Vote for Molly Coleman in St. Paul's Ward 4

I live two blocks from Ward 4, and consider myself, if not an honorary resident, at least someone with plenty of vested interest in the health of the neighborhood (i.e. what I’ve already called House Stark). After Council President Mitra Jalali stepped down earlier this year, there’s a special election for a new Council Member happening right now.

I’m endorsing Molly Coleman. If you live in Ward 4, please take the time to vote for her. 

I’ve met Molly many times, even before she announced her campaign. She’s smart, humble, experienced, wonky, and has good positions on some of the St. Paul’s thorniest issues like rent stabilization, housing, or economic development. She clearly loves St. Paul, and (for obvious family reasons) has deep knowledge of its neighborhoods and traditions. Most importantly, Molly Coleman seems like a good listener, a rarity in politicians these days. I’ve been impressed with her mix of curiosity and experience, and especially her desire to learn from others even as she brings a lot of St. Paul knowledge to the table. I think this election is an easy choice.

The other candidates: 

School Board member Chauntyll Allen is a nice person who’s been involved in local politics for years. I met her during an early discussion of the Rondo Land Bridge, and still remember a lot of what she said about that project. In this case, though, I don’t see her actively putting forward any reasons to vote for her in this situation.

I've never met her, but Carolyn Will is an communications person (and former SARPA president) running on a 'taxes are too high' / 'crime is out of control' message, making her the obvious conservative in the race. More importantly, she helped run the Save Our Street / Summit Avenue anti-safety campaign, which is both wrong about infrastructure and street design and actively wasting your tax dollars.

That's a terrible thing to be ring leading. For a year, I’d go out of my way to not bike on Summit Avenue, just because the signs infuriated me. The endless disinformation campaign is a bleak sign of the future, making it seem like any improvements to St. Paul's urban fabric are going to be slow and painful. There’s a toxic strain in St. Paul toward negativity, where anything “the city” is doing is inherently bad. Carolyn Will seems to personify this pessimistic defeatism.

Cole Hanson is a young organizer who is maddeningly inconsistent, and I cannot suggest supporting him either. For one thing, he is way too online, repeatedly getting into inane fights with people on social media. For another thing, he's both for and against policies that contradict each other; When it comes to rent stabilization or transportation policy, it seems like he’ll say anything. See for example: this weird video. (Sure, Snelling Avenue is dangerous — I've been saying so for 20 years — but random spitballing about something that’s not in the cards, and is out of the city’s control, is a waste of time at best. Why not talk about an issue that's actually in front of us?) 

Before launching his campaign for City Council, he'd apparently purloined the District Council mailing list where he'd been working. That's naive at best, and unethical at worst. 

The real sign of trouble with Cole Hanson is his parroting the disinformation around the Summit Avenue reconstruction project. The Summit Avenue reconstruction is a great litmus test for one’s susceptibility to bullshit, so that's a deal breaker. Without naming names, the City Council has already been a hot mess this year, rife with inexperience and lack of attention to detail. Cole Hanson would make that problem worse. In a time when St. Paul is in rather desperate straits, he seems like a random policy generator. 

We need positive visions and common sense, and only Molly Coleman passes the test. Her stance on the Summit Avenue process and other key dilemmas are great signs of how she’d make decisions at a time when we need thoughtful wisdom in City Hall. Please vote for her on or before August 12th!

[Molly with John Edwards on Wedge Live!]

There's No You're Not From Here this Month

I'm taking a month off for a summer vacation from "You're Not From Here, Are You? A Show for Transplants." We'll be back next month, September 3rd, with some great guests! 

Twin City Shop Windows #26

 

[Portland, OR.]

[Salt Lake City, UT.]

[Denver, CO.]

[Longfellow, Minneapolis.]

[Marshall Avenue, St. Paul.]

[Detroit, MI.]

[Appleton, WI.]

[Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis.]

Dedicated Bike Funding Remains Minuscule

[The $1M Jefferson Avenue bicycle boulevard as it passes an elementary school. You're welcome to complain about bike lanes if your complaint is that they are not good enough. The only trace of the bike boulevard is the tiny green sign next to the stoplight.]

For some reason, bicycles and bike lanes cause drivers to lose their minds. There are a lot of reasons for this, most having to do with what I call the "windshield perspective", the way in which many people are unable to view a city street from outside an isolating motor vehicle. There are way too many examples to list -- see the latest Evan Ramstad column -- but the recent, welcome Minnpost piece about a Star Tribune op-ed is an attempt at a corrective that, if anything, actually understates its case! 

Cities and counties rarely have meaningful capital funding specifically dedicated to for bicycle projects. As Keefer points out, the amount of money is small: around $2.5 million a year in Minneapolis, which laps all other Metro area cities in this regard. For capital costs, bicycle project funding is often pitted against other worthy causes like playgrounds, rec centers, fire stations, or bridges in disrepair. (Despite being the smallest costs, bike rarely do well in those scenarios.) 

[Transit funding, here dwarfed by highway funding, is far larger than bicycle infrastructure funding (as it should be). The 'MPO' dot here is the "regional solicitation" step I refer to.]

One of the few bike-specific funding steams that exist is part of the regional solicitation, unallocated Federal transportation dollars that are directed to MPOs. (See the Northeast Hennepin / 1st project I wrote about today at streets.mn for an example of this money at work. Even there, the bike lanes are part of larger pedestrian and transit improvements.) 

In the Twin Cities, our leaders decide to use some of that Federal money for bike-specific projects, while many other metro area do not. Most recently, there was $40 million for a two-year period divided amongst 11 projects in the seven-county metro, chosen out of 50 applications. (The list of winners appears below.) Meanwhile, other countries spend a billion dollars a year on bicycle infrastructure; most notably the Netherlands, where their national and local budgets include spending $1.2 billion over 7 years.  

[Here's the Federal/State bike-specific funding for the entire metro area for 2023-2024.]

A  detail at the end of the short piece illustrates this very well. Keefer writes:

Minneapolis has a robust bike infrastructure built out through city, state and federal initiatives. The city was one of four communities that received funding through the 2008 Federal Highway Administration’s Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program – a total amount of $25 million that was spent in the region over a 10-year period.  

I wrote my dissertation on this project. That amount of money, dedicated to bike infrastructure, was impossibly rare back when it arrived in 2005. That’s what made it so special and important; because the money was specifically for bicycle infrastructure (and nothing else) it allowed Minneapolis and a few other cities to begin bicycle planning and develop new treatments and designs. If the money had just been part of a larger transportation pot, as it almost always was before that point, bike infrastructure could have been watered down or folded into a highway or road expansion. 

[Here's what that $25M (over eight years) bought you in "Minneapolis Area" and four other cities.]

Bike infrastructure funding is a rounding error compared to even a minor highway project, let alone a major one. To offer an extreme example: at the most recent TAB meeting, someone mentioned that a proposed interchange at Highways 65 and 10 in Blaine will cost $250,000,000. That’s likely a low estimate; the cost could grow immensely. That fact that commentators, angry drivers, or columnists focus on bicycles as examples of wasteful spending is laughable.  

One further note:

Here is some data about the NTPP money from a post-mortem study that came out in 2014, showing where the money went. 

[The map of “Minneapolis” is particularly funny: it shows a large “bicycle boulevard” infrastructure project in St. Paul, for example, which was funded here along Jefferson Avenue, pictured at the top of this post. If you go there today, you’ll see almost no sign of the >$1 million bike infrastructure investment. In some places, you’ll see no sign of bike infrastructure at all!]

[Different cities spent the money in different ways.]

Twin City Doorways #73

 

[Edina.]

[Linden Hills, Minneapolis.]

[Downtown, Minneapolis.]

[Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis.]

[Grand Avenue, St. Paul.]

[South St. Anthony Park, St. Paul.]

[South St. Anthony Park, St. Paul.]

[Detroit, MI.]

[Detroit, MI.]

[Detroit, MI.]

[Detroit, MI.]

Some Platteville Limestone Examples from St. Paul

[A retaining wall at the Burbank-Livingstone-Griggs house on University Avenue.]

In my Minnpost column this week, I wrote about Platteville Limestone, the Twin Cities' earliest construction stone. The gist is that it's a great thing to spot as a clue to the age of the urban landscape, and I wanted to offer some examples for you from a recent wander I took around St. Paul's Ramsey Hill, Irvine Park, and West Side. 

Here you go! 

 [Close-up of the Burbank-Livingstone-Griggs house on University Avenue.]

[Foundation wall at the University Club on the top of Ramsey Hill.]

[Foundation in Irvine Park.]

[Foundation in Irvine Park.]

[Foundation in Irvine Park.]

[The Alexander Ramsey house.]

[Retaining wall outside Forepaugh's Restaurant.]

[Retaining wall in Irvine Park.]

[My friend Adam's house in the West End.]

PS. A map of St. Paul's bedrock (Blue is Platteville Limestone, Yellow is St. Peter Sandstone):

\

A wikipedia photo of limestone, shale, and sandstone bedrock near Minnehaha Falls:

Lead Pipe Crews are a Welcome Sight

[There are different funding sources for lead pipe removal; IIJA is one of them. This sign was from Frogtown earlier this summer.]

A bunch of “No Parking” signs showed up in my neighborhood yesterday, on the next block to the west. It turns out they were there to make space for the crew that’s been systematically working through Hamline-Midway and Frogtown to replace the ubiquitous lead pipes that have been lurking underneath people’s yards for decades. It’s impressive to see how quickly the crews remove and replace the pipes. They dig up the sidewalk and then use giant steel frames to excavate the pipe between the house and the street, before replacing the concrete sidewalk and moving on. The process takes about two weeks and they are good at it by now.

Lead is a big problem, and it’s everywhere. When we bought our house in 2019, one of the first things we did -- we were told to do by a friend -- is look up our address and check our house for lead pipes. Thankfully we were one of the few homes on our block NOT to have one.

[The St. Paul lead pipe map.] 

This is the “service pipe” that runs from the water main to the house, typically about 20’ that, for many many houses in St. Paul’s working-class neighborhoods, remains lead to this day. That’s a problem for everyone, but especially for any household with kids. I think about all the kids I know on our block — I can name nine — and wonder how many of them drink water traced with lead every day.

When I had former St. Paul City Council Member Chris Tolbert in my classroom this spring, asking him about his career at the City of St. Paul, he said he was proud of his work funding lead pipe replacement over the years. He and others fought to get funding for the city, from state and Federal  programs. Then the IIJA / Biden infrastructure bill came along and threw a lot more Federal money at the problem, as you can see from that sign. That the work is just happening now, under the diametrically opposed Trump cabal, is ironic. 

It’s wild that the United States has taken so long to clean up lead. (See also: Flint, MI.)  Given the clarity around what lead does to children, this is such a clear need. The last twenty years have presented many golden opportunities for the government to devote money to this kind of infrastructure investment, it’s damning that it’s only happening now.

Better late than never. The crew fixing the pipes in my neighborhood is a rare encouraging sight in Frogtown!

[A pile of lead pipes in Frogtown, recently removed from people's front yards and homes.]

Twin City Message Boards #22

 

[Pepin, WI.]

[Cambridge, MA.]

[West Bank, Minneapolis.]

[Appleton, WI.]

[

[Denver, CO.]

[New York, NY.]

[New York, NY.]

[Uptown, Minneapolis.]