urbanMSP

Downtown St. Paul has the best physical urbanism of any place in the Twin Cities. You can't beat Lowertown especially for a great urban scale. If you don't go, you're missing out. The problem is that not enough people live and work there. I do think that is somewhat changing, as downtown St. Paul's ...

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 minde...

This is sort of a textbook example of why nice renderings can cause some problems. There are a couple renderings in the packet that make the metal cladding look like cor-ten steel, which I think would be quite attractive. There are also renderings like the one that Rhett shared above that make the m...

The Frankstein-esque design of this has... not improved much. Still don't like the walk-ups along 3rd St. S and the lack of activation along Marquette. This building reads as two buildings, but I think the mass isn't broken up enough, and this is going to feel like a really massive, somewhat confuse...

Again per Robin Garwood , The Louis is done. I hadn't known it was so close, since they only recently put on the facade, but I guess they did that almost last. I was concerned about the small, square windows on this one, and it doesn't look good in the grey areas, but there is enough variety in the ...

Ya! Scare tactics to force the council to spend more on cops!

It is obviously needed.

It is?

Violent crime is going down, horrific one-off events nonwithstanding.

Would there have to be some sort of barrier between the trails and the tracks? Is that extra space for the potential need for emergency assistance? I feel like the freight rail would want something. I'm sure it'd be just like the Greenway east of Hiawatha, where a fence separates the tracks from th...

The St. Paul Bicycle Coalition posted a video that shows, via stop motion, the potential connection between the Ayd Mill gulch and the Short Line Bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZftMI3wLHPs When I was a student at Mac, I actually used to live directly next to the railroad, and so I know how ...

Hello Twin Cities developers. Hire Snow Kreilich more often. Kk thx.

This is good:

Anyone know the latest on the project just south of 10th St. and west of Hennepin? I thought they were supposed to start construction on two different hotels this summer?

Fingers crossed that they are dead, the designs were absolutely appalling and there are higher and better uses for those parcels.

I don't see scooters replacing car trips

Why not?

For a tourist, they often replace trips that might otherwise be taken by ride share. Why wouldn't that be the case for residents?

One of my favorite things about the State Fair is how much great media comes out of it. Here are a bunch of good recent episodes:

Mayors Carter and Frey on MPR News
Governor Walz on 1A
1A on Minnesota's affordable housing crisis and solutions
1A on Minnesota's craft beer industry

The Met Council got a ridership update the other day . At first glance, the topline numbers look pretty dire. Local bus is down 9% on the year, which is a drastic acceleration of a national slide. Light rail is up 3%, which is nice, but not as rapid growth as seen in previous years. BRT is up 12%, w...

I had seen a lot of photos of 419 Washington and the entire building, especially the front facade, has always read as extremely flat. But then I visited the building in person a few weeks ago, and it turned out that the pictures were totally deceiving. It's completely fine. The facades have far more...

I think the issue is that parks can be active or passive. The Mall has historically been a passive park, meaning that it doesn't have sports fields. Not every park needs to, or ought to, have sports activities. No, but there is strong demand for them, and when you're master planning for investments...

Neel Kashkari was on WCCO radio this morning and was asked about the ramp. He reiterated that they have a parking problem (lol) and said something to the effect of "we're not done yet." Very ominous. It's beyond dispiriting if nothing that anyone has said about climate change or transport...

In general, I sometimes think we're in danger of repeating some of the worst urban planning mistakes of the past, namely tearing down buildings because they look out of date or represent an architectural era we don't respect at the moment. The big mistake of urban renewal wasn't that it tore down o...

I don't quite understand why they've arranged the lobby and parking entry on the west side of the building and the retail spaces on the east side. Given the existence of commercial west of the building, doesn't it make more sense to string the commercial uses together instead of separating them by a...

I never said it wasn't profitable. But selling out to a developer can also be profitable. It's a prime location. A smart developer could include a convenience store in a future development. There are also small-footprint urban gas station formats, which you see especially in Europe and East Asia. I'...

A couple shots that show how this building is framing N 6th Ave and N 5th St. (Later shot also shows a side of the new Metro Transit police building, which was designed by Snow Kreilich.) https://i.imgur.com/zcas0iK.jpg https://i.imgur.com/uK24qBF.jpg That Holiday can't be long for this world, can it?