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Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 7:08 am
by mattaudio
Don't forget to put a garage in the front, too! http://goo.gl/maps/TfqL9

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 10:05 am
by Snelbian
Aim for 1920-1950
…and remember to replace the old windows, siding, roofing, insulation, furnace and water heater with better quality, more efficient, lower maintenance new stuff.
Or don't buy a crappy house. The insulation in my 1915 home is just fine (brick tends to help with that), and the windows just needed a cheap-ish retrofit. My in-laws seem to need to replace siding and roofing on their 1990's home more often than people in my neighborhood...

As for confessions, I also ignore the Uptown forum. And even though I criticize people in public forums (the face-to-face kind) for expecting off-street parking when they have driveways and just voted against allowing construction of a parking pad...I usually park in front of my house rather than in the off-street spot because it's more convenient than pulling out onto Snelling.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 10:41 am
by John
I live in an unattractive condo building downtown, even though I often criticize buildings that actually look better than mine.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 12:27 pm
by Chef
I didn't own a car for seven years but I really like having one now. I am thinking about moving out of Whittier because parking is such a pain in this neighborhood. This is the first time I experienced winter parking restrictions as a car owner.

I like Murals of Lynlake. I think it has good lines.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 12:38 pm
by TommyT
I didn't own a car for seven years but I really like having one now. I am thinking about moving out of Whittier because parking is such a pain in this neighborhood. This is the first time I experienced winter parking restrictions as a car owner.

I like Murals of Lynlake. I think it has good lines.
I also like Murals, just wish they had used different colors.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 12:45 pm
by blobs
why don't read uptown forum?

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 1:24 pm
by Silophant
Well, in my case, I can't tell the million stick-built luxury apartments by the greenway apart, so reading the minutiae of their construction details is boring. Basically, I don't spend much time in the area, so I don't care as much as I do about the University and Downtown areas.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 1:27 pm
by FISHMANPET
There is an awful lot of minutiae posted in the Uptown forum.

But I'm a glutton for punishment and if I see an orange icon I have to click it, so I've read pretty much every damn thing ever posted on this forum.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 1:29 pm
by talindsay
Yes, far too much detail about this and that apartment building that I don't care about. There's always a hundred threads on a project I've never heard of, and when I do check it's just little updates. I care about developments in the central commercial node of Uptown but beyond knowing that there is still dense construction in Uptown I don't need to know much about the residential picture.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 2:39 pm
by Snelbian
I don't spend much time in Uptown. If I leave St. Paul for Minneapolis it's almost always for Downtown, the U, or Longfellow. That combined with the fact that I kinda just assume that urbanism is doing well in Uptown means I'm more interested in following updates in areas I frequent with more tenuous development, like Midway.

tl:dr Because Minneapolitans never shut up about it. We get it, Eat Street blah blah Kmart and condos. ;)

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 4:05 pm
by ECtransplant
Random pet peeve of mine: when people refer to luxury apartments as condos. (Not directed at anyone in particular nor something that originates from this forum. Just seemed a good place to note it)

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 4:22 pm
by David Greene
I don't want an apartment building on my block, because the houses are mostly really well kept up and the ones that aren't are spaced too far apart to allow the lots to be combined.

I would not at all mind single-lot apartment buildings, even right next to my house.

I want the four-plex (?) at the end of the block, the one with the vinyl siding, garbage in the driveway, beer bottles on the boulevard and fake shutters on the windows torn down. With prejudice.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 8:52 pm
by Minnehahaha
One of the many reasons I'm a regular user and supporter of our mass transit system is that I love my cars so much that I want to keep the miles off their odometers and avoid winter-time salt exposure. (When we chose to buy our home in Hamline-Midway over ten years ago, one of the deciding factors was to be close to the potential Central Corridor, now Green Line.)

Also... when I first saw this thread, I misread it as "Embarrassing Convention of Urbanists" and thought I had missed out on a fun event! :D

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 16th, 2014, 9:58 pm
by Suburban Outcast
One of the main reasons (other than stating one of my ideas about transit planning) I wrote that streets.mn article "Can we kill two birds with one stone when it come to light rail planning?" was to have something to talk about what I have done recently for an internship interview at the Metro Council. I attend community college so I haven't actually taken a Urban Studies course since 2012, so my recent experience was lacking in that department.

I found out they went with another candidate anyways via e-mail today, so that was a lost cause apparently. Maybe not taking the 62 bus and driving to the interviews was bad luck (or I just suck at selection interviews). Though technically this is an embarrassing confession of a (sub)urbanist.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 12:02 am
by Chef
Another one: I got to know Meg Tuthill a little bit outside of her capacity as a city council member, and I really like her as a person. She was a regular at Duplex when I was the chef there. Sometimes she would bum smokes off of my cooks which I thought was funny and charming. She reminds me of Olenna Tyrell from Game of Thrones, in a good way. I didn't vote for her though.

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 12:06 pm
by eazydp
I grew up in a home with a walk score of "3".

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 8:32 pm
by David Greene
I grew up in a home with a walk score of "3".
You couldn't walk in the house?!?

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 10:38 pm
by mulad
I use the skyways a lot in downtown Saint Paul. Two main reasons:
  • My coworkers default to the skyway.
  • There are hardly any street-facing storefronts in the skyway-connected part of downtown anyway.
I do find the skyways to be somewhat more comfortable than outside. Sure, weather is part of it, but the really annoying thing about going outside is that you're subjected to noise and pollution, particularly from diesel delivery trucks. I'm sure there are more driveways in that part of downtown than there are doors for people. Have you walked past the Met Council building? No doors face the street! Well, none aside from a couple of emergency exits that don't have any exterior handles. (I guess it used to be the Minnesota Department of Revenue headquarters, but still...)

But there's a lot of discomfort inside the Saint Paul skyways too. Most of the corridors are fairly run-down, not having had very much attention over the years. The US Bank building changed their carpeting last year, and you'd never know it because it's so utterly bland. The Saint Paul skyways are also a lot narrower than those in Minneapolis, particularly at the entrance doors that join the skyway bridges to buildings -- most only let people go through two abreast, and most of them have motion-activated doors with noisy motors/solenoids that are always buzzing at 60Hz.

At least I work next to Mears Park, my favorite park in the Twin Cities...

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 11:12 pm
by Suburban Outcast
I just like the skyways because it saves me time avoiding intersections and waiting to cross the street when it's busy.

I was at that Met Council building for the interviews, and it has one of the oddest entrances that I have ever had to use. The blank walls and semi-hidden entrance are pretty stupid (and feels like an oxymoron when they talk about urban renewal). Honestly if Bill Lindeke didn't have a photo tour of ugly walls awhile back (I think on his blog or streets.mn), I probably would have spent a minute walking around the building trying to find the entrance or even would have tried to open up the random door near the bus stop.

Btw, they had no clue what streets.mn or UrbanMSP was (at least their officals that interviewed me)

Re: Embarrassing Confessions of Urbanists

Posted: April 17th, 2014, 11:41 pm
by ECtransplant
Have you walked past the Met Council building? No doors face the street! Well, none aside from a couple of emergency exits that don't have any exterior handles.
This explains a lot