger half understates the denominator: Saint Anthony reads 1.96% split and 1.49% whole. Seven other pairs share a name with a neighbouring township — Waconia and Waconia Township, and similar — and those are genuinely different places, kept apart here.

If you are checking a figure and it does not reconcile, we would rather hear about it than not — get in touch.

Where to go from here

Our lot finder maps individual candidate parcels in 37 of the cities above, with what we know and what we do not stated on each one. If you are further along, our cost-to-build guide covers what land scarcity does to a Twin Cities budget, and the builder directory lists builders by the cities they actually work in.

If you would rather see finished new construction in the outer-edge cities that still have land, the Fall 2026 Parade of Homes runs September 11–27, and several cities at the loose end of this table have homes on the tour.