Minneapolis city budget negotiations this year sparked a public conversation about city finances and the details of budgeting. There was one piece missing, however, from the public conversation. It is the difference between the tax levy and the taxes levied. The former is the targeted budget set by the city. The latter is the method […]
Bill Lindeke’s How Should Cities Value Industrial Land? started a great conversation. He finds contradictory information from different sources and wonders whether they are reconcilable. One report finds industrial land use as one of the most productive land uses in a city, yet tax value per acre shows a different story. Which is right? Both points […]
Streets.mn occasionally profiles small towns and cities throughout Minnesota, case studies that show that urbanism is not a war between the metro and Greater Minnesota. On the contrary, it is often from the Main Streets of small towns that urbanists gain valuable insight. For example, streets.mn has previously profiled New Ulm because of a battle […]
Creating a full-service Metro Go-To Card would benefit transit users and those without access to traditional banking services. It would also benefit the Met Council. There are examples of public institutions acting as lending agencies that provide great benefit to a range of people. The largest example of a public institution bank is the Bank of […]
The expanding list of transportation options makes our multi-modal system stronger. All of these services should be lauded for their efforts. There is one catch, however. Each transportation service requires a debit or credit card as a payment option. For the 16.7% of Minnesotans who are unbanked or underbanked, debit and credit cards are out […]
Significant praise has been heaped on ridesharing services. Uber, Car2Go, HourCar and NiceRideMN, to name a few, are lauded for increasing transportation options. Each service adds another way to get from point A to B, making our multi-modal system stronger. These networks run best when switching from one mode to another is easy and obvious. […]
The Midtown LRT/Streetcar has joined the growing number of high efficiency corridors planned for the Minneapolis, St. Paul metro area. The Midtown LRT/Streetcar will run on the Greenway rail trench from the planned SW Green line station at W Lake Street to the Lake St station on the Blue line. Though the transit in the […]