Pine Salica • April 12, 2021 • 6 Fun fact: etymonline traces the word “park” meaning “to put (a vehicle) in a certain place” directly back to the storage of military equipment on commons grounds. Car storage spots aren’t a human right, but housing is. The way building codes currently are, you must pay for this luxury that is a couple dozen square […]
Christa Moseng • April 8, 2021 • 4 This editorial on disparities in property valuation in the New York Times is drawing attention and commentary, for good reason. The editorial finds nationwide, systemic valuation errors disproportionately affecting lower-value residential properties which shifts property-tax burdens towards those property-owners and away from higher-value residential property owners. Racial disparities in wealth and homeownership, and the persistent […]
Jeff Wood • April 7, 2021 Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]
Alex Schieferdecker • April 2, 2021 • 4 Fears about the post-pandemic demise of our cities may have been greatly exaggerated.
Ryan Ricard • March 16, 2021 Neighborhoods are designed, slowly and constantly, by the people who live in them. We make decisions about what gets built and who gets to use it or live in it through a network of community meetings, zoning boards, and city and state governments. In the process we create something we call “housing policy”. I have […]
Alex Schieferdecker • February 23, 2021 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 […]
Alex Schieferdecker • February 22, 2021 Everybody knows the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) metropolitan area is building new housing. It’s been evident for years in the disappearing parking lots of the Mill District and the North Loop, the new windows on old Lowertown warehouses, and the profusion of mid-rises that increasingly characterize Uptown and Dinkytown. But almost nobody has the free time […]
Bill Lindeke • February 15, 2021 At one level, all you need to know about the proposed development on Lexington Parkway, just south of University Avenue, is that it meets every rule in the St. Paul Zoning Code. That’s the point I was trying to make during the intense Planning Commission meeting ten days ago. The vote was part of a […]
Jeff Wood • February 4, 2021 Every day at The Overhead Wire, we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region. […]
Christian Huelsman • January 28, 2021 As the 210-unit Snelling Yards development nears construction, a rare named alley appeared on site plans and city documents, leading the author down a rabbit hole to investigate this anomaly and double down on the need to apply names to even the most mundane public assets.