To quote law professor and recent mayoral candidate Nekima Levy-Pounds, Minneapolis has “the best parks system for white people.” To some, the implication that Minneapolis parks do not adequately serve people of color may sound like a surprising claim for a city whose identity is based in part around its lakes and green spaces, and […]
Here’s a maddening and entirely believable map from a think tank called the Urban Institute out of DC. It shows the size and scale of the gap in homeownership rates between African-Americans and whites in the US. As described by the report’s authors, “the dots’ color represents the magnitude of the disparity, and the dots’ […]
I’ve spent five years on the Saint Paul Planning Commission, a Mayor-appointed group of people intended to provide a broader perspective on city planning and zoning decisions. Planning Commissions are meant to be a less-political buffer between the public and elected officials, and Commissions have a long history that dates back to the early 20th […]
Why are people so mad about bike lanes, when, in fact, they can protect everyone equitably across our towns and cities?
The most segregated neighborhoods in Minneapolis are in tony southwest Minneapolis. But we don’t call them “segregated”; that’s saved for Black neighborhoods.
This chart explains more about the key social dynamics of our cities than anything else out that I’ve ever put up here, IMO. Here it is, from a recent City Observatory article by Joe Cortright: (Note: the blue line is way higher than the red line.) Cortright’s Observatory analysis references an earlier New York Times article […]
Here’s a chart from a must-read Jim Buchta article in this weekend’s Star Tribune, on the homeownership trends in the Twin Cities metro. Check it out: The piece includes a whole bunch of troublesome data from the Census Bureau, and caps it off with a few individual stories of people trying to buy homes. Here’s […]
Here’s a pretty simple chart from “Dangerous by Design“, Smart Growth America’s three-year-old report on pedestrian safety: The key point on the report’s summary explaining these statistics: Who are the victims of these collisions? People of color and older adults are overrepresented among pedestrian deaths. Non-white individuals account for 34.9 percent of the national population but make […]
Editor’s Note: One of the missing voices in bicycle planning in the Twin Cities is college students who belong to a generation much less likely than their parents to own vehicles. This series of posts written by Macalester students for the “Bicycling the Urban Landscape” course are one effort to include these voices. This piece […]
Preface: I buried the lede. If you don’t make it to the end, I want you to know about HF 322: “Governmental units allowed to sue to recover costs related to unlawful assemblies and public nuisances.” Also, this post has been boiling under the surface for me for over a year. The topic continues to remain […]