It’s budget season in Minneapolis, and the rest of the state. This is a complex process, but the question on everybody’s minds is “how will my property taxes be impacted?” A simple question with a rather complicated answer. Hopefully I can shed a little light on it. In this first part of a planned three-part […]
Via Visualizing Economics, here’s a cool chart showing the percentage of a home’s value that is tied up in land (as opposed to the house itself). Here’s the chart: The chart’s maker, Catherine Mulbrandon, doesn’t say much about this other than to point towards the dataset, which comes from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. […]
From City Observatory, here’s an interesting chart ripped from a study about small business turnover and gentrification in New York City. It compares the number of businesses that close, go vacant, or are replaced with new businesses in gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods (gentrifying neighborhoods were defined as meeting a certain change in income within a census tract). Here’s […]
Alex Schieferdecker turned me onto an old Citylab article about parking perception versus parking reality called Four Reasons Retailers Don’t Need Free Parking. It cites a (hard to find) study out of the UK which charted perceived mode-share versus actual mode share for a shopping street in Bristol, UK (a medium-sized city in the Southwest, population 450K). Here’s the chart […]
Dear Saint Paul Business Owners, My name is Dan. I’m 31 years old and I lived in Saint Paul for nearly 8 years. During that time, I was a patron of many local businesses (I still am actually), as it’s a personal value of mine to support local businesses and give back to my community. […]
Here’s an interesting map from a blogpost by the terrific Chicago-based writer, Aaron Renn. The map comes from a Pew Charitable Trust report that offers some population projections. This one shows the “workforce” data, the number of people in the peak working demographic of 25-54. Here you go: It’s interesting to me because Minneapolis / […]
I had the pleasure of meeting Lana Stewart at this year’s innovative “Winter Cycling Congress” in Minneapolis. She’s a mother, blogger, and bicyclist from Ottawa, Ontario, and gave a good talk on winter biking with kids in Canada. Anyway, she recently put up a great post mapping out some of her shopping habits in Ottawa, and how […]
I like the Pioneer Press. They do a lot of good work, and I’ve read a lot of quality articles there over the years. But over the last month or so, a narrative keeps popping up about cost over-runs for infrastructure projects. Mirroring the “fiscal hawk” critique at city hall, they tend to frame infrastructure news […]
Minneapolis has the opportunity to transform Third Avenue downtown into a landmark street. The proposed redesign would offer environmental and aesthetic benefits through adding 10 percent more green space in the form of landscaped medians and planters, improve safety for all users by removing a lane of traffic and feature the first planter-protected bike lane […]
In the past week or so, the Distressed Communities Index, released by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) has gotten a lot of attention. Many posts and articles have been written about it, for good reason I believe. The Distressed Communities Index examines economic distress and presents its data through infographics, a report, and an excellent interactive […]