Lofty Ideals

We were a little disturbed by the explosion. All around the city, there was a sudden, violent eruption of elegant apartments, lofts, row-houses, and condominiums. And it wasn’t just along the Mississippi or in the Warehouse District. It was where a gas station had stood at Fiftieth Street in Linden Hills. It was where something unremarkable had failed at Lake and Bryant. It was in a liquor-store parking lot at Nicollet and Franklin. It was even cropping up on lackluster strips in first-ring suburbs like St. Louis Park and Richfield. What were the developers smoking? When was the population of the Twin Cities overrun by turtlenecked young executives with seven-figure checking accounts and an aversion to mowing the lawn?

They say the real-estate industry is recession-proof, but this felt like a powerful case of denial. The economy had soured, employment figures took a dive, higher interest rates thundered on the horizon, coffins trickled out of Iraq, and the country threatened to come apart along the red-blue seam. Meanwhile, Twin Cities contractors built ten thousand new “units.”

Sometimes our best impulses and our worst converge, and the result is happy. This colonization of the cool may seem wasteful and excessive and unneeded and vainglorious. It may even be morally suspicious; certainly this is not the low-income, affordable housing we’ve been promised for years now? But we should count our blessings and try not to be so disagreeable.

We find that the same sour people (in other words, we ourselves) who are complaining about “urban sprawl” and the loss of “green space” are the ones who feel uneasy about the urban building boom. But when we do our exercises to eliminate our affliction with jerky knees, we realize this is precisely what is needed. If we are serious about putting a lid on the tract mansions of Farmington, and about bringing beautiful people back to the city, then we will have to find some sugar to take with this medicine. These developments are creating what city planners call “density.” That is, more people living in a smaller amount of space. It is what distinguishes a city from a town or a village or a suburb. It is not necessarily a bad thing.

It is probably true that native Minnesotans are constitutionally turned off by population density. We are essentially a rural people—many of whom have freshly left the farm for the city (but not too much city, if you please). It could be that we are basically misanthropes who prefer to be alone. After all, some have interpreted Minnesota Nice as an icy-smiled predisposition to hate the stranger and the strange.

Still, let’s not forget that we do have a grand tradition of communitarian spirit. Officially, we care about each other, and we do our best to respond to neighbors in need, and there are times when personal gain does take a rear seat to civic pride—whether it’s light rail or the St. Paul Saints or a web-link to Canadian pharmacies.

In the last census, the Twin Cities ranked twenty-second among large American cities in population density. Minneapolis contains about seven thousand people per square mile. St. Paul, our narcoleptic capital city, has a bit more elbow room, with around five and a half thousand people per square mile. But with high-density housing “units” springing up like mushrooms all over the Twin Cities, we can be sure that there are more of us fitting into the same space. Perhaps we’ll learn how to get along more earnestly and take care of each other better—and the land given over to Farmington McMansions can be plowed into green meadows once again. Living among irritatingly rich, chic, lawnless people is a small price to pay for the greater good.