Among urbanists, it’s basically an accepted Truth that more compact development patterns reduce public expenditures per resident. Fewer lane miles and feet of pipe per resident means lower tax bills, while also making it possible for services to cover more residents with the same physical infrastructure (police or fire stations, etc). There’s a whole organization around the idea based in […]
I’ve lived in the Oxboro area of Bloomington my entire life, 3/4 of a mile from the major commercial area at 98th St. and Lyndale Ave. Although most of my shopping is done at big box stores in other areas, this is where I go to the bank, get lunch at the drive-thru, drop off mail at the […]
I love interactive maps and one got my attention recently. Christopher M. Jones and Daniel M. Kammen at UC Berkeley published a study in 2013 taking data on household carbon footprints to develop carbon profiles of zip codes, cities, counties, and states. They took the carbon profile data and produced an interactive map of the […]
I came across this news story last week about a public works proposal in Brooklyn Park, a northern suburb of Minneapolis (and future host to the end of a planned light rail line). As far as things go, this proposal is a pretty mundane function of local government: reconstructing a few 30+ year old streets, replacing some […]
A doctoral student at the UGA, Neil Debbage, led a study trying to determine with urban forms affected urban heat islands the most. The study also ranked the urban heat islands of the U.S. Researchers found no one size fits all urban model where the advice to build more dense or build more sprawling would solve […]
The City of St. Louis Park has a problem — a pretty good problem to have. They have two spectacular east-west trails, running through pleasant natural corridors, on their own rights-of-way. Those trails are the North Cedar Lake Regional Trail and the Cedar Lake Trail (this is often called the “Greenway”, since it becomes the […]
Last week in my article on self-driving cars, I noted the phenomenon that affordable (say $200,000 or less) new houses simply aren’t being built anymore and speculated that might lead to people choosing longer commutes. As a second part, I thought I’d look at some possible reasons affordable houses aren’t being built any more. For the […]
Warning: This post, which is about generalizations, contains many generalizations. — As many people of many different ideological bents will eagerly inform you, we have a big, sprawly metropolitan here in the “Twin Cities.” Our 3.5 million or so residents are spread around a little over 8,000 square miles, compared to, for example, the 13 […]
I was thinking about writing this post well before today’s Dear smug urbanites, stop ridiculing the suburb I love defens(iveness) of suburban living in the Strib, but that commentary seems like a good motivation to actually sit down and write it. But it’s also a bit funny, because I don’t have much to say to its author. I’m […]
Frank Lloyd Wright is a renowned as a great architect. His city plans are less well-loved. In the 1930s he proposed Broadacre City, a new American landscape where everyone would have an acre of land, a car, and a gyrocopter. Fueling those cars requires gasoline. Gasoline requires Gas Stations. FLW, being an architect, had a gas […]