Several weekends ago, there was a streets.mn Board Meeting on the East Side of St. Paul. Deep, deep on the East Side of St. Paul. I took a Route 17 bus from my neighborhood into Downtown Minneapolis, transferred to a Route 94 bus to Downtown St. Paul, transferred to the Route 74 bus to my […]
“There are folks who are extraordinarily invested in validating the process that has brought us to this point.” – Peter Wagenius, Minneapolis City Council Ways & Means Committee, October 1st, 2013 To date, this is easily the best way anyone has found to describe, in one sentence, the situation that Hennepin County, the City of […]
Sitting around a firepit in a South Minneapolis backyard on a recent Saturday night, it was clear: It’s nice to have a yard. You can see stars south of Lake Street! The bike ride was a bit of a schlep–when you don’t have a car, Lake Nokomis may as well be Lake Pepin if you […]
Minneapolis is going to have a very different municipal government in 2014. We’ll have a new mayor for the first time since 2001. There are 13 councilpeople in our weak mayor-council government, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a majority of its members will be first termers come next January. Three councilpeople […]
Warning! Subjective statements about architecture ahead. We’re in the midst of a multi-family building boom in the Twin Cities. Thousands of new units have been built in the past couple years, and the next couple years will see at least as many. This is great news–maybe all those Style section trendpieces about “the new urban […]
It’s hard being a mass transit proponent in a medium-sized Midwestern city. It’s hard being an urbanist in state whose legislature is filled with mostly rural and suburban representatives. And it’s hard being a person who tries to grasp complex issues in 2013 in general. All these things (and more) make it rather hard to […]
Two weekends ago, I had the pleasure of going to the Guthrie Theater for a reason other than a Vikings Stadium design unveiling. I was there for a performance of Clybourne Park*, which, according to Wikipedia, is a modern response to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. For those who don’t click […]
I, through a combination of factors that are too complicated to explain here, did not get my driver’s license until I was 20 years old. There was a whole thing. As a result, my “default” mode of transportation has never been a car. I rode my bike to work in high school, and even got […]
In my first post here, I come to you, oh humble readers of streets.mn, hoping to change your mind about one of the trendy words we urbanists throw around too often. The acronym NIMBY, which of course stands for “Not In My BackYard”, popped up at some point a few decades ago and has since […]