Yesterday, I shared five takeaways from forty-one years of housing starts data in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. This data, collected from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, can be useful to get a look at how much housing is being built across a range of geographies, down to the municipality level. But […]
Thanks to new funding, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is picking up steam. Work on the B, D and E lines is underway with others soon to follow. Based on the available pre-Covid data for the A and C Lines, total ridership in those two corridors increased by about a third. On the surface, that’s wonderful. […]
By one count, there are over 7,600 streets named “Main Street” in the United States. But there is only one that became the title of Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 classic “Main Street”, and that’s the one in Sauk Centre, MN (alias “Gopher Prairie”), the writer’s hometown. Main Street—the novel—is about a progressive and […]
The Duluth Waterfront Collective is a group of planners, designers, thinkers and more, united in our desire to create a more livable, equitable and sustainable Duluth. Our plan, entitled Highway 61 Revisited, takes an eraser to a one-mile stretch of Interstate 35 and will use a community engagement process to draw in the blank space […]
This image shows a mostly undeveloped parking lot, occupying a full block of prime real estate in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. Why does this lot remain underdeveloped? The owner of the land could increase their income drastically if they developed the land to its fullest potential. Additionally, the city as a whole would gain […]
Our current world situation led me to think about the song Downtown’s Dead, by the esteemed urbanist and bro-country performer Sam Hunt. Although I doubt that a global pandemic was on his mind when he penned this tune in 2018, it does raise a question that increasingly is being pondered. Is downtown dead? Most employers […]
The St. Paul City Council recently approved the 9th and 10th Street portions of the Capital City Bikeway (CCB), and those are expected to be installed this summer during the city’s Pavement & Sidewalk Improvement Project. Those opposed to this project have gotten coverage from various local media outlets (Star Tribune, Pioneer Press, WCCO, City […]
For those of us who live in the Merriam Park neighborhood of St. Paul, on the city’s western edge close to Marshall Avenue (the Capital City’s equivalent of Lake Street), the upcoming B Line will mean faster rides to catch art-house films in Uptown in Minneapolis or walk with friends at Bde Maka Ska. Headed […]
I started writing this piece in my head on December 2nd, a cold, slushy evening on which I attempted to take the bus from downtown Minneapolis to Lyndale and 28th in order to attend a public meeting about street safety. I say “attempted” because—although I did eventually get to where I wanted to go—very little […]
On Thursday, October 24, the Minnesota Vikings played a home game against a semi-professional team from Washington, D.C. Sometime the weekend after, Steve Arundel, a fan from Wayzata who attended the game, wrote about his experience to the Star Tribune. On Monday, October 28, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reporter Nick Halter noticed the letter in […]