I thought I needed to have a car for my assignment. In August, I was offered a position that had me relocate to Bemidji. In Northern Minnesota. 200 miles away from the only home that I’ve known outside of San Francisco, away from the friends that I’ve made. I thought I was going away too […]
Henry Pan 潘嘉宏 • January 30, 2019 8am. I just finished walking an hour and a half from the Grand Forks Amtrak station. It’s a Saturday morning at the end of September in 2017, and the night before, I spent 6 hours on the Empire Builder traveling from the Twin Cities. After crossing the bridge to briefly visit East Grand Forks, and […]
Hello streets.mn readers. By now I am sure you are aware we are holding our annual streets.mn Winter Fundraiser on Wednesday, December 19th (purchase tickets here). While streets.mn is fortunate to count many among you as supporters, it is entirely possible some of you are asking “Why should I give money to streets.mn?” Let me […]
Sometimes the fun is the journey, not the destination, and thus my series of phototours of scenic, notable, or historic highways and the sights found on or nearby. After a few much shorter ones for my former North Star Highways site, I did a full one on US 14 across southern Minnesota. Next up is […]
Like many of the maps I find I came across a webpage via Twitter, hat tip to @stateofthecity. The webpage takes data from the Global Human Settlement Layer and runs it onto Google Maps. This is the result, Human Terrain by Matt Daniels (@matthew_daniels). I immediately panned to tool over to Minnesota and geeked out. Something I […]
After living in Minnesota for four years, I decided last year to focus on getting away from the metro area and exploring greater Minnesota. I also decided to take up camping for the first time since childhood in 2017. As someone who is car-free, accomplishing these goals required some creativity on my part. I purchased […]
A lot has happened during Rochester’s North Broadway discussions, but I feel that much of the consternation is not about the project itself. Rather, people in Rochester are debating about which direction the city is heading. There is a group of people, both elected and not, who are clinging to the last strands of what […]
The nice part about living in Mankato is that you’re often times overlooked by statewide media. Sure, we’ll pop up here and there for the best hockey town or landing number 10 on nation’s drunkest city list, but despite this marginal attention, we’ve been simply humming along. I have plenty of problems with Mankato that […]
We’ve all heard that the current administration is hoping to pump $1 Trillion dollars into infrastructure spending in the coming years. This type of rhetoric has been slung by almost every President since I’ve been alive and probably more. “We need to fix our roads and bridges!” often evoking the painful memories of the 35W […]
I promise this is the only time I will share a chart from the otherwise one-dimensional New Geography website, but here’s an interesting local report about some economic trends in the state, focusing on workforce and the millennial generation. Here’s one of the most interesting bits of data: The key point here is that, in […]