If we get the streets right, good things will follow in downtown east. Much hand-wringing is occurring over whether or not there will be good development around the new Minnesota Vikings football stadium in downtown Minneapolis. When we look backwards 30 years at why development hasn’t happened since the current Metrodome stadium was built, we find three main reasons. One reason is some property that remained zoned industrial until very recently. A second obvious reason is five entire blocks of land owned by the Star Tribune blocks didn’t get developed in part because the newspaper was using them and didn’t want to…

With spring coming it’s time to install that on-street bike rack (bike corral) in front of my brewpub, the Northbound. I approached the ownership prior to their fall 2012 opening about whether they would like that, and I was informed that an application was in process. Thrilled, I volunteered on their behalf to follow-up with Minneapolis Public Works on this application. After all, once they opened, a LOT of people found their way to the Northbound by bike so the need was clearly there. And after all, Minneapolis is the number one biking city in America, right? All these months, dozens…

Do cities have a “failure of frontage?” I credit Dan Parolek of Opticos Design for coining the term. When I was researching a post on form-based codes in the Bay Area, Dan explained he believes cities everywhere have a failure of frontage, that we focus so much on other elements of urbanism that we overlook the basics. We worry about shape, height, bulk, ever-evil DENSITY, parking and traffic problems, but we fail to do the simple thing and make the building engaging to the pedestrian. We have a failure of frontage, and it’s not unique to Minneapolis. A recent post of mine at…