[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ometimes people ask if I am bummed to not win last year’s Minneapolis Park & Rec Board race and my answer is always a resounding No. Five seats flipped and my Big Ideas won, along with a new majority ready to implement the same goals. A personal favorite, the Triangle Improvement Plan, was fully and […]
Here’s a chart from, Aaron Renn, an urban economic consultant who has been critical the Twin Cities for some time now as not being attractive enough to national movers and shakers. In his recent blogpost, he writes about how domestic in-migration to the metro area is up slightly, but why he does not think much […]
Minneapolis is a dominating economic presence in Hennepin County and in the state of Minnesota. As the base of the state’s dominant newspaper even Minneapolis’ politics can dominate so many conversations all Minnesotans need to be having about the direction of our whole state. Last week I posted a series of maps produced by Three […]
Here’s a map from a recent presentation by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs out of the University of Minnesota. It shows a different perspective on the typical way of viewing income inequality in the Twin Cities. Instead of showing the Racially Concentrated Areas of Poverty (RCAP), this map flips the categories on their […]
The other day, the Wedge Live online periodical tweeted out this amusing chart showing technology adoption rates: It was funny and made me chuckle, but then a week or so later I saw a report from a consulting group that offered a literal version of the same kind of data: The report was a […]
In the last post, I discussed which foreign cities are most like Minneapolis in terms of population distribution. In this post, I’m going to present some numbers about the transit systems of those cities, in order to determine how extensive Minneapolis’ transit system could be, given the distribution of its population. Transit share in New […]
There are many cities in the world that are roughly the same size as Minneapolis. There are many cities in the world that have high transit ridership. But do these two sets of cities overlap? This article series is an exercise in two things: determining which cities are most like Minneapolis and determining what is […]
For those of us that are dedicated urbanists, it is something of an article of faith that density is good. Is it good? How do you measure ‘good’, anyways? One way to measure ‘good’ is to see if people want it. Are people moving to cities? Are denser areas growing as fast as less dense […]
Here’s a beautiful chart for you, from a Reddit thread I once happened across. It’s a “Sankey diagram” showing the population of the state broken up by type of city / region / type of urban or rural environment. Check it out: It’s both beautiful and informative! Thanks to Reddit user aphid43 for making it. If […]
Here’s yet another chart from Scott Shaffer’s Twitter feed, which is chock full of tasty bits of data visualization. It shows Saint Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood (pop. 12,519) compared to two rather arbitrary endpoints, the city of Dayton, Ohio (pop. 141,749) and the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn (pop. 32,926, where I used to live). Here you go, […]