Should Minneapolis be a 15-Minute City?

It is time for the City to stop making land use and transportation system changes that are harming businesses and focus on building a sociable city.

Since the COVID crisis hit and George Floyd was murdered, both downtown and neighborhood business districts have seen failing businesses, increased vacancies, and falling property values.  I’ve had the opportunity to advise several Minneapolis community business districts – specifically Dinkytown and Uptown. Both have lost businesses and suffer from empty storefronts, unsafe reputations, and poor tenant mixes. Overall, the City has lost over 15,000 jobs from 2019 to 2024. DEED  Not all businesses have closed their doors; some simply moved to suburban locations where rents were lower, parking was free, costs were lower, and customers felt safer. Others who remain struggle with the increased cost of doing business in Minneapolis. StarTribune

Any discussion of urban planning should begin with the quote from Jorge Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana

Any discussion of urban planning should also include the word hubris. “Hubris” means “excessive pride, self-confidence, or arrogance that can lead to failure or ruin.”

When we think of urban planning forgetting the past and having too much hubris, we need to look at one of the biggest and most expensive planning errors in this country’s history: the construction of more than 200 pedestrian malls. Victor Gruen is the Austrian architect who designed Southdale, the first enclosed shopping mall.  He wanted to take the features of a shopping mall and extend them to existing commercial districts. He proposed the pedestrian mall, where you close a commercial street to automobile traffic. Gruen thought that the European concept of pedestrian streets would be cure-all for American downtowns that were suffering from the move to the suburbs. Over 200 cities, from Kalamazoo to Chicago, closed streets in the hopes of improving commercial vitality. He was wrong, and it proved costly. As cities closed streets, removed parking, and throttled access, commercial areas died. Today, almost all the pedestrian malls have been removed, only after years or decades of commercial decline.

Planning is notoriously faddish. Today, cities like Minneapolis are making the same mistakes again, just under another name. City leaders and planners are now taken with the “15-Minute City,” where residents can get to everything they need with a 15-minute bike ride or walk, and automobiles are an unpleasant afterthought. The French urbanist Carlos Moreno originally proposed the idea of the 15-minute city, a “place where all the necessities of daily life – shops, schools, workplaces, doctor’s offices, parks, libraries. restaurants and other amenities – are located in a short 15-minute walk or bike ride from home…”. Moreno Article His ideas are based on his experience living in Paris.

Bike advocates and City planning staff in Minneapolis have adopted the idea that Minneapolis can become a 15-minute city. According to the Northeast Arts District report, “The Minneapolis 2040 plan seeks to make Minneapolis a 15-minute walkable city. Affordable housing, coffee shops and grocery stores on every corner, fighting climate change and racial disparities in housing and employment.” Northeast Minneapolis Arts District

This is a deeply flawed idea. The hubris of urban planners is clear, and proponents have forgotten the wisdom of Santayana. Removing parking, throttling access, and assuming this will make commercial areas thrive was tried and it failed miserably. Here is why the 15-minute city will not work in Minneapolis:

• Americans don’t live as Europeans do. We don’t work in boutique offices near our homes, staying in one firm our whole life. We work in large, centralized offices which draw people from all over the region. We change jobs frequently, compared to Europeans, and work in different places throughout our careers. We don’t walk to market every day; we shop for essentials once a week, and we need a car with a trunk to carry the groceries home. Our children go to large, centralized schools.
• Our land use was not designed for walking, like most European cities, which were established millennia before automobiles. Most of our region is autocentric and most things are just too far to walk to. Most of Minneapolis was built after World War 1, when transit plummeted, and most people traveled by auto. It is not an island, where people can live without ever having to go to the auto-oriented suburbs. And once a land use is established, it is almost impossible to change without a massive influx of population, something that will not happen, given the plunging birth rate.
• Minneapolis planners should study streets like Lake, Hennepin, Broadway, Plymouth, Nicollet, and Franklin. These were commercial streets, and they worked for a reason- for the same reason that main streets in Stillwater, Anoka, Excelsior, Red Wing, and Fergus Falls work. Before following the most recent planning fad, planners should deeply understand why these streets work.
• Not every resident is capable of walking or biking 15 minutes. Minneapolis is a cold weather city, and snow and ice can make walking or riding unsafe or impossible. The sun does not come up until almost 8 am and sets by 5 pm during the winter, meaning many people would have to be walking in the winter in the dark in the bitter cold. One of ten residents have disabilities. One of ten are over the age of 65. One of five is a child under the age of 18. Women bike at one-third the rate of men. Black men bike at one-third the rate of white men. Black women bike at a rate so low that the Census could not report it.   Census Census
• Neighborhood business districts are distinguished by multiple property owners. Property owners compete for tenants. Coordinated tenant mixes, which is necessary for a 15-minute city, are difficult to achieve without a mechanism like a business improvement district (BID).
• Most districts don’t have physical spaces to support all the things people would need to survive. A grocery store. A Target or other general goods store. Clothing stores. Shoe stores. Bookstores. Basically, you would need the equivalent of a shopping mall within 15 minutes walking of every person in a city. You would need to be New York City. And Minneapolis will never have those kinds of population densities.

The idea that if we make our commercial districts walkable and bikeable, they will magically thrive completely misdiagnoses what it takes to make a commercial district thrive. It isn’t the walking and biking that is the secret sauce: it is the mix of tenants and the experience of visiting a place. Entertaining businesses with interesting things to see and do. Creative restaurants. A local vibe that you can’t get anywhere else. A joy that doesn’t come from how you get there but what you do once you are there. Owners who know you by name. Restricting access to only people who walk and bike or making driving hard reduces the number of people who can go to a place. More fundamentally, it reduces the joy of going when you are first frustrated getting there.

I grew up a block off Lowry, worked in a shop on Broadway, rented apartments on Franklin and Nicollet, and bought a house next to Lake Street. I have been consulting with commercial areas and businesses for decades. I know in my gut how a commercial street functions. I served on the board of the Responsible Hospitality Institute for years, and the key they talk about is the “sociable city” where people “want to go and be with one another.”

What makes these places successful? These districts tend to have a professional, well-staffed coordinating mechanism works with property owners and local government to ensure a coordinated tenant mix, a business recruiting program, a joint marketing program and a parking and access management program. This can be a business improvement district or, a Chamber, or business partnership of some kind. These organizations thoughtfully curate a customer experience that brings joy and delight to visitors. That provide experiences for people to be with one another.  Examples include Holland Michigan, Kalamazoo Michigan, East Carson Street in Pittsburgh, and East Liberty in Pittsburgh.

None of these are 15-minute cities with access restricted to walking and biking; each of them has a tenant mix that attracts visitors and locals alike. Each are thriving. And the magic was not restricting access or any other land use planning approach: it was empowering businesses to work together to recruit and retain an inviting mix of businesses that people want to go to. And employing a staff that truly understands business.

Businesses have begged the City to stop implementing the 15-minute city changes like removing parking and narrowing streets and reducing access, but the hubris of city planners means they are ignored. Planners seem to think they know better than business owners but the commercial losses from these changes are piling up. With the number of vacancies in Minneapolis commercial districts, it’s time for a new approach – and the 15-minute city approaches is not it. The solution is not related to land use or transportation policy at all. It is in creating and curating a customer experience that gives people a reason to socialize and experience the joy of being together.

Our commercial areas are the stages on which we celebrate our community – and every day is a new production. It is time for the City to stop making land use and transportation system changes that are harming businesses and focus on building a sociable city. That means investing in creating ways for businesses to work together, envisioning the places that will bring people together, and then empowering them to do the recruitment and retention to make fun and thriving commercial areas. This is a proven way of revitalizing and growing businesses. And this is where the City needs to focus, not land use or transportation changes.