Minneapolis, MN
Vanessa Dayton wanted to build a house in the Bryn Mawr woods. Then the neighbors found out.
Dayton has stopped people to let them know when they’re trespassing, and most are polite, but Griswold Holmberg said one “kind of came after her with a chain saw.”
“She doesn’t yell, but she says, ‘You’re trespassing,’” Griswold Holmberg said.
Brooks said the “rubble-strewn vacant land” went unsold for a couple of years because it had no street access and no city utilities, so the owner would have to invest in bringing water and sewer service to the property.
It’s not unusual for a neighborhood to take ownership of vacant lots or parcels and make them their own, Brooks said.
“It’s pretty classic and sometimes comical, and in this case, it’s hard to understand why it’s contentious,” he said. “Bryn Mawr is a community that loves organic things and taking care of the land and environmental issues, and that’s her entire passion, so hard to understand why they haven’t embraced that.”
Dayton built something similar outside of Boulder, Colo.: She bought a 2-acre parcel, built an urban garden and opened it to locals.
Minneapolis, MN
Primary underway for special election of Minneapolis state Senate seat
Minneapolis voters are headed to the polls Tuesday to nominate a candidate for an upcoming state Senate special election.
The party nominees to arise from the Senate District 60 primary will face off in two weeks, on Jan. 28.
Gov. Tim Walz called the special election last month after former DFL Sen. Kari Dziedzic died of cancer.
Candidates scramble for open Minnesota legislative seats; uncertainty remains ahead of session
Eight DFL candidates and two Republican candidates will appear on the primary ballot, but a judge disqualified one Democrat, Mohamed Jama, from participating because of evidence that he voted outside Senate District 60 in November. Any votes cast for Jama will not be counted, per the judge’s order.
Polls are open until 8 p.m. A list of candidates and instructions for finding a polling place and checking voter registration are available on the Secretary of State’s website.
The district encompasses all of northeast and southeast Minneapolis and the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood on the opposite side of the Mississippi River. It’s considered a safe Democratic district and is expected to tip a tied 33-33 Senate to DFL control.
Minneapolis, MN
Judge dismisses environmental lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis over its 2040 Plan
A Hennepin County judge on Monday dismissed an environmental lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis, paving the way for the city to continue pursuing goals it laid out more than seven years ago for a long-term development plan.
While urbanists praised the 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which the city voted on in 2018, for focusing on denser and more affordable housing over traditional single-family zoning, others pushed for an environmental review of the plan, which they argued is likely to cause pollution and depletion of natural resources.
That latter position pushed Smart Growth Minneapolis, an environmental nonprofit, and several other groups to sue the city in 2018 over the 2040 plan.
That change in state law was cited by Judge Joseph R. Klein in his decision Monday to toss out the lawsuit.
“The legislation quite simply makes it impossible for Smart Growth to prevail,” he wrote.
The Star Tribune was unable to reach members of Smart Growth late Monday for comment. In describing the legal battle on its website, the organization said it had presented in court “an engineering analysis showing the harm that would be done by the plan… but the City did not even try to deny that the 2040 Plan would have adverse impacts on the environment or that it had neglected to identify those impacts.”
In an interview Monday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the decision allows the city to continue evolving.
Minneapolis, MN
'Longfellow Stalagmite' 17-foot-tall ice pillar on display in south Minneapolis
The bitter cold has a lot of us feeling down, but someone in south Minneapolis used that as motivation to give us all reason to look up.
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