urbanMSP

At last month's Union Park Land Use Committee meeting the CEO of Episcopal Homes ran us through the features and design. In addition to all the amenities within the building which will be closed off to public access (including an "authentic Irish pub", which I find amusing), they intend fo...

Thanks, I completely missed that info somehow. Isn't that the same reason Caspian Bistro gave for opposing the redevelopment at the corner of Washington and Huron? How is that supposed to work, anyway? Is there some obvious outcome of the physics I'm missing that means tall building next to shorter ...

Anyone know what property Juno is involved with?

And once again we learn what we already knew - there is nothing resembling a parking shortage in Lowertown. Not that this won't stop people from continuing to complain about the parking shortage (which I can really only assume means "I can't find a space in front of my building's door").

The Twin Cities could have a great (or at least very good) Science and Technology Museum if you combined the Bell, with the Science Museum, with a Planetarium, with the Bakken, with the Works. (Just as it could have a great Transportation museum, ...). There are network effects to combining facilit...

I'm just glad there's finally SOMETHING there. Waiting around for 30 minutes to catch the 84 in that lot has always felt tedious and exposed, easily the worst part of my trips to the airport or MoA. That plaza promises to be a much better spot to crash than the uncomfortable bus shelter benches. And...

It's really not that big of a divider. We're talking about an interrupted barrier on a busy thoroughfare that didn't get all that many jaywalkers to begin with (and, to be fair, it's not so high that people couldn't still do that). Hardly comparable to a trench entire blocks wide bisecting the city....

There are more undergraduates, and more of them want to live on campus. This has been accelerated by the U's move towards having less parking nearby with the demolition of the largest parking lot without a replacement during stadium construction. The dorms have never been able to accommodate anywher...

I'm Colin. I've lived in the Cities very nearly all my life, first in White Bear Lake, then Willernie, then Woodbury before escaping that for Stadium Village for 3 years and Merriam Park in Saint Paul for the last 5. I have no background in urbanism, unless you count a Masters thesis dealing with 10...

The 84 is almost exclusively standard buses, and they're usually around 2/3 full until 9 pm or so in my experience. I think part of the enthusiasm for a Snelling BRT (which will, oddly, NOT be replacing the 84) is based on expected density increases at University and, to a lesser extent, Selby. And ...

The argument also ignores how Purple Onion, Campus Pizza, and many other places have successfully relocated within their respective areas to larger places and done very well. Shhh, don't confuse the debate with real-world examples of redevelopment outcomes. We need to preserve character and parking...

Everyone knows that Dinkytown/Marcy Holmes would be better off without all those undergraduates moving in and out every 4 years! I mean, just imagine how idyllic the retail core there would be without that pesky university and its tens of thousands of people buying things. To say nothing of how much...

Snelling and Ashland, where the larger Cheapo location on the strip mall to the east used to be (they consolidated into the smaller Cheapo location across the street).

What an utterly ridiculous article. They've managed to disparage students as a mere nuisance prone to violence, ignore actual parking statistics while simultaneously presenting them, and pretend that the Purple Onion and Dinkydome weren't redeveloped only a few years ago into tall mixed-use student ...

Finally! The "historic preservation" reasoning still baffles me. Was it the parking spaces that are historic? Are we preserving 20th century transportation nightmares now above the interests of livability?

We definitely care about it, but the feeling in the neighborhood is that it's a fight for another day. Everyone here seems to be agreed that the strip mall should be redeveloped and the parking lot filled with mixed-use buildings fronting Snelling, but most people (as represented by that NIMBY group...

The Buffalo Wild Wings development has spawned a new NIMBY organization, "Citizens for a Better Snelling Avenue" ("better" in this case being strictly defined as "not allowing bars other than O'Gara's anywhere near Grand or Selby") - http://www.facebook.com/CitizensForA...

There's a weird conflation of Dinkytown and Marcy-Holmes that fuels those comments. Yes, one is technically part of the other, but the anti-development crowd in Dinkytown likes to talk as though Dinkytown itself, rather than Marcy-Holmes more broadly, is a mix of longtime residents and students when...

The article also reiterated that the new building would contain a grocery store, which I think is a surprising use, considering the number of grocery stores in the area -- Whole Foods, Kowalskis, Target, Rainbow, Cub -- but I would welcome it. I chatted very briefly with the apparent spokesperson f...