urbanMSP

Luxury retail in general is in trouble. It was kind of cool having a little cluster of nice shops there--felt very cosmopolitan, but honestly how many times does a person need to visit an Apple store or a North Face store? And how many of the dollars spent there stay in the neighborhood, or even the...

For a good time, read the letter at the end of the packet. "Parking is sadly being removed from these priceless urban neighborhoods, which is the lifeblood of neighborhood retail." This is a crazy statement. However, his point about residential rents subsidizing an empty retail space is spot on. It...

Okay I'm relatively new to the whole city-planning thing as I'm 23 and just found out about this stuff as a hobby, but what the heck are we thinking? Why would not every development along the river include some space for a restaurant, brewery, bar, winery, distillery with patio space so people coul...

Hopefully none of the pipeline projects gets cancelled. Housinglink has reported falling median rents for Minneapolis for the last two months after years of nothing but increases. If the pipeline stays full and this continues, maybe some of the middle-range existing projects will reduce their rents ...

For the purpose of regulatory affordability standards, it's gross income. There is no way for a regulator to know each family's tax rates, deductions, savings rates, healthcare costs, etc. So it's 30% gross, which for most people will indeed end up being 40-50% of take home pay. If you have a bunch ...

That particular development's frontage on Main Street is one the worst pieces of urban design in the city. I always assumed that the retaining wall here predated the condo development, but I guess I'm not 100% sure about that. Can anybody confirm? Based on Hennepin's GIS, it looks like the wall was...

Slightly off-topic, but I'm going to be interested to see what happens to townhouse cluster communities like the one at the bottom right in that photo, or The Landings in the North Loop. They are bizarre little enclaves of a short but weird era of downtown development that now seems very close mind...

The building is twice the height of anything within three blocks (21 feet higher than what is allowed by zoning after any bonuses).

I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of your comment, but there's an 8 story apartment building 600 feet southwest of the site.

I've heard it said that the condition of the road base on NE Broadway would make a 4-3 difficult. The concrete joints would be right underneath vehicle tires, so the surface would deteriorate quickly. That wouldn't make much sense unless the longitudinal joints divided the street into thirds? The j...

Broadway NE (County Highway 66) open house coming up soon; May 14 at Able.

https://www.hennepin.us/broadwaystreet