For those of us that are dedicated urbanists, it is something of an article of faith that density is good. Is it good? How do you measure ‘good’, anyways? One way to measure ‘good’ is to see if people want it. Are people moving to cities? Are denser areas growing as fast as less dense […]
I know a woman who lives on Hague Avenue in St. Paul, within two blocks of the frenetic intersection of Selby and Snelling. She parks her car in the driveway that runs alongside her house, by the “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here” sign in the front yard. I asked her recently if she minded […]
Here’s a cool new map website over at the National Aeronautics and Space Aerospace (NASA) that creates population projections of any area you like. Here is Minnesota with its surrounding area, but the cool thing is that you can draw a polygon around any part of the map and it will estimate the population within. […]
It seems like every time someone wants to build a multifamily residential building, there has to be a public brawl about density and character in front of the City Council first. It’s completely unnecessary, but you get used it. This week I wasted another perfectly good Wednesday night of my quickly evaporating twenties in […]
What happens when Car is not King? A web of subways; taxis and buses aplenty; and car ownership only for the rich.
As of right now, Thrivent Financial owns a collection of surface parking lots and one uniquely shaped 18-story tower in Downtown Minneapolis. For what seems like ages, their tower loomed over a vacant corridor of the city where even surface parking was off limits, contracted only to the employees of Thrivent Financial. But following the […]
About two weeks ago, the Planning Commission finally passed Saint Paul’s plans for the old Ford factory in Highland. The vote was unanimous to support to support the city’s plans, which called for around 4,000 units of housing and plenty of mixed-use, along with a host of other amenities. (Note: there was also an amendment […]
In August 2016, the city of Saint Paul lost a court case in the Minnesota Supreme Court. It was about right-of-way fees, a primary funding source for the city’s roads. To make a long story short, the court found that the fee was not a fee but a tax, meaning that every non-profit and government property […]
Alex Cecchini recently argued that we should allow multifamily buildings along leafy, quiet streets. One of the points he used to support his argument was that transit service in many Minneapolis neighborhoods is flexible. This point seemed particularly ripe for further analysis and visualization. How good is transit in low-density neighborhoods in Minneapolis? Is our zoning code preventing […]
I’ve walked thousands and thousands of miles with Tank in the past eight years. Probably more than half of them have been in Lowry Hill East, where I lived for the first three of those years. It’s one of the most senior-friendly areas of Minneapolis, with its commercial corridors, transit, and density of people. As […]