Everybody knows the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) metropolitan area is building new housing. It’s been evident for years in the disappearing parking lots of the Mill District and the North Loop, the new windows on old Lowertown warehouses, and the profusion of mid-rises that increasingly characterize Uptown and Dinkytown. But almost nobody has the free time […]
We know that Minneapolis and it environs have a historically, dangerously low vacancy rate. The proportion of homes that are for sale or for rent is far less than a healthy five percent, so renters and buyers compete for empty units, and sellers and landlords make more money than they would otherwise. We need more […]
Janette Sadik-Khan served as transportation commissioner for the city of New York during Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor. She was in charge of most of the streets, roads, bridges, tunnels, and ferries responsible for moving a population of over eight million people. As such, she was responsible for the maintenance and programming of more infrastructure […]
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 […]
A recent blogpost by the Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research charts out some recent trends in crash statistics. In general, US roads have been getting safer. But at the same time, as more cities encourage walking and biking, pedestrian and bicyclist crashes, injuries, and deaths have become a greater share of the whole […]
Via Citylab, here’s an interactive map showing all the deaths on roads for the entire country for a decade. A data researcher named Max Galka made it, and it has over 370,000 data points, one for each fatality. Wow. I zoomed in on Central Minnesota here. Duluth and Lake Superior are at the top right. […]
I like the Star Tribune. They do good work, and have had a lot of quality articles on urban design over the last year. But this last weekend, the front page of the Star Tribune had a big headline front and center, the prime A1 slot, declaring “A Deadly Year for Distracted Walkers in Minnesota.” […]
Hats off to the Met Council! When they’re not busy with pedestrian bridges and light rail planning, they provide amazing amounts of easily digestible data about Twin Cities communities. Check out the interface, which generates charts for different cities at the click of a button… Here’s the one for my home city of Mendota Heights, just south […]
In an effort to increase transparency, the City of Minneapolis has started publishing data that it routinely collects during the course of day-to-day activities. This concept of “open data” has picked up steam as the utility of this data is discovered. By freely publishing this data, institutions create a tool for citizens to piece together […]
The wave of new “Complete Streets” laws require cities to develop “Complete Streets Plans” and new street design manuals. Street design manuals are like smart phone contracts or software download agreements. They tend to be so mind-numbingly boring and full of technical jargon that, rather than read them, we just click “agree.” Later on, we […]