A routine push to standardize skyway hours has collided with the Fifth Amendment, reviving an old argument over whether the world’s largest enclosed pedestrian network is an asset worth saving or a mistake worth correcting.
Ten miles of glass and steel connect roughly eighty city blocks above downtown Minneapolis, the largest contiguous system of enclosed, second-story pedestrian bridges in the world. Office workers use it to reach lunch without a coat. More than 60,000 downtown residents, a number climbing fast as vacant office towers convert to apartments, increasingly treat it as their sidewalk.
But the skyway has a secret most people walking through it never learn: nobody owns it. Everybody does, in scattered pieces, and those pieces do not agree with each other. That disagreement is now a genuine legal fight at Minneapolis City Hall, pitting a city council that wants guaranteed public access against building owners invoking the Constitution to say the city cannot make them provide it for free.
A System Built One Handshake at a Time
The first skyway opened in 1962, a single bridge connecting the Northstar Center to the Northwestern Bank Building. More followed whenever a new building went up nearby, block by block, deal by deal, each one approved through an ordinary encroachment permit rather than a formal easement. What the city never did, in most cases, was buy the public a permanent right to use the space it was routing foot traffic through.
That omission separates Minneapolis from its twin city across the river. St. Paul’s system, roughly half the size, was largely built and paid for by the city itself in exchange for recorded easements guaranteeing public access at hours the city sets, and this past November, St. Paul voters approved a charter amendment letting the city cite owners who illegally lock their doors. Minneapolis has no equivalent. Its ordinance asks skyways to stay open roughly 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays, but with no easement behind the request, enforcement has always been closer to a suggestion. Many buildings close by 6 p.m.; some close entirely on weekends.
Why This Fight Is Happening Now
The timing is not incidental. Downtown Minneapolis office vacancy is running close to 30 percent, with forecasters projecting it past 31 percent by 2028. The city assessor now values downtown commercial property at $7.8 billion, down from $8.6 billion a year earlier and off nearly 35 percent since 2022, a slide steep enough that Minneapolis homeowners now cover 55.6 percent of the property tax base, up from 47.4 percent in 2020. The IDS Center is refinancing debt against a building worth less than half its 2013 sale price; the Dayton’s Project redevelopment went into receivership; Target paid $110 million just to exit its City Center lease. For owners already absorbing those losses, an unfunded hours mandate is a real cost on buildings some can no longer refinance. For the city, the same numbers cut the other way: a downtown still bleeding value pushes more tax burden onto homeowners, which is why officials treat a functioning skyway as more than a convenience. Both sides have real money riding on the outcome.
The City Pushes for Uniform Hours, Building Owners Push Back
In 2025, the city council took up a proposal, tracked in city records as RCA-2025-00678, to make the posted hours mean something: uniform access, enforced consistently, framed by supporters as essential to a downtown trying to become a place people live, not just pass through by six. The pushback arrived that August, when BOMA Greater Minneapolis filed formal comment with the council’s Business, Housing and Zoning Committee, arguing the mandate is not a reasonable regulation but a government-compelled physical occupation of private property under the Fifth Amendment.
BOMA leaned on Loretto v. Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp., the 1982 case holding that any permanent physical occupation, however small, is a taking requiring compensation, and Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the 2021 ruling that a government-mandated right of access for outsiders counts as exactly that. Add the requirement that any property condition have a clear nexus and rough proportionality to a real public problem, and the group’s position is simple: pay for easements, the way St. Paul did, or drop the mandate.
Is It Actually a Taking?
The doctrinal answer is not obvious. An ordinance requiring an owner to keep doing what it was already doing voluntarily, on space it built to funnel public traffic through its own storefronts, looks less like a new occupation than a regulation on a use the owner chose in the first place. Many bridges exist only because their original encroachment permit imposed access conditions as the price of building over public right-of-way; an owner cannot easily claim a taking from enforcing a condition it already accepted.
Minneapolis courts have drawn one version of this line before. In Castor v. City of Minneapolis, a 1988 case BOMA itself cites, a court upheld a city-built skyway on a public alley because it sat on existing public right-of-way. BOMA reads that narrowly: fine for city-built bridges on public land, irrelevant to bridges built entirely inside private buildings without easements, which describes most of the system. The record is not uniform enough for one citywide answer.
“Let It Die” Misreads What the Skyway Does
Minneapolis has never lacked for people who think the system should simply come down. The Danish architect Jan Gehl, visiting in 2007, said the skyways struck a “defensive posture” toward the city around them. The urbanist Gil Peñalosa, founder of 8 80 Cities, called them “absolutely horrible” and blamed them for leaving storefronts feeling lifeless. Eric Dayton, the Minneapolis retailer behind Askov Finlayson, wrote in a widely read 2017 Star Tribune op-ed that the city was “a 2017 city living with 1967 urban-design thinking,” and urged people to simply go outside and walk. Bill Lindeke, the University of Minnesota urban geographer and MinnPost columnist, has pressed the case longest; in a 2012 Streets.mn essay he argued that shielding pedestrians from the cold was never the skyway’s real purpose, and the honest question is what it has done to street life below. The writer Sam Newberg has made the same point more bluntly, calling further skyway investment wasteful.
That critique carries real weight in cities that built skyways as a substitute for a functioning street. It fits Minneapolis less well, because sidewalk life and skyway life here were never really competing for the same people at the same time; the choice between them is mostly made by the weather. A downtown that spends weeks each winter under subzero wind chill will not sustain the continuous outdoor pedestrian life critics imagine, whatever happens to the hours ordinance, and for residents with mobility disabilities, the skyway’s flat, heated, curb-free path is often the only realistic way to cross downtown in January.
The system is also being actively rebuilt, not merely defended. The Minneapolis Downtown Council counted about 280 open downtown restaurant and retail businesses in March 2021 and roughly 450 by mid-2025, with landlords offering coffee shops and small restaurants the favorable lease terms once reserved for anchor tenants; some skyway rents have fallen from around $3,000 a month before the pandemic to a few hundred dollars or less. Downtown retail vacancy remains near 40 percent, so the recovery is real but incomplete. The case is not just anecdotal: a peer-reviewed study by University of Minnesota researcher David Levinson and coauthors, published in Environment and Planning B, found better-connected buildings systematically captured greater accessibility value as the network grew, the empirical signature of the agglomeration effect his theory predicts. The hours dispute, in that light, is an argument over how to keep a real economic asset alive, not whether it is worth keeping.
What Happens Next
Nearly a year later, the dispute remains unresolved. After BOMA’s August 2025 comment, the Business, Housing and Zoning Committee received a staff presentation on September 2, 2025, an informational briefing rather than a vote on binding ordinance language, and public records reviewed for this piece show no final ordinance since. That stall is its own answer of sorts: absent a negotiated path forward, the city is no closer to resolving whether it can mandate access than it was the week BOMA raised the Fifth Amendment. Whatever the council eventually decides will likely be challenged or renegotiated, and it touches more than city hall: disability access groups who depend on the skyway, downtown residents who assumed a corridor marked with a city seal was actually public, and a question most cities never have to answer, because they never built anything like this in the first place. St. Paul answered it by paying for the bridges outright. Minneapolis is still finding out what it costs to have never asked, and should not let that unresolved bill talk it into giving up an asset the city, and its winters, still need.
I have been waiting years for someone to say the things Jim Klein says. His essay should be framed and posted in the Mpls Council Chamber and wherever New Urbanists and architects are trained or gather. We need to stop trying to make Mpls into Chicago or NYC. Minnesotans have proven over and over that they love their low density neighborhoods, downtowns and suburbs. If that ever changes, the real estate market will begin to make it happen. We cannot force that to happen through planning, rules and zoning. Evidence of this is all the new apartment buildings in Mpls, Richfield, and Edina who have built city mandated retail spaces on their ground level along the sidewalks. They are almost all empty years after they were built.
Rather, we need to focus on the city-wide deal that is needed to set reasonable skyway hours, plus the perceived problem, if it is one, of lack of pedestrian traffic at street level..
I would like to submit that the street level “problem” is not a problem. What is a problem is that our streets are too narrow to accommodate all the uses the New Urbanists want to squeeze into them: buses, light rail, bikes, power wheelchairs, scooters, delivery trucks, outdoor dining, wide sidewalks, trees, planters, farmers markets, pedestrians and maybe a trickle of cars. The Urbanists would prefer no cars at all, but most Minnesotans and visitors need cars to get to the the street life, offices, stores, restaurants, sporting events and apartments that the city is trying to use to attract them downtown and to other locations. (Note how stores and restaurants have died when streets are rebuilt with New Urbanist plans with scarce parking. See Bryant Avenue, Blaisdell, Hennepin, Uptown). In our post-COVID, work-from-home world easy access to these attractions for everyone is desperately needed to save downtown and other commercial areas.)
Removing pedestrians to the skyways should be seen as a blessing to relieve demand on our narrow streets for all their other uses. Not to mention the blessing they are for the handicapped, elderly, downtown residents, office workers, visitors, and other Twin Cities resident pedestrians who want to avoid the cold and heat and humidity of our climate and improve their health by walking more and riding less. As a bonus, they are built and maintained by the private sector building owner.
Let’s get real world about our city’s problems and creative about viable solutions.
Thanks for writing and publishing this. As someone who was not born in the Twin Cities, but rather, moved here intentionally after a college-plus-grad-school education, I have never understood the arguments of those who would get rid of the system. Did ’60s, ’70s and ’80’s -style city planning leave the streets themselves less “alive” than they could and should be? Yes. Yes, it did. So we ought to fix *that*. But as you have pointed out, the skyway system is not the problem with the street-level environment, and getting rid of it would not be a solution. Too many of the policy prescriptions of the “new urbanists” involve dealing with problems by assuming fantastical things that they wish existed (like an entire population both in love with, and physically able to use, bicycles as main transport year-round) rather than dealing with realities that do exist. I, too, enjoy denser cities like NYC, Chicago, Boston, and SF – I grew up in one! (Chicago), but we are not that, and there is no realistic prospect of our becoming that. Doing something because one feels it would “force” an urban environment to become more dense, more a “walkable neighborhood”, etc. confuses causes with effects, and is a fool’s errand. I wish those who like such places so much would move to one of them, and let the rest of us take actions that would preserve the many positive aspects of a city built with less density, and improve what we have by solving problems with appropriate and realistic solutions. As you point out, it’s the skyway system that even makes viable the idea of more residents living downtown, and especially the idea of more area residents relocating downtown as they age and become less easily personally mobile. Also, as I took note when I was choosing where to relocate to after college, they make year-round downtown work life and recreation much less unpleasant than it must have been before their construction. They are flawed, as is so much in the real world that “new urbanists” refuse to inhabit. Their flaws should be removed – not the entire system.
Thank uou! The skyway system is one of the things that make Minnespolis such an amazing place to live. In January, during a snowstorm or below zero Temps, OR during July, with smoky skies and 100 degree heat index, one can always navigate downtown in comfort. It seems to me that the building owners, who paid for construction and continue to pay for maintence should have the right to allow access as they see fit without interference from the city.
St. Paul did it the right way, but it’s worth noting their skyway is poorly maintained and crumbling in some spots. Minneapolis’s skyway is mixed with openings and closures, but it’s much cleaner and better maintained. I’d rather have the latter.
The debate about skyways taking away pedestrians from the street is tiring. We need small stores and “doors” which the skyway has in bountiful supply. Neither Minneapolis nor St. Paul have figured out how to have small, quirky, well-equipped and affordable commercial spaces at street level. All you get is giant big box steel and glass spaces that are hard to subdivide, and even if you can, are still too large and still too sterile.
St. Paul does even more poorly, but blocking off businesses with oversized transit stops. Multiple stores and restaurants are not visible from the street because they’re blocked by enormous bus shelters. That doesn’t happen in the skyway.