Monte Castleman • January 11, 2021 Many people want to live in a new-construction, detached home, but the traditional way to achieve that – owning your own house and lot – may not be achievable or desirable for all. Part one of this series covered two options: owning the interior only of a detached structure, either a traditional detached townhome, or […]
Fred Kreider • January 7, 2021 It’s that time of year again, and what a year it’s been! I usually like writing posts that have some aspect of positivity or future collective goal, but this post is not like that. This is my 2020 airing of grievances. As COVID-19 continued to spread through our community and we neared the peak of […]
Speed Rogers • December 4, 2020 The City of Minneapolis’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan promised to change our city’s approach to housing. The plan’s central argument is that the city needs more homes, especially since Minneapolis doesn’t have sufficient affordable and supportive housing for our most vulnerable community members. Decades of racist and exclusionary zoning policies have made Minneapolis one of the […]
Janne Flisrand • November 26, 2020 There are more than 14,000 residential lots in Minneapolis that are smaller than what is currently required to build on per the current zoning code. Now, this is a messy statement. There are multiple minimum lot sizes (5,000 square feet, 6,000 square feet, and a large lot zone where the number is based on the […]
Monte Castleman • November 25, 2020 There’s many advantages to living in a detached house – they generally offer more space, more separation and privacy from neighbors, and a discrete place to drive up to, look at, and call your own. But there’s definitely drawbacks to the primary ways of acquiring a detached home (owning a house and land or renting […]
Janne Flisrand • October 2, 2020 Undoing failed zoning by basing new rules on the development that occurred under that failed zoning is a cycle doomed to repeat past failures. If you want to get the diversity of buildings we used to have, you have to work back from what you want.
Conrad Zbikowski • September 21, 2020 In the “before-times”, housing advocates in Minneapolis worked with a progressive city council to pass the 2040 Plan. The New York Times proclaimed, “Minneapolis, Tackling Housing Crisis and Inequity, Votes to End Single-Family Zoning”. These were all great achievements, and it is clear that 2040, inclusionary zoning, and other reforms and investments have made real […]
Saumik Narayanan • August 28, 2020 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 […]
I’m “attending” the bi-annual Walk Bike Places conference virtually this week. It sucks. We should be in Indianapolis, a town I lived in for a few years in the 1990s. We should be doing walking tours and bike tours and visiting amazing spaces and seeing one another. But, we’re not. I’m sitting at the same […]
very 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. […]