Haha! Fck their offices! Wfh ftw!
This is only a problem because of people WFH with their nasty cat blankets 😠
The headline is terrible, though not surprising coming from Star Tribune. How about “Downtown Minneapolis about to get lots more affordable housing” or something that doesn’t bemoan capital taking a haircut?
It probably won’t be affordable housing due to code, but the crux of the issue is that walkability is horrible, basically a checkerboard of one-ways for cars. Block E used to be an entertainment spot like 20 years ago but now all the fun spots aren’t in downtown, people go to the warehouse district, north loop, lyndale and lake because those are established.
Not much reason to do anything in downtown anymore and anyone opening a restaurant or whatever knows that, so it’s just a boring spot
IMO the problem of entertainment, food, and whatnot would fix itself. If a bunch more people move into downtown, things will get built pretty quickly. People don’t like being bored. Car culture is a little harder to fix, but Minneapolis is generally pretty good about handling that sort of thing. That’s assuming Frey doesn’t starting vetoing things though.
Last time I was in Minneapolis we just walked around in the Skyway stuff on the second floor all over downtown. Didn’t even need to be outside in the frigid cold. So walkability seemed fine.
Cry me a river, I’ll keep being happy working from home.
Based
In before someone explains how it’s impossible to turn commercial buildings into housing and me wishing for more housing is nice and selfish.
It’s not impossible, but it is definitely too expensive for a capitalist economy to do. Never mind that it would create work for thousands of people in each city while simultaneously creating affordable housing for everyone. We all must serve the economy, unless it’s too expensive. Then the proles can just deal with the consequences
At the end, the new owners who bought what was the sushi restaurant don’t seem to have any plan for the building. They just said that they wanted to be in the area, but didn’t give anything concrete that they planned to do with it. So it just could remain empty for years.
