urbanMSP

There's a key part of this article that I think is important.

One could just write the above off as a gaffe, but Mike Hicks — a fellow transit blogger and former Streets.mn contributor — recently dug into all the other ways the most recent study is flawed. It’s based on bad rail traffic estimates ...

I love it, but I think the issue with that plan (and chatter from real estate folks seems to confirm this for me) that said developer would need to be okay with the fact that they're undermining the very market that they'll use to get a return on their investment.

For all the good that the 24,000 ...

Honestly the whole side quest that Edina Mayor Hovland went on trying to get funding to study a hyper loop to Rochester makes me think we are bound to repeat the Zip Rail fiasco. Trading a solid plan for a shiny object with suspect timing and feasibility worked so well the first time, I'm sure our ...

A rail connection to Rochester needs to be viewed as the first step in a HSR line to Chicago. There should absolutely be a regional component to any line but it needs to be envisioned and built to a true HSR standard, ideally 200 MPH.


Honestly, I'd settle for 125mph just to get things going ...

Minneapolis is probably destined to remain a "quiet midsized metro" forever.


Is Albuquerque destined to be a major global metropolis because of the Rail Runner? The ridership on the CapMetro Rail in Austin is pretty dismal, if they cancelled that train would Austin stop growing like a weed?

I ...

In the backend, is there a way to set a different color for the highlighted "thanks" or "edited" banners?

When using dark mode, the banner is a pale yellow that makes the white text near impossible to read.

IMO we need to get Hennepin and Ramsey Counties, including their cities, to significantly densify and transform into walkable places before rail like this is going to succeed. That's not even likely based on the pace of change since 2020... Unfortunately, MSP is too car-brained to make our transit ...

If there was a huge crush of people who wanted to take transit from Big Lake and Elk River to Minneapolis, would we be in this position to begin with?

Come on, Saints. Read the room - They're asking the state for $8 million to build a ferris wheel at their stadium

It's not the biggest request for state dollars that's come out of Saint Paul in recent months, but the pile is growing.

Well, it finally happened - City Center owner defaults on their loan .

Hopefully we can speed run the obligatory "Downtown Minneapolis is doomed" news cycle this time around and skip to the part where a local group of investors buys the property for a song and uses the savings to lower lease rates ...

To be clear, "shepherding" Central Station and "underwriting" Riversedge are just as much bailouts for massively wealthy people as funding renovations at the publicly-owned Xcel block. Subsidizing the uber-wealthy with public money is more-or-less required to make any big projects happen; you can ...

I, for one, don't think we should sell our state's capital city down the river so that three billionaires can pocket millions in rent.


Xcel Energy Center
RiverCentre/Roy Wilkins
River's Edge
Central Station development

Saint Paul is going to try and get LGA money for all of these things. They ...

It's certainly a better plan than the "tear down City Center and the Target Center" plan Axios came up with.

I sure love living in an extremely wealthy country that constantly feels like it's held together with spit and scotch tape.

Been a hot streak for downtown Minneapolis news lately. Paywalled article from MSPBJ about how Hempel will be opening a food hall on the ground floor of the Lasalle Building, occupying the space that used to be filled by the Rock Bottom Brewery.

https://www.bizjournals.com/twincities/news/2025/03 ...

Man, this forum hates St Paul!


I, for one, love Minneapolis' biggest suburb.

In all seriousness, I think historically a lot of bad decisions and good money have been spent maintaining the idea that Saint Paul is literally a twin (and not just geographically a twin city) and deserves to have ...

Sherman Associates and Hempel are pushing for a new adaptive reuse tax credit

It's not all good news though. Sherman wants it, in part, because they would take advantage of it to rehab and reuse the Wells Fargo operations center instead of moving forward on the Harmonia development.

If it's not going to be rail or fully dedicated ROW, I don't see the point in spending more than $100 million on this. Arterial BRT or keep the 54.

Hopefully between Ecolab, Securian, the museums, and Xcel Center there's enough of a base to sustain downtown til whatever comes next...but it's hard not to feel pretty damned pessimistic these days.


Unscientific sample size of two, but the hockey fans I know are hoping a new Wolves/Lynx ...

James Crockarell keeps sapping Downtown Saint Paul's vitality, even from beyond the grave.