In this architectural rendering, the intersection appears flat, although there actually is a slope upwards on the right hand (Franklin Avenue) side. The traffic volume looks more like 1914 than 2014. In the 1870s this was the northern boundary of Lake Blaisdell, 20 acres in size, 40′ deep in places. (What are those birds preparing to do, I wonder.)

Most of the objections to this proposal would be addressed if the project were redesigned to conform to the parcel’s current C1-C2 zoning. My friend Mike, whose father represented Minneapolis’s Third Ward in the 1950s, told me that when he read through his dad’s papers, he was struck by how many of the correspondences concerned zoning–scores of applicants thinking that their businesses should be made exceptions to the law. If the City is going to give special dispensation to Gerberding’s proposal, it had better lay out documented proof that the spot zoning will not have negative consequences for residents and City taxpayers. If the City decides to gloss over problems and approve the variances, it should provide just compensation for property owners on Aldrich and Franklin Avenues, who will be very negatively impacted by the development.

Vague assurances that the proposal fits the City’s plan for increased density at transit hubs are not good enough. The claim that the size/height of the building (75′ high) and number of rental units (85) can be justified because the City endorses public transportation is disingenuous. Traffic snarls and severely limited parking are already acute problems at this intersection and in the surrounding neighborhoods.  This intersection used to be the northern end of Lake Blaisdell– which is why it floods every time it rains hard, and why they can’t put in underground parking on the site.

Lyndale Avenue side, showing the parking entrance which would sit exactly opposite the Wedge Co-op’s parking lot.  The Co-op has to hire cops to manage the traffic melee that ensues at peak shopping times.  In this view, there’s one small bus, some cars, and, amazingly, no bicyclists or traffic cops. But the mysterious flock of birds is hovering over Franklin.

Minneapolis currently is the nation’s most bike-friendly city, but this has had no discernible impact in relieving congestion at this crossroads of two major traffic arteries at an Interstate on/off-ramp. The complex with its 212 for-pay “district parking” spaces would make the intersection a bigger bottleneck for years to come. It astounds me how city officials and supporters of this proposal so easily dismiss the traffic congestion in the area: In the near future, everyone will be riding bicycles and buses. Just put some bike lockers for tenants in the apartment complex and voila! problem solved. Yeah, right.

Why does the City have a zoning code, if it is to be selectively applied according to developers’ “needs”? Approving spot zoning opens up the City to demands from other property owners for equal treatment.  Cynics wonder if allowing selective zoning for this project might be a sneaky way for the City to open up other “transit hubs” in the area to higher density redevelopment. If that’s so, it’s a dangerous game they’re playing.  Developers aren’t the only ones who can sue the City.

Rooftop restaurant on the proposed project.  Does the City so easily forget the recent war between local residents and owners of rooftop bar-restaurants in Uptown?  Do they expect bar patrons here to be less rowdy, quietly whiling away the evening eating and drinking until closing time?

To avoid community rancor and potential lawsuits, the City must do an objective harm/benefit analysis of the impact of the zoning variances on surrounding properties. This process must be transparent, with claims by City officials of neighborhood support backed up with specifics.  The developer and his backers keep claiming that the project has significant community support. Council Member Lisa Bender said that some want the proposed building to be taller. (Quoted in CityPages blog ) Someone thinks this building should be seven or more stories high? Really? Who–and why? Let’s see the proof: an accounting of communications pro and con to the mayor and council members about this proposal. So far, local residents have gotten mostly opaqueness, not transparency, from City Hall. City officials, put your cards on the table, and let’s see what hand we’re being dealt.

The northwest corner of Lyndale-Franklin, c. 1920. Streetcar tracks run on Lyndale, sidewalks have grassy boulevards with trees, and a gas pump sits on the Lyndale side of the building. No birds. Today, trees and grass are gone, vehicles fill the streets, and the building’s facade has been bricked up. It’s one of the city’s busiest crossroads. If you want gas, you can go to the cramped SA station at 2200 Lyndale.

Gerberding began his Wedge presentation by telling us that he designed this project for the benefit of the neighborhood. Don’t do us any favors. If he finds it impossible to come up with an “economically feasible” development that conforms to the property’s zoning, let another more imaginative and resourceful developer take a crack at it.

Too drunk to remember name of the babe you slept with? No one cares here.

Hey, sluts, whoop it up for a year at the City’s new bro-plexes.

Rush hour traffic by GerbilCage Lofts

–Trilby Busch
  Ceridwen Christensen
. . .with thanks to Sinclair Lewis and Stephen Colbert

Note: The article below appears in the April 2013 edition of The Wedge, neighborhood newspaper of Lowry Hill East. I wrote it as a report. After the article I’ve added some editorial comments.

The west side of the 2800 block of Colfax Ave. S in the Greenway: a 1970’s 2-1/2-story walkup, three modest-sized houses, and two apartment buildings under construction.

            Those are the demographics of the Wedge as a whole as of 2010. While we don’t know demographical differences in the three Wedge sections, we can look at what distinguishes them physically. The southernmost section is currently undergoing significant changes. Formerly an industrial corridor along railroad tracks, the area south of 28^th Street is being transformed into a high-density residential area of apartments, condos, and townhouses.  The total number of new units under construction (839) and already built (1,061) south of 28^th Street is 1,890. Assuming that each unit will house 1.5 residents (the current Wedge average), these nearly 2,800 new residents will swell the current population of the Wedge by 47%, and constitute about one third of the total population.

The west side of the 2600 block of Colfax Avenue S: two large 1960’s apartment buildings and turn-of-the-century houses

The northernmost section, the apex north of 24^th Street, is the smallest.  In the first half of the 20^th century, large houses, a school, and a church occupied this area.  Some of the houses were used as student housing for this school and for the Dunwoody Institute. After the middle section was downzoned, high-density zoning remained in place for the Wedge apex. This writer’s count of the structures located in the area between 24th and Franklin revealed the following distribution: 5 pre-WWII apartment buildings; 19 post-WWII apartment buildings; 14 houses with 4 or more residential units; 60 houses with 3 or fewer units.  Today a half-dozen single-family homes north of 24^th Street are in R2B zoning, but the remainder is zoned for commercial or high density residential.

The west side of the 2300 block of Colfax Avenue S: the back of the funeral home parking lot and four 1890’s houses, three of them built by T.P.Healy, all currently rooming houses.

Because of this high-density zoning, the apex is slated to be the next area facing big changes. Mayor Rybak and the City Planning Department have targeted the Wedge, Whittier, and other neighborhoods to the east for more high-density residential development.  When the available space along Greenway is filled, developers’ attention will turn to the Wedge apex. A hint of what’s to come is the current proposal by the Lander Group to demolish the houses at 2316 and 2320 Colfax and replace them with a four-story apartment building. It’s only a matter of time that other redevelopment proposals will be offered to replace houses in the R6 part of the apex.  If a proposed building conforms to R6 zoning, which allows for buildings as high as five stories, it can go in without neighborhood approval.

Doomed by redevelopment? The Edward Orth House, 2320 Colfax, one of two houses developer Michael Lander intends to demolish for a four-story apartment building.

 

A wedding portrait of Edward and Catherine Orth, 1877

 

The Wedge (when it wasn’t the Wedge) under development as a streetcar suburb in the 1890s, as seen from Lyndale Avenue.

Preservation is an international issue. Desregarding public outrage, in 2007 the City of Panama wrecked dozens of exquisite old houses like this one, the Castillo El Millon, in a frenzy of high-density redevelopment.

Despite losses and setbacks, Panamanian preservationists repeatedly took to the streets to protest demolitions for redevelopment.

The “emergency” demolition of the historic Fjelde House on Christmas Eve, 2009, is one example of the City’s stealth attacks on sites it wants to redevelop.

Another example is the middle-of-the-night demolition in 1975 of Calhoun Elementary School (built 1887) on what was to become the parking ramp for Calhoun Square.                                 –T.B.

SPACE:  There’s no place for monstrosities such as the house at right in the dense, competitive city. Down they go for clean, lean highrises like the one at left.

THEORY:  With our planning and vision, this is what the new Gopher City will look like in ten years.

SPACE:  This is an example of a real, competitive global city, Hong Kong.  What an inspiration!

     On December 17th, an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Minneapolis Sees High Density Future,” proclaimed in its opening sentence, “Minneapolis, the city of the single-family home on a tree-lined boulevard, sees its future in the apartment towers rising 20 stories above busy downtown streets.”  The article quotes the city’s director of community planning and economic development, Jeremy Hanson Willis: “If we’re going to compete in the 21st century as a competitive global city, we have to attract people who want to live in cities. And cities are dense, urban environments.” (Has Willis ever seen a city with a rural environment? I hope not.)

High-density housing: great places to live?

      Much of the article is devoted to developers’ comments about zoning.  The gist is that they don’t like being hindered by having to get variances to build lucrative (for them) so-called “multifamily apartment complexes.”  The message is that the City and developers can’t wait to nearly double Minneapolis’s population by cramming citizens into high-rise housing in the neighborhoods north of Lake Street.  Higher density benefits City government by bringing in more tax revenue, while the developers will be raking in enormous profits.  Architects, construction companies and trade unions will benefit, too, from the frenzy of new buildings going up.
     Who won’t benefit? The residents of neighborhoods redeveloped into this high-density Utopia.  The planned Lander development at 2320 Colfax S. is a harbinger of the changes the City anticipates bringing to the Wedge, Whittier, and other Minneapolis neighborhoods.  If the City’s vision is realized, as in the bad old Urban Removal days of the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, hundreds of houses, duplexes, and smaller residential buildings will fall, replaced by 5- to 20-story apartment buildings.
     Contemporary urban planning theory justifies, indeed lauds this kind of redevelopment as necessary, to borrow a phrase, for the “competitive global city.”  The informative word here is of course “competitive.”  The focus is squarely on big business. Planners and city officials alike love to see the $$$ rolling in from these new projects, and eagerly anticipate the revenue generated from it in the future.

Nicollet-Lake in 2015?  Minneapolis, “competitive” city of the future, cow town no longer.

      The City and its planners have long touted the wonders of collaborative planning between neighborhoods and proposed developments.  This collaboration, however, is purely theoretical.  At the first hearing about the Lander proposal before LHENA’s Planning and Zoning Committee, a sizable majority of residents at the meeting spoke out against it.  The 2004 LHENA study calling for the downzoning of the Wedge north of 24th Street was cited as what the neighborhood envisioned for its own future.  But we all were wasting our breath.  The assumption by the City and the developer is that, thanks to R-6 zoning, the new four-story apartment complex is as good as built. So what if an historic house is wrecked and low-income tenants are displaced?  This is a necessary evil to achieve the new “competitive global city” of Minneapolis.
     The term “dark side of planning” was coined by Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg to describe this kind of disconnect between planning theory and practice. . In keeping their eyes on the starry skies of  economic development for the City, planners and officials turn away from looking at the malevolent consequences of redevelopment on the people who live in the affected areas. For this reason, Flyvbjerg contends that actual urban planning practices frequently violate accepted norms of efficiency, equity, democracy, and hence, of planning ethics.

Too bad we can’t lift our houses out of encroaching high density development, as did Carl Fredricksen in the film “Up” (made by Minneapolis native Pete Docter).

     One need only to look at the past disasters of City planning to see what can go wrong:  Cedar-Riverside, St. Anthony Main, Nicollet-Lake.  I have no confidence in the assertions of R.T. Ryberg and Jeremy Hanson Willis that they know better than Minneapolis citizens what kind of city we want to live in. They are speaking for moneyed interests, not for the ordinary people who live here.
     Last week I was talking to my Wedge neighbor Don, who, since buying it in 1972, has lovingly restored an 1890’s Queen Anne.  He remarked that when he saw the proposal to wreck 2320 Colfax and build an apartment building in its place, his heart sank.  For him, for me, and for the many other long-term Wedge residents who fought the development and zoning battles of forty years ago, this new thrust of City planning is like a nightmare come to life.  After decades of quiet, neighborhood residents are going to have to organize against high density development, or accept the consequences.  If you want to save the old houses of the Wedge, speak now or forever hold your peace–for once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Wow, am I glad that the developer took down that nasty old house made from Minnesota virgin timber so it can be replaced with a new, clean, “green” apartment building made of concrete, particle board, and sheet rock.

Next: An interview with visiting officials, city planners, and architects from Gopher City, MN (with a nod to Sinclair Lewis)      

–T.B.