Market-Rate Housing Has a Phase-In
Market-rate housing has benefits, but they aren’t distributed evenly. That creates both an economic and political problems for new development.
Tag Archives: Affordable Housing
National Links: A Dorm with No Windows
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. […]
Three Ways of Looking at the Lexington and University Development Debate
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 […]
What’s In a Name: Frankman Place, A Rare Named Alley, Resurfaces Briefly as Snelling Yards Development Gains Key Approval
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.
Why are Building Height Limits in Minneapolis 2040 Delaying Affordable Housing in Whittier?
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 […]
National Links: A NIMBY Win North of Dallas
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. […]
New Housing Lowers Rents in Minneapolis; St. Paul, Not So Much
There’s an ongoing and tedious debate about whether or not building new market-rate apartment housing helps or hurts affordability in US cities. The argument is tedious not because it’s an uninteresting question, but because nothing seems to change. “You can’t build your way out of a housing crisis,” on one hand; “we have a housing […]
Tenants’ Rights and Environmental Justice: In Pursuit of the Same Goal
My longtime home and beloved Silver City is beginning to change. Though St. Paul has often been maligned as “old-timey” by some of the more unsavory residents across the river in Minneapolis, I am proud to have seen St. Paul take tangible steps into the future by passage of the massively important Climate Action & […]
National Links: Austin 3D Prints a Village
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. […]
$100 Million for What?!
It has been publicized that Hennepin County is working on plans to build a “wishbone overlook” on the upper portion of Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River. The Star Tribune article states cost-estimates of $50-100 Million USD to build this project. I’m going to err on the side of the upper estimate, because at […]