This post focuses on a familiar but mostly overlooked decorative accoutrement – window shutters. Before I get to the multiplicity of shutters I’ve laid eyes on while riding around St. Paul, here’s a bit of historical context. A Brief History of Shutters According to several websites, shutters first appeared in ancient Greece; constructed of marble […]
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.
Hey! It’s been a while, huh? We are out of spring and well into summer, and our project finally is getting into the swing of things. I owe y’all a few updates. When we last left off, we were concerned about what type of accessory dwelling unit (ADU) was possible on our property. So, we […]
I wrote an earlier post that explains what TIF is and how it works. Click through and read it here. In any community, we put things we want in plans. We want good jobs for the people who live here. We want homes people can afford to rent and buy. We want polluted land cleaned […]
Via Scott Shaffer’s Twitter, here’s a chart showing new housing permits pulled in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. If you’re a fan of new housing in Saint Paul, the chart is a bit depressing. Shaffer made the chart in response to the recent news that a proposal for new apartment building on Grand Avenue has been […]
It’s no secret that Minneapolis is experiencing both an apartment boom and condo dearth at the same time, which begs the question, “why aren’t condos being built at the same rate as apartments?” According to many, Minnesota’s construction defect laws are to blame. The rhetoric usually claims Minnesota has unique construction defect laws for condos; it’s said […]
Here’s a chart from the Big Picture, an economics blog, about how slow the construction sector has been to rebound from the 2008 housing crisis. Here’s the take on the data: The relatively weak recovery in construction employment is interesting for at least two reasons: First, construction work is a source of relatively high-wage jobs […]