On Thursday, October 24, the Minnesota Vikings played a home game against a semi-professional team from Washington, D.C. Sometime the weekend after, Steve Arundel, a fan from Wayzata who attended the game, wrote about his experience to the Star Tribune. On Monday, October 28, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal reporter Nick Halter noticed the letter in […]
[content warning/trigger warning: gun violence, police violence, murder, anti-Black and anti-Native abuse, r*pe, assault] 1821 The Metropolitan Police Department, the first municipal police force in the world, is created in London. The first American police force forms in Boston 17 years later. 1867 Minneapolis incorporates and the City Council establishes the Minneapolis Police Department, which […]
The current debates over the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan and inclusionary housing raise some interesting ideas for consideration about the city and Twin Cities metro area overall. First, more housing at all levels of affordability is critical to the future of the city, not for the sake of density itself but rather the city’s ability […]
Here’s a chart from a must-read Jim Buchta article in this weekend’s Star Tribune, on the homeownership trends in the Twin Cities metro. Check it out: The piece includes a whole bunch of troublesome data from the Census Bureau, and caps it off with a few individual stories of people trying to buy homes. Here’s […]
Here’s a great chart from the archives, from a 2015 post entitled “Twin Cities Traffic Congestion Goes From Fine to Still Fine.” The whole post is worth a read but the key point is embedded in this wonderful chart from MnDOT: As the chart shows, congestion has been largely flat since it peaked around the year […]
Minneapolis Council Members Lisa Bender and Lisa Goodman have introduced a change to city ordinances to broaden the coverage of Pedestrian Oriented Overlay districts. This includes a ban on drive-through fast food, banks, pharmacies, and other businesses. Eric Roper at the Star Tribune gave a pretty good run-down of the situation, followed by about 500 commenters raising the […]
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.” […]
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 […]
I perked up this morning at the Star Tribune headline, “Growing a Greener Downtown Minneapolis,” written by the newspaper’s editorial council. While I applaud plans for more trees and greenery downtown, I must question whether Minneapolis has indeed “turned over a new leaf,” so to speak. While the Pathways to Places remains a plan, the evidence […]
It was exciting and an honor to be featured in Eric Roper’s recent Star Tribune story about the ground floor design of recent developments in Minneapolis. Roper did a good job of explaining the concepts that those of us in the real estate industry take for granted; we speak in tongues and he translated it well. […]