urbanMSP

For those just joining the conversation, TL;DR is as follows: The design elements of a pedestrian bridge... (which connects to a stadium wherein men [mostly of color] will be required to give each other traumatic brain injuries as a form of mass entertainment, built to help facilitate the translatio...

beige_box's comments seem a bit all over the place. Small business owners are good, unless they're landlords who are jerks, but also most small business owners are also not great anyway? Not trying to pick on you, but you seem to be conflicted as to whether capitalism in land use is good or bad, or...

The way I read their narrative, they want to build a spec commercial building, then sell the completed building to whichever business/entrepreneur comes along, rather than own it themselves and lease it out. That's kinda strange, but I hope it works out for them! 27th and Bloomington is not really ...

each bedroom having a closet AND at least one window (right beige_box!?!?)

I got no troll-concerns!

...

Actually now that I think about it the number of bathrooms seems excessive and points contrary to the "this will house large low-income immigrant families" theory.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/affordable-housing-for-white-people/483444/ The report calls these buildings POSH developments, Politically Opportune Subsidized Housing. They’re priced in such a way that families with children or those who are extremely poor could not afford them...

There sure are a lot of windowless bedrooms in the plans for the 5-story building part of this.

To clarify, they might not burn down their own buildings; more like they would simply have them demolished through legal means and replaced by new apartments again, thereby negating the natural affordability argument.

Like I said, I very much sympathize with your overall message, but the details become difficult to understand. If you're using windows as a symptom of a much larger problem of building quality and how that affects the quality of life and social mobility of the future urban poor, you should just say...

So, am I to take your whole screed against windowless bedrooms as a point of "the poor will be forced into making love in the dark?" I sympathize with your arguments, but even if it's true that upwardly mobile people will abandon these units leaving them exclusively to the poor (I'm skept...

Terrible ideas deserve condescension. This isn't some bullshit "the right answer is in the middle" nonsense. If someone like biege_box is going to come here and spew nonsense, it deserves to be put down for what it is: nonsense. We don't need to walk around it with kid gloves, we're all a...

Nice nice we got some good discussion going on at forum.streets.mn 2day! nice. here goes: the EVIDENCE (built projects) is clear - these buildings lease up and get sold. The market for multi-family rental is strong and it is off the charts in desirable cities with strong economies (Minneapolis). The...

Seems like once the novelty of these buildings wears off, and once developers start figuring out how to build smaller, more window-y "missing middle"-type buildings (which seems like it might be the new trend), folks won't want to have to pay a premium only to then have no windows and/or l...

I'm not making this up. If you actually look at floor plans of some of these projects, you'd have spotted that this is not an uncommon phenomenon. I'm not sure how it's legal, either. Here's a couple examples I found in a couple minutes: Seventeen10 Lake: most of the 2BR units have one of their bedr...

Even setting aside natural light, I simply couldn't imagine living in an apartment without the ventilation that a bedroom window provides. I guess modern buildings are built with constant air conditioning assumed, but I couldn't live that way. Exactly, and it just makes that kind of unit all the mo...

I think it's at least worth pointing out that newer buildings, both single- and multi- family, are far more complex - more and larger windows, crazy rooflines, A great deal of new construction definitely has far less windows than old construction. Most larger new apartment complexes consist mostly ...

I like it. It's Soviet enough in both style and scale that when it inevitably becomes a hard-to-maintain liability 30-40 years down the road, it will be pretty obvious to have the city just nationalize it into public housing.

North isn't a ghetto, but it was designed to be a ghetto (via its inaccessibility), and if our affordable housing "solution" is to let all the lower-income families in South to get displaced into North, it will function as a ghetto again. I do spend time in North, I know there are huge are...

Working families aren't getting priced out of the housing market here. I just did a search and found about 50 3+ bedroom houses in the City of Minneapolis for less than $100,000. Vast majority (and increasingly so) of those houses are in the Northside. You're advocating that we do nothing to challe...

The utility is more housing. More housing means the people who will end up living there won't have to come steal your place and price you out of it. Is it that hard to understand? The people who will eventually price me out of my place in South will be hip young newlyweds with college degrees and s...

It's not pretty, but yes the utility is there.

Sorry, what's the utility again?