urbanMSP

Yesterday HUD updated their building permits survey (I've been calling these housing starts, which is basically what they are, but there is a difference and I should be more clear) through June, so we've got a half year of data now. Through the first half of 2022, there were permits for 2,317 homes ...

What an awful headline. "... as [Minnetonka] reaches max capacity" Who wrote this, a farmer? I wouldn't have chosen that headline, but if you read the first three sentences, it's clear that what they mean is that Minnetonka has an extremely low vacancy rate and that more housing is needed.

If I'm not mistaken, didn't the Governor (either Dayton or Walz, I can't remember) actually fly down to Fort Worth to negotiate with BNSF executives directly? This project was delayed for years while the state tried a lot of different avenues of leverage. I wholeheartedly support the new route throu...

May 2022 Blue Line = 15,632 Green Line = 19,554 Total LRT = 35,186 % of May 19 = 45.36% % of May 20 = 260.46% % of May 21 = 126.28% Ridership is improving and Metro Transit is painting a positive picture, but I think the number is a bit more discouraging. Especially in May, which saw much less ride...

Orange Line passed over 1k weekday riders in May. Ridership has grown every month so far. While there's no avoiding the fact that it's a pretty low number overall, it's still a positive milestone. Still enormous opportunity for growth, especially given how almost none of the station areas for this l...

I like how each station has a different motif expressed in those metal screens at the entry ramp. They all look very nice, but I'm especially fond of the tree in Eden Prairie Town Center Station and the circuit board at Golden Triangle Station. A nice cheap way to add decoration and local flavor to ...

The residential conversion is in front of the CPC next week. Packet . Now at 216 homes (I find it funny sometimes how these numbers move around by extremely small increments as the design evolves). This project will have no new added parking spaces, understandably, but residents will be able to get ...

More or less, Eat Street-adjacent, since this is over on 26th and Blaisedell. https://twitter.com/nickmagrino/status/1116472555987193856 Replacing two tiny commercial buildings and parking lots. I expected more posts about this saga, maybe in a different thread? I couldn't find it. The project quot...

250 Fremont Ave N is back before the CPC and it's gotten significantly worse for reasons that I can't really understand. The new proposal has 24 fewer housing units and 135 more parking spaces. It's gone from something that was genuinely quite a progressive development in terms of mobility to someth...

This is back before the CPC . Thirteen units have been added and the fifth floor setback on the new building has been pushed forward to be flush with the rest of the facade. Both changes are positive imo. I'm anxious for this project to get underway. The location of this project will transform what'...

The upcoming CPC Committee of the Whole meeting will feature a presentation from the City Attorney's office ( memo ) on the importance of making solid legal findings in order to deny an application, and a presentation from the the CPED Code Development office ( memo ) on the legal preeminence of the...

You can throw out objections to everything, there's no such thing as a free lunch, someone eventually gets stuck with the bill. If MSP wants to improve transit service and increase transit ridership, it needs to take tangible steps to prioritize transit over other modes, especially private vehicles....

There may never be any serious travel demand for the Bryn Mawr Station, but given the neighborhood's geographic isolation, there will be some decent benefit to providing high quality transit access. Unfortunately the project scope doesn't include improved pedestrian connections over the highway, whi...

As much as I would like to see something more active than a parking ramp, I don't really see many alternatives for this site. As much as we want less parking downtown, the hospital needs parking, they need a place to store their ambulances, and a skyway connection to the burn victims housing is ver...

What a thumb in the eye of the city. Flies in the face of everything that people have been trying to do to improve downtown Minneapolis for years and years. This would be a second Gateway Ramp disaster. The city should reject it, tell HCMC to read a book sometime, and come back with a better idea.

The façade design of the parking deck for the Northstar complex is a nightmare that downtown Minneapolis will just have to live with. Getting rid of the ramp would be a small consolation. Anyway, this project is otherwise a big win. It'll revitalize a notably shabby structure and add 217 homes to pi...

Existing lot has 118 parking stalls. Proposed development would have 183 parking spaces on three levels of underground parking. To add 719,000 square feet of new office for a net gain of 65 parking spaces is just phenomenal. Just for "fun" and comparison, I took a look at Dallas' parking m...

Plans have been submitted to retrofit the Northstar Center East (111 6th Street S) from office into 219 housing units.

We've got threads for academic papers and podcasts, but not one for plain old good articles.

Starting this thread with this phenomenal conversation: The Indignity of Automobile Dependence by Alex Pareene and Tom Scocca

A nine unit market rate addition to the Get Down Coffee Co. + Houston White Men's Room building has been submitted to the city. If you've been to the site, you know that this has been in the works for a while and they've had a rendering of this project up on the fence. But this is a more significan...