In the 1930s, Hennepin Avenue in Uptown Minneapolis was a redlining boundary. Banks were instructed to give loans to people who wanted to live west of Hennepin, but the neighborhoods just east of Hennepin were labeled “definitely declining” and people who wanted to buy a home or renovate one were systematically denied loans. The redlining categories […]
Historyapolis‘ amazing work on the history of racism and real estate in the Twin Cities continues with this map showing racial covenants in Minneapolis over time. Here’s the cumulative total (so far!) from 1951. Racial covenants were part of a suite of racist practices and policies that profoundly shaped Northern cities in the 20th century. […]
Here is a fascinating map from Myron Orfield’s Institute for Metropolitan Opportunity that categorizes the Twin Cities’ metro region into four different groups based on racial diversity and density. I like this map’s simplicity and focus, and also the fine grain at which it makes its distinctions. For example, you can see how different parts of Saint Paul […]
Every day at The Direct Transfer 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 DC region. […]
Last week I posted a series of maps showing how the areas around the Northern borders of Minneapolis and Saint Paul have been changing over the past few decades, become much more racially diverse over that time span. I was reminded again of the wonderful Cooper Center racial dot map project, which offers both beautiful cartography and useful information […]
If we actually cared about broken taillights, there are far better ways than a traffic stop to make sure they get fixed.
Here are a pair of maps from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity report called “Why Are the Twin Cities So Segregated?” They shows the Northern first-ring Twin Cities’ suburbs along the borders of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and the change in time over the thirty-year period when the Twin Cities’ percentage of people of color, in general, increased from roughly […]
My Thursday morning had a strange start when I checked my Twitter feed and saw news that an African-American man, Philando Castile, had been shot and killed shortly before I’d gone to bed, and it had happened in a place I knew pretty well. Disturbing live video taken by his girlfriend in the moments immediately after […]
Here’s a chart from a recent Citylab article called “In the U.S., Walkability is a Premium Good“, using a new analysis of the amount of “walkable urbanism” in different US cities. (Or, as I think of it, the “sidewalk factor.”) The article goes over a number of different variables correlated with walkability, including GDP, but the chart […]
A while back, while reading Daniel Hertz’s recent article about Chicago in City Observatory, I came across the work of Robert Sampson, an urban social psychologist at Harvard. The work is over a decade old, but I still find it compelling and relevant. Sampson’s basic thesis is that perceptions of disorder, i.e. a chaotic or blighted neighborhood, […]