It’s hard to tell these days whether or not the Minnesota Legislature is in session. Technically it is, except for the House, but it’s complicated and you can read a whole 1,500-word column on this topic and come out little-the-wiser. (Thank you for your service, Peter Callaghan.)

One thing’s for sure about going to the State Capitol: compared to six years ago, it’s easier to park your car. One blessing in disguise around the COVID aftermath is that, with the majority of government staff  at home, demand for parking is down. This is important because where you park is a badge of honor among State Capitol denizens. Proximity to power forms a hierarchy that comes with rank and/or seniority, and there are few more obvious displays of this power than car storage. 

This is probably one reason why state capitol areas have a bad urban design track record, offering acres of parking and poor land use. A video last year by urban journalist Ray Delahanty (aka City Nerd) ranked all 50 state capitols in terms of urban quality; St. Paul landed 10th from bottom. Delahanty’s video describes how the damage done by the government campus “is mitigated a bit by the I-94 spaghetti that blocks it off from downtown [but that the Minnesota Capitol area]  really demonstrates the corrosiveness of bad state capitol urban form.”

By contrast, great state capitol areas — Delahanty calls out Sacramento and Boston — are surrounded by destinations, neighborhoods, walkable streets and quality public space. I am partial to Madison, myself, but St. Paul’s Capitol area leaves a lot to be desired on all of those fronts (at least if you value public spaces that actually attract people).

The worst capitol areas are plagued by parking lots, often a challenge for state government because, for one thing, they’re almost always seasonal enterprises. (There are only nine full-time legislatures in the U.S.) For months they lie dormant, then burst into hyperactivity when sessions begin. Politicians, staff, lobbyists, constituents, and advocates of all stripes descend on the state capitols with their cars, all demanding convenient parking. 

Likewise, because they’re based on geography, political assemblies are inherently dispersed, with  officials coming from all corners of the state. (Fun fact: the best way to traverse the 400 miles to St. Paul from District 1, up in Kittson County, is to fly.) This is partly why the quest for parking has been a generational endeavor for politicians, staff, and the Department of Administration officials who oversee facilities. For example, before COVID, building a new $66 million parking ramp was a key Department of Administration request, but that has died down in an era when most state workers stay home most of the time. 

I reached out to both the state Department of Administration and Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board (CAAPB) staff to ask whether parking policies have changed in the post-pandemic era, but the answers seemed vague.

Erik Dahl, CAAPB executive secretary, is working on a “rule making process,” complex legal administration, to “update parking standards” in the area. According to Dahl, they are trying to encourage “the gradual return of workers at lower SOV split [and] seeing reduction of surface lots in favor of a structured approach, and increased use of transit.” In addition, CAAPB has been looking at “eliminating parking minimums, if the market demonstrates how car storage or mobility is handled with an innovative approach.”

Meanwhile, according to an Administration spokesperson, there are about 1,400 parking spaces currently on hiatus due that might one day return. According to communications director Julie Nelson, with lower daily demand, they have also  released 600 parking spots from daily contracts, converting them to meters or flexible arrangements.

On the ground, the most marginal surface parking lots around the Capitol have disappeared. Both Lot C and Lot X are now at least temporarily absent. (Lot X is part of the mystifying “Sears Site” situation, currently mothballed after being renovated as either a reality program production studio or the backdrop for a seasonal outdoor asian market.) Lot C, on the other hand, has been removed and subsumed by the demolition of the historic Ford Building, something of a historic preservation travesty along University Avenue.

That said, there are still plenty of surface ramps and garages to be found around University and Rice. In addition to the three large public, multi-story ramps, you’ll find lots Q, W, U, K F, and H waiting to take your money and offer your car temporary refuge. (This is not to mention the guarded lots for highest levels of staff and elected officials.)

Post-commuting plan needed

After a century of increasing demand, it would seem that there’s finally enough parking around the Capitol. I would hope this fact would help decision makers pivot to a different model of development in the area, one predicated on density and inter-connection rather than far-flung commuting. 

Indeed, if you look at the Capitol area plans, especially the (high quality) 2040 Capitol Area Comprehensive Plan, that’s the idea. Theoretically, the future of the Capitol area should be more integrated into the surrounding community, with more restaurant and commercial establishments to support the public space, filling into the old acres of surface asphalt.

That said, conflicting post-COVID trends make that reality hard to envision. Even more than downtowns, the Capitol area suffers from a lack of density and vitality. One state worker recently  told me about how, on returning to work after months away, they found that the coffee and vending machines had been removed. For most of the year, the Capitol area offers a lunch vacuum, at least for those unwilling to walk 2/3 of a mile into downtown.

This is a common catch-22 regarding  returning to the office. For people who actually go into work, there’s often little reward other than quietude. Thus many people go into the office to get away from people, precisely the opposite of the normal office rationale centering on networking and propinquity. This leads to a self-reinforcing cycle: fewer daily workers leads to fewer amenities, disinclining people to return to “in-person” work, leading to fewer amenities and so on. With government workplace tending  toward deference to employee demands, the already sparse State Capitol area in St. Paul has become a commercial desert. 

Of course, given the unpredictability of government these days, everything I’ve just written could turn out to be completely wrong. One of President Donald Trump’s first orders in office reads thus: “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis.”

It’s difficult to believe this will actually occur, or that the rationale might be anything other than to demoralize federal staff, but it does illustrate the fragility of our assumptions about the future. In other words, stay tuned. Maybe government parking lots will make a comeback.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

The post The new realities of post-COVID parking at the Minnesota State Capitol appeared first on MinnPost.

For the last two years, I’ve been watching the rise of a six-story apartment building a few blocks from my house. Now called “The Nine,” the mixed-use building boasts 309 new apartments, now leasing with rents ranging from an income-restricted studio for $995 to $2,375 for a two-bedroom. The black-and-white building occupies a spot along Lexington and University that’s been vacant since at least the 1960s, so to me it’s a sign of progress. 

The Nine marks the first market-rate apartment project in greater Frogtown for at least a half-century, meaningful because it can be hard to be the “first” development in a long neglected area. (See also: Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood.) The housing also reflects the kind of change that many city leaders had hoped might be a fundamental part of transit investment in St. Paul, new housing catalyzed by the Green Line light rail investment along the long-neglected University Avenue corridor.

The other big takeaway around the building’s completion is that it takes an awfully long time to build new housing in this country. I first heard about this project in 2019 when it was just receiving grant funding from the Met Council, money that was later refused by the city due to anti-housing neighborhood advocacy. As I wrote in 2020, it was hardly smooth sailing from there. 

The project (then known as Lexington Station) was one the last contentious cases in my nine years on the city Planning Commission, which denied it in 2021 (despite my objections) before the City Council also denied approval. Mayor Melvin Carter then vetoed the denial, allowing the building to move forward, though by that point the original financing was in jeopardy. The eventual resolution over approval for the apartments revealed how tortured local control can become. (The project was merely a  site plan review decision!) To me, it marked the beginning of a turn away from pro-housing politics in St. Paul. 

Fast-forward four years, and things look a bit different. In 2021, Saint Paul approved (and then modified) a strict rent stabilization policy, and has since struggled to attract housing investment. Minneapolis passed an initial approval of a theoretical rent stabilization regulation that same year. There are many possible reasons for this, but enough time might have passed to allow the data to suggest a few trends.

Steep decline in housing

I ran the numbers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development database, analyzing housing production for every Midwestern* city over 120,000. I calculated the increases and declines in housing production from a post-COVID 2020-2022 average for 60 municipalities and was surprised to see that the city of Minneapolis has the largest drop-off in the entire dataset. Its 2024 housing numbers represented a decline of over 88% from its previous three-year average, and St. Paul is just behind, ranking #7 on the list with a 81% drop-off.

(I used my subjective geographic definition here, but also threw in Portland, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo as useful Twin Cities’ ‘comparable’ cities for good measure. Another caveat is that HUD housing data for late 2024 is preliminary, and can be revised upward in the future.)

The idea that core-city housing is slowing down should not come as a shock. (See also my story a month ago on Met Council demographic data.) Earlier this year, Libby Starling, the Minneapolis Federal Reserve’s senior community development advisor, released a worrying report about the slow pace of housing construction in the Twin Cities and how it augurs trouble for housing affordability. The Fed’s research found that 2023 was the first time in years that housing supply goals had not been met, and 2024 data looks to be much worse. 

Locally, most conversations I’ve had around housing have pointed to national economic dynamics like high inflation and housing costs, while also mentioning the lack of rent growth in the Minneapolis market (an admittedly good outcome). But that does not seem to explain the whole picture, where Minneapolis and St. Paul show declines even relative to similarly-positioned cities.

From one perspective, it should be surprising that Minneapolis and St. Paul should show the largest housing construction declines, as both cities have been national leaders in zoning code reform. The (now officially unchallenged) Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan reforms were legitimately groundbreaking, and theoretically allow for an easier path toward approval for new construction than you find in many other cities (at least in ones in “blue states”). St. Paul’s reforms, passed a year later, were arguably more sweeping in loosening restrictions around single-family-only zoning.

By contrast, cities like Denver, Seattle and Milwaukee haven’t made these kinds of zoning reforms. For example, they all still have parking minimums on the books, probably the reform with the easiest “bang for the buck” of anything cities can do. St. Paul and Minneapolis got rid of theirs years ago, removing one costly requirement from the books.

The most obvious culprit to me is that both St. Paul and Minneapolis have enacted (or taken steps toward enacting) rent stabilization policies. This was an issue that I argued about back in 2021, writing that the policy proposal appearing on the referendum would amount to St. Paul “redlining itself” when it came to attracting housing investment. The bigger surprise is that Minneapolis seems to also have been affected by concerns about rent stabilization, even though they haven’t actually enacted any actual policy.

The reason why rent stabilization (or the threat of it) affects construction lies in the risk analysis of housing lenders. While I don’t know much about the opaque world of development financing, but I can tell you that many sources of money are national in scale, and investors can easily “shop around” between cities that offer the easiest path to a return on their investment. Most developers will tell you that rent control is a fiscal red flag, and a significant percentage of investors will simply not deal with cities where rent stabilization is a possibility. 

Admittedly, there are other concerns about investing in Minneapolis or St. Paul. What you think those issues happen to be reveals a lot about your politics, and it’s worth pointing out that the rapid pace of housing construction from roughly 2018-2021 in both cities (especially Minneapolis) created a rent bubble and led to a decrease in rent growth.

To my eye, none of those explanations account for why the drop-off has been so stark in Minneapolis and St. Paul compared to other midwestern cities, each of which has its own unique political, economic and COVID-related problems. Given the Twin Cities’ strong regional economy, steady investments in transit, pro-housing zoning changes, and record levels of low unemployment, there’s no reason why Minneapolis should be building fewer new homes than Des Moines, Little Rock, Cleveland, Tulsa or Fargo.

How should the cities respond?

Especially given the lack of actual pro-renter outcomes in either core city, from a policy perspective the best thing to do would be for both cities to repeal their rent stabilization programs. (They should do this “in fact” in St. Paul’s case, and “in spirit” over in Minneapolis.) But given the contentious nature of both referendums — a requirement of an onerous state law — that path seems politically impossible. It would likely take another referendum to remove rent stabilization from the books in St. Paul.  

Barring a clean break with rent stabilization, passing something along the lines of Mayor Carter’s reforms to the new construction exemption seems like a smart move for St. Paul, in the hopes of avoiding the watering down of the city’s investment ambitions. The recent de facto downzoning at the Ford Site/Highland Bridge is a troubling sign.  

Meanwhile, it seems like rent stabilization (and even the threat of it) have led to an alarming drop-off in housing production, which means that a well-meaning policy has backfired and is worsening the housing crunch for renters. Others may have other opinions, but if the Twin Cities wants to maintain its economic and climate momentum, something has to change. Given the long-term nature of housing construction permitting, I predict that next year’s housing decline will be even steeper.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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The city of Minneapolis and Metro Transit are currently sorting out how to move buses off of Nicollet Mall. It’s something I wrote about back in 2023, when Mayor Jacob Frey’s Downtown Storefronts Initiative launched. Then, as now, I view the idea as a mixed bag. 

It’s entirely possible to improve transit performance through downtown, while also making Nicollet more attractive and vital. But without more specific plans in place, it’s hard to say whether the change would be an improvement. A lot depends on whether or not you think the city and the Downtown Council will be able to manage the details and create a space that’s welcoming and attractive to existing residents and downtown visitors alike, a tall order. 

One thing is for sure: Whatever the future holds for Nicollet Mall, the street should be attractive and comfortable for bicycling, scooting, wheelchairs and any other slow-moving means of conveyance. Placemaking efforts should center everyday people, because the last thing downtown needs is another too-precious symbolic landscape.

The curious case of transit malls

The idea of “transit malls” has always been strange, sort of like the American version of the futon: not quite one thing, and not quite another. In this case, the big idea was to create a pedestrian street that also has buses, but not ones that go very quickly. It’s a concept that emerged from a turbulent mid-century period when downtown had too much traffic, but was rapidly losing its place as an economic center. Fast forward to the 21st century and transit malls have since boasted a mixed track record.

Minneapolis’ most obvious parallel is Denver’s 16th Street Mall, designed by I. M. Pei in 1982 and roughly inspired by Nicollet. Denver’s downtown boasts a similar size and geographic centrality, and it’s notable that their city planners have completed an expensive $170 million reconstruction effort, involving years of disruptive construction. (That might sound familiar to downtown Minneapolis denizens who remember the 2010s.)

Today, Denver’s plans do not involve removing buses from their transit mall, instead improving the sidewalks and public realm in the hopes of attracting residential development. It’s an easier lift because, on the whole, Denver’s downtown sidewalks are far more vibrant. Without skyways, there’s an abundance of shops and doorways lining the street that make Minneapolis’ mall look almost abandoned. 

Madison’s State Street mall offers an even more successful local parallel, one of the true gems of Midwestern urbanism. With tens of thousands of college students and government workers, there’s hardly a blank wall to be found along the avenue, and the resulting window shopping experience attracts strollers from all across Wisconsin. In both of these cases, the ‘transit mall recipe’ works pretty well, as there are already plenty of attractive destinations along the street to sustain a critical mass.

On the other hand, the streetscape of Nicollet Mall was bleak even before the COVID pandemic decimated downtown crowds. Even under the best of circumstances, something needed to be done to liven the street, and the last five years have been anything but that. Nicollet Mall isn’t going to fix itself without dramatic intervention because its structural problems — especially the skyways — are too fundamental. The lack of doorways, shops, and everyday retail makes it, in all practical purposes, the opposite of Madison’s State Street. 

This is why Downtown leaders need to create use placemaking and programming to attract workers and residents out of the privatized comfort of the struggling skyways, all while bringing people in from the surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs. That will take some serious attraction — the Rochester example springs to mind — and it’s hard to see that happening with the sidewalk status quo.

What the bus removal does accomplish is to make space for something else to happen, and everything depends on what that ‘“something else” turns out to be. You can be sure that whatever success planners and the business community can conjure won’t come naturally to a street that, these days, is nearly devoid of active doorways. 

Bikes needed

This is why Nicollet Mall needs bikes, pedicabs and slow-speed mobility now more than ever. The street should turn into an array of wheeled vehicles and wanderers, a place where kids can run around a bit and you might even find skateboarders hanging out. That was always an awkward marriage with buses and their drivers who, after all, have an important job to do.

I’ve been bicycling in Minneapolis for over 20 years, which makes me old enough to remember when bikes were officially banned on Nicollet. Unofficially, nobody much enforced the rule, and pragmatic cyclists (like myself) routinely biked down the street despite the occasional blasé raised eyebrow from authority figures. The temptation of a car-free street was too appealing, given the alternatives for crossing downtown.

That policy was silly, given the street’s ostensible vibrancy goals, and thankfully the rule was rescinded in  2010. Funnily enough, things have swung in the opposite direction now, and it seems like buses will disappear and bicyclists (and other folks on wheels) will have free reign over the street. This is why it’s such a shame that Nice Ride bike sharing system disappeared. Those stations would have been the perfect amenity for a wide-open, pedestrianized Nicollet.

City leaders would do well to heed the golden rule that urbanist (and now city bicycle and pedestrian coordinator) Alex Schieferdecker laid out last year: First ask, how does this benefit residents? It’s the critical question surrounding any change. I think that it’s possible to thread the needle on Nicollet, moving transit to nearby streets with higher speeds while making Nicollet itself more attractive and engaging, but it won’t be easy.

There are plenty of great ideas that can easily coexist with active transportation. Rochester’s downtown activity menu offers a weekly public stage, farmer’s markets, street vending, and the like, offer a great example. There are plenty of other ideas that might be fun, but whatever they are, leaving room for bikes, skateboards, pedicabs, scooters, and anything else people can contrive is a necessary first step.

I’m cautiously optimistic. If Minneapolis leaders play their cards right, and spend a lot of time and money doing the right kind of placemaking, I think Nicollet might one day compete with the downtown main streets of other midwestern cities like Omaha, Denver, or even Madison. For Nicollet Mall, that would be a welcome change

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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When Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a 6,000-pound Ford F-150 Lightning into a dense crowd on Bourbon Street this month, the resulting carnage was one of those things that writer Rebecca Solnit has called “shocking but unsurprising.” Like so many things in the news these days — the Los Angeles wildfires being the latest — this kind of deadly violence is both predictable and uniquely tragic. I hate getting used to these events.

That said, two details of this incident caught my attention. First, the assailant used a massive Ford F-150 Lightning, a three-ton electric truck with a high front end, a trend these days in dangerous vehicle design. The second was that the city of New Orleans had, years before, installed expensive retractable bollards in reaction to a deadly 2016 vehicle attack in France. American planners and politicians had done the right thing to prevent a tragedy, but ironically failed to maintain their defenses. The bollards had been neglected for years, brought down in part by cheap plastic Mardi Gras beads.   

Bollards background

The attack on the French Quarter, America’s foremost urban treasure, made me stop to reconsider the lowly bollards that could have saved lives. It turns out that bollards are surprisingly controversial for what amounts to the simplest possible piece of urban infrastructure. They’re not more than posts that can withstand a major impact, especially motorized vehicles, but it’s precisely their inflexibility that has long made them a sticking point for many engineers.

The standard bollard costs around $700 to manufacture and install (at least according to one estimate). That’s very affordable for a modern capital expense, which is probably one reason why they’re common in many European cities. For example, Amsterdam has long been famous for its iconic (and somewhat suggestive) Amsterdammertje bollards, which have lined the sidewalks and street-level canals for centuries. Over time, the city has been removing them in favor of grade-separated curbs, but some tens of thousands remain.

Fancy retractable ones, like those dormant in the French Quarter, can cost over $10,000 and require annual maintenance. They’re used only for special occasions and places, like surrounding the city of London landmarks or in James Bond films.

For years, I’ve been rather obsessed with bollards thanks to the semi-popular World Bollard Association social media account, which has 200,000 followers. It regularly posts bollard-related incidents from around the world, demonstrating a fascinating technological obstinacy. Compared to anything you’ll find in a public works budget, in the right context they represent  an amazing investment payoff for traffic calming and safety. 

That’s why it’s strange that, officially, bollards are not in vogue in Twin Cities governments. Plastic bollards (or flexible posts) that you see near bike lanes are much more common on our streets, but have also become a rather dubious technology. Talking to engineers over the years, they often hem and haw about using them. While they can serve as a short-term traffic calming technique, they’re not cheap and (as any observer well knows) are prone to being destroyed by wayward drivers.

A few years ago, I was told that St. Paul had a de facto policy of not using flexi-posts anymore — endlessly replacing them can be rather expensive — but lately they’ve begun to re-appear in my neighborhood. They provide welcome traffic calming, but remain symbolic protection at best.

Real bollards are much rarer and, weirdly enough, more common in the Twin Cities’ private sector. Companies that seem to know the actuarial value of their infrastructure deploy them more literally than urban planners. For example, the privately designed park that shelters the giant St. Paul loon sculpture has an array of fancy bollards at its vanguard. (In fact, one of them has already proven its metal, after being hit by a wildly wayward vehicle.) You see them, too, outside sports stadiums, or protecting buildings with exposed infrastructure. They cluster especially around drive-thrus, keeping ATMs, pneumatic tubes, or the menu speakers sfe from their customers.

In the public sector, they’re not currently in favor. Apart from federal office buildings, put there since the terrible 1995 Oklahoma City bombings, you don’t find them much in use. I reached out to a variety of urban actors to ask why but didn’t get many clear answers. According to a city spokesperson, Minneapolis does not have an official bollard policy.

“[We] are focused on implementing those actions, including proactive safety treatments on ‘high injury streets,’ supporting safe driving speeds through street design, and piloting traffic safety cameras,” the spokesperson said. “[However] the current Vision Zero Action Plan does not include an action for creating a policy on solid bollards, although we may consider that in the future.”

It’s a similar story for Metro Transit, which typically limits its preventive infrastructure to hardened centerline treatments. Meanwhile, MnDOT’s official policy is to “avoid installing bollards whenever possible.” According to the Bicycle Facility Design Manual, they represent dangerous obstacles for cyclists. At the same time, they can be quite important. St. Paul’s downtown bikeway has a few bollards to demarcate the trail from the street, though not enough to prevent delivery vans from parking on at the bikeway nearly every day. 

Bollards can save lives

As the threat of vehicular violence has increased over the last few years, official allergies toward bollards look  misplaced. As vehicles grow larger, more powerful, and with higher front ends, everyday streets are more dangerous. Places like bus stops, schools or any sidewalk with a regular concentration of people could use a few tasteful-but-firm obstacles to slow traffic and protect the vulnerable. 

For example, a few weeks ago, a speeding driver hit another car on Emerson Avenue North in Minneapolis. The crash threw the vehicle directly into a busy bus stop, killing two people and injuring three more. This is exactly the kind of thing that well-placed bollards might prevent. In an era with increasingly dangerous drivers, Metro Transit should consider bollards around bus stops along with other technologies that might better protect the vulnerable.  

Then there are the more obvious public spaces where bollards might thrive — parks, plazas and the like. Retractable bollards should be a matter of course on any main streets that regularly host events and should be maintained so that they work at all times. (Hopkins did this with their Main Street years ago, installing gates that can be easily lowered.) If Nicollet Mall is closed to buses, hosting daily public gatherings like farmers markets or sidewalk cafés, retractable bollards that prevent drivers from scaling the sidewalks seems like a necessary first step.

Another silver lining of a bollard-happy future: it could facilitate more public festivals and parades, which have become saddled with high security costs, leading to the cancellation of these socially important events. Retractable bollards like the ones that should have been working in NOLA would turn any street into a more protected space for gatherings like the (recently moved) Uptown Art Fair, replacing expensive police permits with everyday technology that operates 24 hours a day. That’s important in an era where public gatherings are disappearing.

So consider the bollard, the humble pawn of the urban landscape. In a world where  vehicular physics have escalated, and mass homicide has become all too common, it only makes sense to better protect our sidewalks and streets.

Editor’s note: The paragraph describing Metro Transit’s use of bollards has been updated to clarify that the agency typically but not fully limits preventive infrastructure to hardened centerline treatments.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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2024 was quite a year. For urbanists like myself, this week’s unveiling of congestion pricing on the streets of Manhattan was the equivalent to a New Year’s Eve “ball drop.” In case you’re not paying attention, New York City’s congestion pricing plan has been an idea for a half-century and a concrete policy proposal for almost two decades. After months of self-immolating political decisions from New York politicians, it’s finally happening, though in a diluted form. 

So far, so good. Like dedicated bus lanes, it’s the kind of urban climate action that we need to shift the incentives and privilege allotted to different users of our public spaces. 

Given the policy excitement, I am taking this opportunity to look back at my columns from the past year and, to some extent, some things I’m pondering in 2025.

To my eyes, last year’s big story remains the COVID pandemic and its prolonged effects on our urban society. A friend of mine commented the other day that our country has never really paused to mourn this event. Individually, we all have our stories, but as a whole, more than 1 million Americans died. Many times more had their lives fundamentally changed. For the most part, everyone seems to ignore this.

For cities, ignoring the pandemic is impossible. Last year, I wrote repeatedly about how workplace shifts have altered our downtowns. Thanks to the inertia of building assessments, leases, subleases and the like, the effects of that change are only beginning to “shake out.” I wrote about this early and often in 2024, and I don’t see any cooling off of this hot topic. In June, it grew so intense that I even evoked my personal patron saint, Jane Jacobs, in thinking about how decades of planning have led downtowns to this difficult impasse.

This downtown conundrum plays out differently in each city. Back in February, I pointed out the lack of downtown ice rinks in the Twin Cities, a glaring omission given how well they activate public space. (This is still a problem: Why not flood a block of Nicollet Mall?). A few months later St. Paul’s big “downtown revitalization” report came out, and it was full of good ideas for improving walkability. There seem to be a half-dozen studies and reports by this point, and it’s hard to keep up. Of course talk is relatively cheap; meaningful action is far more rare.

The other big impact of COVID has been on public safety and retail, and I had a handful of stories on these topics this year. In February, I wrote about the dispiriting nature of copper wire theft. While this problem is improving, as I travel around town I still fixate on the bases of street lamps. Many miles of everyday darkness remain on our streets. 

Transportation changes

The issues around the light rail are rife with similar dynamics. For the 10th anniversary of the Metro Transit Green Line back in June, I wrote twice about how that investment has been playing out in our core cities. Long story short, COVID changed everything — from staffing to public safety — and change has been far slower than most people anticipated. That’s maybe one reason why the corner of Snelling and University, which saw a giant loon appear in September, has been ground zero for lowered expectations from city planners and community members alike.

Speaking of transportation, there was a lot going on there too, much of it connected to pandemic upheaval. Because infrastructure projects often take so so long to plan and construct, transportation is perhaps the slowest sector of the planning world to change. Witness the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s “Rethinking I-94” project, which I wrote about a few weeks go. It’s been in the works for almost a decade, with another decade or so to go, though the latest news looks grim for the “boulevard” or freeway reduction options. That’s bad news for the climate, to say the least. 

To make matters worse, a couple of big-ticket transit projects are going badly. St. Paul’s Riverview Corridor finally died, and Ramsey County’s Purple Line seems to be on life support.

Retail was another sector affected by COVID, and where people’s habits continue to shift toward online and isolated experiences. That’s clearly played out, especially in formerly retail-oriented nodes like Uptown Minneapolis. A year ago I wrote about Grand Avenue, which continues to be a hot button St. Paul topic, and I came back to it in November when the long-standing Metro Independent Business Alliance closed up shop. 

I’m definitely going to be looking at how commercial zoning and retail trends are affecting planning policies in 2025. And in other news, small businesses like the historic 19 Bar in Minneapolis’ Loring Park remain as priceless and irreplaceable as ever. I wrote about their tragic fire back in April, and am told that they will be reopening any day.

Housing headlines

Finally, housing remains the other big issue, almost an existential challenge (at least, if you’re a city). While Minneapolis and St. Paul have been somewhat on the cutting edge of housing policy in the US, the result on the ground hasn’t exactly been a panacea. This is partly thanks again to the slow pace of construction and financing, where policy changes take a long time to play out.

The two big stories were zoning reform and rent stabilization, which have tended to offset each other to some degree in how they’ve affected housing production and affordability in Minneapolis and St. Paul. I wrote about St. Paul’s proposal to change their existing rent stabilization policy back in August, and that’s sure to be a story that returns in 2025. It has certainly shaped the conversations about the Ford Site, which I discussed in my most recent piece. (See also: this story about a potential garbage truck industrial facility near West 7th Street; rent control makes an appearance.)

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the specious anti-2040 Plan lawsuit finally died in 2024, just in time for the 2050 comp planning process to begin sometime late next year. It’s a great case study of how long it takes to change things in cities.

I wrote about another overlooked area of reform in March: the need for changes to the state building code. This was the column that generated the most pushback from commenters, who did not buy my argument that fire codes are too strict in ways that harm both livability and affordability. I predict this issue will return. More and more evidence points toward the need for single-stair reform in Minnesota, and other changes to loosen up restrictions on housing.

Stay tuned for more on all these topics as we move into 2025. As always, if you have any good story ideas or suggestions I’m happy to hear them. Personally, 2024 was a banner year because Minnpost launched an official Cityscape newsletter, and some of my favorite columns this year have been ideas directly from you, the readers. This includes the Rethinking 94 piece, the one on 740 River Drive in St. Paul’s highland neighborhood, the Desnoyer Park merchandise scoop, and the recent column on demographic modeling. Please keep them coming in 2025, and we’ll see where the city takes us.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

The post Looking back and ahead on our urban affairs appeared first on MinnPost.

If there’s one place in St. Paul that’s an evergreen showcase for the city’s potential, it’s the Ford Site. For over a century, the 130 acres that hosted the former Ford truck plant have had a history of changing the tone in Minnesota’s “second city.” 

Built in 1925, it represented a massive “scoop” for St. Paul against its larger, wealthier western rival. St. Paul had lured Henry Ford, the country’s talismanic industrial baron, to invest in a riverfront property along the Mississippi River. The factory simultaneously ushered control over the controversial “high dam” power supply that had been a political football for nearly a decade, while bringing modern industrial investment into the city.

Fast forward a century, and the situation is oddly similar. After the Ford factory plant closed, Ford made the unprecedented decision to not sell the property but to clean up the site and prime it for development. St. Paul staff then spent years conducting expensive planning, even sending a delegation of City Council members, business leaders, and city staff to Scandinavia to study sustainable urban development. Then and now, city leaders wanted this parcel to be a visionary showpiece.

This is why it’s no exaggeration to call the former Ford factory the most heavily scrutinized piece of land in St. Paul history. In a wealthy, centrally-located neighborhood along the river, the resulting master plan was a hard-won compromise involving countless community meetings and toxic town halls. Approved in 2017, the resulting zoning laid out a promising mix of densities, everything from single-family homes along the river to clusters of mixed-use apartment buildings including affordable housing. Meanwhile, the city spent over $50 million in tax-increment financed infrastructure as a foundation for the development. 

From vision to reality

Fast forward to 2024 and the triumphant tone has changed. Apart from the single-family homes, residential development has been stalled for years due to the challenging post-pandemic economy and St. Paul’s still-onerous rent control provisions. 

The site’s developer, Ryan Companies, finally released proposals earlier this month to develop a key block along Ford Parkway, and from an urban planning perspective, it’s a mixed-bag at best. For a key Ford Site parcel next to the intersection of Ford Parkway and Cretin Avenue, Ryan proposed five buildings; only one of them fits the master plan criteria, and the other four reflect hefty decreases from the city’s density ambitions. 

The situation on Ford Parkway represents an inversion of the usual dynamics, where developers typically press cities for permission to build higher and larger. In this case, the Ryan proposal involves one four-story apartment building and four one-story commercial buildings surrounded by surface parking lots, much less density than required.

That’s why Ryan Companies needs 17 variances to the zoning code, a large number by normal standards of the Board of Zoning Appeals, which heard the case earlier this month. Many of the variances are small details about things like window coverage, but the key exceptions involve building height and floor-area ratio (FAR), a measure of general density. In both cases, the application was not close to acceptable minimums: .3 to 1.0 FAR instead of the required 2.0, and 12-18 feet of height instead of the required 40 feet.  

The situation puts the zoning board in a bind because variances are held to strict “quasi-legal” standards, not technically subjective decisions. They require “circumstances unique to the property that create practical difficulties in complying with the provision with the code,” and one often-repeated point is that financial concerns alone are eligible to be one of these circumstances. 

In this case, while Sean Ryan of Ryan Companies took pains to describe how the slope changes along Ford Parkway created the unique circumstances, both the application itself and the testimony pointed out the determinant role played by access to financing.

“We’re not proposing additional housing because we don’t believe that is able to be developed here,” said a Ryan spokesperson when pressed by one of the zoning board members. “We want a project that meets the master plan that actually has success in being financed and being developed, and we don’t think that is something that has the ability to be financed … and its importance for this development to have vibrance at this corner and support the other things that are happening in this neighborhood.”

In other words, there’s an economic undercurrent where the kind of housing envisioned by the zoning code seems unlikely. After years of impasse, Ryan Companies has still not been able to line up financing for the kinds of projects in the original vision. This itself is a story centering on both the changing economy and the city’s strict rent control policy, approved by voters in 2021.

For their part, city staff recommended approval of the zoning variances.

“In hindsight, maybe things could have been made a bit looser,” said St. Paul Zoning Administrator Yaya Diatta. “When they did the master plan, they thought this is the way to go, but they created some hard situations and this is where we are today.” 

Planning downgrade

There’s no question that the proposal represents a planning downgrade. Instead of the four-or-five-story buildings shown in every early Ford Site rendering, Ryan has proposed the kind of single-story commercial buildings you’d find along a suburban frontage road. It’s basically an elaborate strip mall, and for a key city-subsidized parcel in 2024, that’s a big letdown.  

In the big picture, city planners have for decades tried to shift land use around the city’s aging strip malls, to boost walkability and density especially near transit investments. Examples abound: the Midway area along University Avenue, full of unwalkable asphalt “superblocks” boasting semi-abandoned strip malls, the East Side’s Sun Ray mall, where a half-billion Gold Line BRT is being built next to a surface parking lot, or the Paster Enterprises strip mall on West 7th Street, once slated to be a key Riverview streetcar location.

To build new car-centric strip retail on a key parcel of Ford Site land, after years of planning and tens of millions of city investment, is a dim sign for St. Paul’s most visionary property. It begs the question of what’s going to happen to the rest of the planned development, especially the called-for blocks of dense residential housing to the east. It also reflects the need to change, once again, the city’s rent control policy. Earlier this year Mayor Melvin Carter announced plans to add a permanent exception for new construction, but the City Council has not yet taken up the proposal. 

The zoning case will be voted on again on Jan. 6, when the Board of Zoning Appeals meets again. During its December meeting, it was clear there wasn’t much appetite to approve the 17 variances, so it seems most likely that the board will deny the development proposal. Either way they decide, however, the question is likely to be appealed to the City Council. At that point, they’ll have to look closely at the options on the table and decide, once again, what the vision for St. Paul should look like.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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For months I’ve been asked questions about “Rethinking I-94,” the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s seemingly interminable planning process for changing the intercity freeway between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. Most people want to know:  What do you think of the boulevard proposal? Is it even possible? Where would the traffic go? 

You’re not alone if you’re skeptical about removing this central interstate. It currently carries between 100,000 and 150,000 cars a day, around 10 times that of an arterial street like St. Paul’s Lexington Parkway (near my house). Looking at the overwhelming scale of the freeway, it’s hard to imagine that reducing the road would be possible.

That’s why we’re lucky that the transportation advocacy group Our Streets hired consultants earlier this year to study this problem, a rare outside analysis. The team of experts included a national planning firm, a local data analysis firm and a traffic modeling consultant that picked apart the state-led procedure. The resulting study included inspiring renderings and policy points, but my eyes were especially opened by its critique of status quo modeling practices, a topic most people never consider.

Traffic modeling has long been a “black box” carefully guarded by expert bureaucracy, something few understand and everyone else accepts at face value. Somewhere an engineer uses a complex formula and reams of data to predict a trend, and decision-makers and the public swallow a “baseline scenario” of congestion and ever-more driving.

After years of models failing to accurately predict transportation trends – see for example, repeatedly wrong predictions of increasing “vehicle miles traveled” (VMT) –   that’s starting to change. Alongside other 20th century traffic engineering concepts like “level of service” or parking demand studies, models are becoming a target of scrutiny, 

In this case, led by consultants Toole Design Group and Smart Mobility, a Vermont-based traffic planning firm, the study raises questions about Twin Cities regional traffic analyses and how they are used in the “Rethinking I-94” process. The consultant’s report argues that options reducing freeway capacity might have counterintuitive traffic outcomes in central Minneapolis and St. Paul, and that answering the question of “what would happen to the traffic” isn’t straightforward. If the critique is correct, nobody should pretend they know the answers about what would happen to traffic alongside changes to I-94. 

How traffic models work

Diving into the weeds, MnDOT’s traffic analysis is based on the Met Council’s “activity based” regional traffic model, which uses a “static” traffic assignment approach. Engineers break highways into segments and then input a certain amount of traffic based on past trends (almost always an increasing number). In that way, you get results about congestion and free-flow conditions based on those inputs. 

The problem is that this isn’t how real-world traffic works. Not only does VMT not always go up, but the speed and volume of cars entering a freeway segment are highly dependent on the traffic conditions on either side.

“For a static model, even if you have a bottleneck upstream or downstream, it’s not going to affect traffic volume,” explained Vermont-based Smart Mobility President Norm Marshall. “Even though a real person would have to wait behind a bottleneck’d section of I-94, in the model you just ‘squeeze through’ anyway. By not treating road segments as interdependent, it’s not really modeling for urban freeway congestion at all.” 

According to Marshall, the static approach amounts to a fatal flaw for predicting real-world networks. Instead, expanding or reducing capacity at any given point might make a big difference or have a negligible effect: everything depends on its larger context. 

Marshall and his co-author, Lucy Gibson, argue that the MnDOT study seems designed to ignore the region’s persistent bottlenecks, limiting the “study area” to a stretch of freeway from Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis to Rice Street in St. Paul. As any Twin Cities driver already knows, the actual highway choke points are on either side: around the 35W and downtown on-ramps in Minneapolis (especially the constrained Lowry Hill tunnel) and near I-35E in St.t Paul. 

“The Lowry Tunnel is a perfect example of how their modeling method is gonna fail,” agreed Gibson, an engineer at Toole Design Group. “There’s going to be a limited amount of traffic coming out of the tunnel towards this part of the study area, and that’s not going to grow. [The traffic increase] can’t really get through, even though their model shows that it can.”

The study’s lack of choke points makes the resulting analysis much less useful. The static assignment means that recurring stop-and-go jams because of the existing bottlenecks won’t shape the results for the stretch of highway in between. Instead, the engineers in the Our Streets report suggest that a dynamic model that looks at the system as a whole could better analyze the relationships between the constituent parts.

“The dynamic model treats every segment as part of the network,” Marshall added. “It says, if there is traffic stopped in front of you, then you can’t go until that traffic clears. Or, if that traffic’s going at 10 miles an hour, you’re going to be going 10 miles an hour slowly into that segment. It actually models congestion the way it really happens.”

According to agency spokesperson Ricardo Lopez, MnDOT will use a dynamic model for its “Draft I Tier EIS” analysis later in 2026. By that point, however, the options for change will be limited to a smaller pool. Designs like the “at-grade boulevard” or other freeway-reduction strategies will likely have been eliminated because of their poor initial congestion scores. 

Creating traffic demand

Another key dynamic often ignored by traffic analysis is something called “induced demand.” By now it’s a well-recognized trend that freeway expansions can create as much new traffic as they mitigate with extra travel capacity. This happens even with the current form of I-94, where the free-flowing highway “creates” by attracting trips that would otherwise take place elsewhere, or not at all. 

Take the freeway’s effect on Lexington Parkway, the main arterial near my house. According to Marshall and Gibson, one counterintuitive outcome is that expanding the freeway might make local traffic worse. The easiest way to see why is to type an address into Google Maps and look at suggested routes – say going three miles to visit my my favorite local chocolate shop. There are countless examples where the mapping software routes you onto the freeway to save a minute or two, even if city streets might be a geographically shorter route. This is exactly how people behave in the real world, often going well out of their way to use freeways.

This principle operates across all times-of-day and for thousands of people within the freeway’s catchment. As Marshall says, “no trip begins or ends on a highway.” This is why freeway expansion can “induce” highway trips, focusing even more vehicular congestion along arterial routes by interchanges, streets like Lexington, Snelling, Dale, and Cretin in St. Paul, or 26th and Cedar Avenues in Minneapolis.

The growing chorus of American highway planning critics reminds me of how different street design manuals emerged about 15 years ago. (See also the history of the National Association of City Transportation Officials.) In this case, more planners and engineers are calling into question standard 20th century practices of transportation engineering, forcing planners to look at more international and innovative approaches to urban design. 

One prominent voice, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado named Wes Marshall (no relation to Norm), just released a book that debunks many long-standing highway engineering assumptions. For Wes Marshall, the limited capabilities of static traffic modeling are part and parcel of a whole list of antiquated professional practices for transportation planners. 

“These models — and the conventional traffic engineering protocols that we’ve created surrounding how we use these models — make it very hard not to focus on widenings,” he told me. “On one hand, the models unrealistically overestimate how much delay we will have on a highway if we don’t do anything. On the other, they also unrealistically overestimate the benefit we will see in terms of reduced congestion.”

Before his academic role at the University of Colorado, Marshall worked in the field for years, including on the famous “Big Dig” project in Boston. That effort famously buried the “central artery” freeway through downtown, after a wildly over-budget process that set records in U.S. infrastructure. These days, similarly ambitious urban freeway widening projects are increasingly scrutinized by advocates and communities impacted by urban freeways, and projects like the I-5 expansion in Portland have stalled while other widening projects in cities like Austin or Houston go ahead. 

Wes Marshall says this is all part of a system that actively promotes expansion and driving with little consideration of alternatives or consequences.

“Boston, for instance, has worse traffic today than before the Big Dig,” he said. “Would it be worse had they never done the Big Dig? Probably, but the models were still wrong on both ends. So from my perspective, we are usually asking the wrong questions when we use these models regardless of whether they are static or dynamic.”

When asked to comment on the differing modeling capabilities, MnDOT’s Lopez told me: “MnDOT is following established requirements and guidelines related to the traffic modeling. [We are] confident we are using the best practices in our evaluation of alternatives.”

Is I-94 model flawed?

The crux of the matter is the potential for change. A lot depends on whether or not, if the highway were reduced in size, traffic would dissipate into the networked grid of streets that would make travel more disbursed, efficient and predictable. That’s something that the current model seemingly cannot answer, but there’s a big difference between knowing you don’t know something and being unaware of one’s ignorance.

Last week, local journalist John Edwards, who publishes Wedge Live out of South Minneapolis, leaked part of a draft results analysis of the Rethinking I-94 project. The analysis shows how “mobility in people for motorized vehicles” fares under the 16 potential changes to the freeway. According to the rankings, the reduced and boulevard options fare poorly. Freeway reductions score yellow (“concerns”) and red (“does not meet need”) for the crucial driver mobility category.

That news comes as no surprise to members of the consultant team, who argue that the model itself is the problem. Because it fundamentally misunderstands traffic dynamics, it operates like a one-way ratchet, always predicting the need for more highway capacity.

“Well, it’s the way we’ve always done it,” said Norm Marshall. “[Engineers] get good fees for doing it this way, and it always justifies the [expansion] project.”

So what would really happen to all the traffic on I-94? 

The truth seems to be that the agency hasn’t yet studied the possibilities, and the existing model, static and disconnected, cannot tell us. Instead, we can only make educated guesses by looking at other examples of changes to freeways from around the world. If you do so, it turns out that the answer is much more dynamic than we might think. It’s quite possible that reducing freeway can decrease some impacts of congestion.

“My rule of thumb in a downsizing is that the new facility will carry maybe half of the traffic, [but] it depends on how you design it,” explained Norm Marshall. “A quarter of the traffic will be diverted to roughly parallel facilities, and a quarter of the traffic, we’ve seen this all around the country, appears to disappear. That’s just because people decide, ‘If I can’t go there at 60 miles an hour, I’ll go somewhere else.’” 

This is why, when people ask me “where would the traffic go,” I often demur. It’s simply hard to say. We don’t know how to precisely guess what might happen. 

But if history is any guide, freeway reductions usually work out, leading to real improvements for urban neighborhoods. On top of that, the COVID pandemic upended long-standing assumptions about driving patterns, proving that our society and its travel demands are more flexible than anyone thought. 

If the Rethinking I-94 effort were to live up to its name, it would be nice to figure out what might happen if we changed the freeway for the better. The jury is still out on the next step of the planning process, but I hope that changes that truly “rethink” the status quo will remain on the table.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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“Today, a high-rise like 740 River Drive in a neighborhood like Highland Park would draw such indignation from area residents that a developer would have to be delusional to even propose it,” wrote local historian and bicyclist, Wolfie Browender, when happening across the building on one of his epic investigative journeys. It’s certainly true about the odd, 63-year-old apartment tower that still stands along the river bluff in St. Paul’s Highland neighborhood. 

I served on the city’s Planning Commission during the debate over reusing the “Ford Site,” the 130-acre former truck factory along Ford Parkway and the Mississippi River in southwest St. Paul. At the time, people routinely came into our meetings to testify about how tall buildings cause mental illness, and other overblown claims. The debate escalated into a heated argument between factions, replete with yard signs, over whether this pocket of the city should have the kinds of very moderate density you might find, not in Europe or Asia, but in places like Calgary or Northeast Minneapolis. 

Height was one of the key sticking points: How tall could the new buildings rise in what is now “Highland Bridge”? During this entire discussion, I kept glancing at the maps and couldn’t help but notice that there was a 23-story apartment tower just a block away across the street. If that building was fine — and it seemed to be — then what was the big deal about a seven-story apartment building farther from the river? It goes to show how unique the 740 River Drive project turned out to be.

The history of the 740 building

If it seems from another era, that’s because it is. The building was a blip in early post-war modernism, before the city’s era of stricter zoning controls kicked in. It marks a time when the mid-century modernist movement still harbored urban ambitions for places like St. Paul. According to one newspaper account, the people examining the building compared it to the United Nations headquarters building. (Though I don’t really see the likeness, there’s surely no greater hallmark of modernist utopianism than that!) 

According to Kraus-Anderson archivist Matt Goff, at the time of its construction it was the tallest residential structure between Chicago and the West Coast. The building, completed in 1960, has a reinforced concrete frame with a curtain wall, and contains 164 apartments ranging from studios to four-bedrooms. At 23-stories and 208-feet, it is by far the tallest building along the Mississippi “river gorge” between the two cities, at least until you get to downtown Minneapolis. 

“It is an early example of a residential high rise on that scale,” Goff said. “The regulations weren’t in place that would soon come along and prevent similar examples that close to the river.”

The building also contained an outdoor swimming pool, a first floor “porch cochere auto approach,” a rooftop “party room and sun deck,” and a 105-stall underground parking garage. There were 59 more surface parking spots, incidentally a number that would be below minimum parking standards that emerged later in the 20th century. Adjusted for inflation, the project cost about $57 million. 

One account of the 1960 groundbreaking described a red carpet leading into the woods along the river bluff, where the wife of general contractor Lloyd Engelsma smashed a champagne bottle over a huge bulldozer. The developers had a special double-spaded shovel made for the occasion, with the words Minneapolis and Saint Paul inscribed on each blade.

One interesting wrinkle is the name: The building was called 740 River Drive even though there’s no such street called “River Drive.” For some reason, the developers and marketing team did not think that Highland Parkway or River Road sounded elegant enough, and came up with a splashier alternative. The result is another in the long line of confounding St. Paul naming conventions, seemingly designed to befuddle outsiders. In this case, it invokes a street that does not even exist.

The 1950s housing shortage 

In the 1950s, then as now, the region was gripped by a shortage of housing, though the dynamics of the solution were different. Massive federal support for suburban development meant that the majority of investment and growth was happening outside the core cities, making 740 River Drive into a notable exception. 

For example, Lloyd Engelsma, one of the developers, was a head of Kraus-Anderson construction, and he’d spent much of his time building lucrative new shopping malls like Sun Ray on the city’s East Side. The residential tower was a rarity for the time. Even in the relatively suburban Highland neighborhood, the building illustrated that there could have been more than one path forward for the residential future of the Twin Cities.

By the later 1960s, neighbor pushback against taller residential buildings fused with urban tensions around change, and St. Paul became stricter with its zoning code. And in the late 20th century, specific regulations were put in place to limit height along the Mississippi River. For example, when local developer Paster Enterprises proposed a four-story 93-unit apartment building across the street on Highland Parkway in 2022, it exceeded the “Critical Area Zoning” along the Mississippi by a few feet. The limits seem ironic given that it would be dwarfed by 740 River Drive next door, and the development seems to be on hold for the time being.

Geographically speaking, 740 River Drive marks a notable place within view of the Ford Bridge and its important dam. When the dam was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it triggered a political saga that re-incited the rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Neither city could agree about who should get the hydroelectric power, and as a result the dam sat unused for years. (The University of Minnesota even got in on the action, demanding a stake in the “free” government energy.) It took some conniving on the behalf of the St. Paul political class, poaching an economic development specialist from neighboring Minneapolis, and then luring Henry Ford himself with the promise of the “natural” amenities of a quiet part of St. Paul next to a rushing river gorge. 

As such, the area always served as a sign of competing Twin Cities ambitions. Perhaps that’s why one Pioneer Press columnist wrote that when Minneapolis Mayor Kenneth Peterson did not show up, it was because “maybe he was mad that all this money was being spent in St. Paul.” I imagine that 740 River Drive was perceived as part of St. Paul’s triumph, a residential exclamation mark on top of the then-thriving Ford factory, perhaps the city’s largest industrial success of all time.

At any rate, nothing like 740 River Drive was ever built again in St. Paul, and it was something like a “unicorn” product of unique circumstances.

“The developer, Bill Fine was an interesting character, the [kind of] splashy go-for-broke real estate developer we don’t see enough of anymore,” Kraus-Anderson archivist Matt Goff said.

It’s certainly true that no building in this part of the city will ever block its unparalleled views. Nothing this tall could ever get built there again, a fact that would seem to guarantee that 740 River Drive will remain a coveted address in perpetuity.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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Frustrating as it may be, road construction is a fact of life and a sign of progress. Infrastructure gets old and needs to be replaced, and cities that can afford it devote resources into improving their streets and sidewalks. It’s not hard to find cities with threadbare budgets whose streets slowly degrade into oblivion. By contrast, Minneapolis can invest in its future. 

One of the more frustrating lines of argument, though, is when frustrations over construction boil over into condemning any kind of change. It’s a talk radio staple to blame bike lanes or crosswalks for high taxes or congestion, increasingly so these days, both locally and across the continent. One local example, Adam Platt’s recent column “The Road Diet,” tried hard to paint street reconstruction as part of something akin to a “war on cars” in Minneapolis. 

Instead, these plans are a smart investment in the city’s future, providing streets that better reflect its assets and strengths. Rather than chasing the phantom of suburban traffic flows and free parking, Minneapolis’ economic future depends on walkable streets and quality public space. Though the construction process can be frustrating, the city’s reconstruction projects over the past summer bring us much closer to that vibrant urban future, and better in line with the 21st century economy.

Take the county-led Hennepin and First Avenue project in Northeast Minneapolis. When these streets were last reconstructed in the mid-20th century, the city’s economic landscape looked a lot different than it does today. The entire downtown waterfront was still industrial, and both the North Loop and the Mill District were massive rail yards surrounded by surface parking and nearly-abandoned old buildings. Northeast Minneapolis was practically synonymous with industry and warehouses, and both Hennepin and First Avenues were designed as wide, concrete, one-way roads with plenty of porkchop islands to expedite trucking. 

Today, there’s almost no trace of that economy. I remember one night years ago, staring in the open windows of Superior Plating, a 90-year-old factory that applied chrome exteriors to metal. It was a huge, dirty facility on the corner of First Avenue and University that seemed from out of another world. By the time it closed in 2011, it had only 12 employees left. Today there’s a pair of tall apartment towers on the site with 278 apartments, a salon, a gym and a restaurant. Now the only trace of the old economy is the fact that both Hennepin and First Avenues have long remained wide, industrial-scale roads with marginal sidewalks.

The county’s plans for redesigning and calming these one-way streets are common sense and good for both the local economy and the thousands of residents in the shiny apartment towers. Removing “channelized” turn lanes and adding bump outs will make the area safer and more walkable, boosting local businesses in the area and improve quality of life for the thousands of new residents. The future of Northeast and Central will look a lot different from their industrial past. 

Hennepin Avenue South is a similar story, though with a different historical trajectory and a city-led planning process. (Unlike other parts of Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis “owns” this section of the roadway.)  I wrote about this street reconstruction years ago, calling it “a deluxe version of a four-to-three conversion that will slow speeds and reduce crashes.” The new deign will be far safer for drivers, while dramatically improving the feel of the street for anyone on foot.

The jury is still out on whether the controversial Public Works “compromise” around part-time bus lanes will work. My gut tells me that, without aggressive enforcement, the lack of full-time bus lanes will turn into a “worst of both worlds” scenario, making the situation worse for both business access and transit.

Elsewhere in the city, the county-led reconstruction of Northeast Lowry Avenue, like Hennepin Avenue, represents a straightforward change making the street dramatically safer for people walking or driving. Lowry has long been a prime example of engineering malpractice, as four-lane undivided street cross-sections are the most dangerous ways to design urban roads. Because they multiply the number of conflict points, the streets cause daily havoc for people in and out of motor vehicles and jump off the city’s maps of crash data. 

The new design will literally save lives and prevent countless crashes over its design life. Most businesses along Lowry will benefit from the calmer traffic and improved public realm, and with better business access provided by drivers turning left along the street. By far the biggest improvements will be on the sidewalks themselves, which will improve dramatically with bump outs and boulevard amenities. If anything, people should be worried about the rise in property values that comes with a more humane public realm.  

But as they say, your mileage may vary. Changes to the built environment create winners and losers, and businesses like gas stations, car washes, or drive-thru restaurants that profit from volume, curb cut access and turnover will probably be worse off with the new designs. Instead, the new streets will cultivate walkability and connection, making Minneapolis most important public spaces connections between communities instead of dangerous barriers. That’s a good trade-off for the majority of businesses and residents in Northeast Minneapolis. 

Having to drive a bit more slowly through the densest and most valuable parts of a city is no great cross to bear, and the economic tradeoffs are quite beneficial. Doing an errand the other morning, I got stuck behind a school bus along with a half dozen other drivers. The yellow bus was idling in the street with its red lights flashing, stopping traffic for what seemed like an eternity. I started to get frustrated.

But then I took a breath; that’s life driving a car in a city. We long ago made the collective calculation that faster convenience for drivers is not worth the risk to kids, and err on the side of caution around vulnerable people. The same logic applies to any of these major Minneapolis reconstructions. These have been the city’s most dangerous streets for generations, causing incalculable mayhem. The business case for road diets is solid, but this isn’t really a business question, it’s a moral one. Safer streets save lives.

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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The measure of a city isn’t found in its skyline, but in its local businesses. As any tourist knows, great cities burst with unique establishments that reward window shopping, and any place that lacks this fine-grained economic life is fundamentally boring. Without small businesses, there’s no there there. 

That’s why it was bittersweet to learn that the Metro Independent Business Alliance (MIBA), the Twin Cities largest voice for small businesses, had quietly shut down. The organization had its “final celebration” event last month and is calling it quits.

“COVID really disrupted our independent members’ businesses; it forced them to focus on their own survival,” explained Julie Novak, a long-time board member and organization treasurer. “One part of a member organization is networking and getting together, and when you’re a small business and trying to decide, do I pay rent or insurance or pay my employees or my membership as a business organization… well, it’s a pretty easy business decision.” 

That explanation rings true for former MIBA members like Susan Zumberge, who owns Subtext Books, a long-time downtown St. Paul bookstore. She has a long list of challenges that have faced her bottom line in the last few years. 

“We have been members since Subtext opened in 2012, because I believe small business needs some sort of organized voice,” said Zumberge. “But we are a dwindling breed, and it is easy to understand for several reasons.” 

Membership-based business organizations like chambers of commerce are having a bad time of it lately, as COVID applied fiscal pressure in unexpected ways. On top of that, the strength of local organizations has long been in-person community building. 

The pandemic put a stop to most of that, by placing businesses in fiscally stressful situations. It put a bind on groups like MIBA and other local institutions, and the result has been hard, no matter their specific angle.

At the same time, the basic argument for “buying local” hasn’t changed. The more that customers shop at locally-owned retailers, the more their dollars circulate in the local economy. Unlike national chains, independent businesses employ regional actors like accountants, attorneys, wholesalers and advertisers. Shopping locally keeps the Twin Cities’ economy stronger, and this is not to mention the social benefits of independent retail.

“When you go online and have [goods] delivered, I don’t know who you’re supporting… a big conglomerate I guess,” said Novak, who works as a commercial lender at St. Paul’s BankCherokee. “If you’re being thoughtful, I can rattle off the places that I personally go to day after day: the local pharmacy, the grocery store, the local bank, the local liquor store, the art supply store, the record store… all those places are here in our community.”

For example, Amazon currently has at least half the U.S. book market, and far more of the growing e-book sector. In other sectors, online retail has grown tremendously since the pandemic shifted our collective habits. 

Twenty years ago, it was different. Back then, the movement for small business and to “buy local” seemed to grow out of the book trade. In St. Paul, the owner of a (long-gone) beloved bookstore, the Hungry Mind, had been at the forefront of  organizing a broader movement. The Metro IBA grew out of that era when Barnes & Noble was the big villain – how quaint! – and the argument to “buy local” aimed to emphasize the importance of small businesses to communities.

“Stepping back, many of the problems in our economy now can be traced back to the decline of small businesses and rise of rampant corporate consolidation,” explained Lauren Gellatly, who works on the Independent Business Team for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), a nonprofit think tank. “The consolidation we’re seeing now compared to half a century ago is just astronomical.”

As Gellatly explains it, not all is lost. Bookstores are still the center of the small- business movement and are quietly growing in number again, despite Amazon’s dominance of the market. That’s a pleasant surprise given the dynamics around retail in general, where online shopping triggered waves of consolidation. Nationally, anyway, the small-business movement remains active.

“We can’t shop our way to a better economy,” Gellatly said. “The three pillars for the IBAs that are thriving today are, first, that core public awareness of the benefit to supporting independent local businesses. That hasn’t changed. But also [IBAs have to] create innovative business support programs in order to get the buy-in that they need to keep going. And the third piece of it is the advocacy piece…”

When it comes to advocacy, the ILSR would ideally like to see federal regulators break Amazon into smaller component parts, as they did with AT&T back in the early 1980s. Because Amazon doesn’t disintegrate its web commerce, online services, and other businesses, Gellatly argues that it’s impossible to regulate Amazon in its current conglomerated form.

Maybe things have fundamentally changed. Perhaps the arts of browsing, small talk and window shopping are dwindling away in the era of smart phones and ear buds, when literally half the country is a dues-paying member of Amazon Prime. At the same time, there’s a countervailing tendency to being online. Many people crave in-person experience, especially in certain sectors of the retail economy like the bookstores, hardware, restaurants and pharmacies that have remained resilient despite years of chain competition.

In downtown St. Paul, Subtext books is hanging on at Wabasha and 5th, even though downtown St. Paul has been particularly hard-hit by post-pandemic changes. Susan Zumberge’s biggest problems these days are making sure her parking spots turn over, and keeping access to the building open in the sometimes-unreliable skyway system. 

“For us in particular as a downtown retail store, access in terms of parking spaces has been eroded,” said Zumberge. “[Plus] the rise of online sales, where our need for instant gratification is met: I think most folks who shop this way have no realization how their decision robs our communities of the vibrancy of small businesses. As booksellers we are perhaps the first type of business to have some resurgence, because we were the first to be targeted by Amazon.”

Meanwhile, the hundreds of small businesses dotting Twin Cities streets are carrying on, despite the turbulent economic times. Don’t take them for granted, because you never really know if the corner restaurant or neighborhood hardware store will be there tomorrow. The larger social movement around “buying local” might look different than it did the past, but the brick-and-mortar economy remains a key part of city life.

“Without them, our economy, our cities, our neighborhoods are just gonna suffer,” said MIBA’s Julie Novak, talking about our local establishments. “We need to continue to support local business, it’s just that, unfortunately, there’s one less voice out there shouting that message. But it’s been a great run.”

Bill Lindeke

Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.

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