Strange Resolutions Around Downtown
I was walking downtown one day when I saw a broken automatic sprinkler. Water was everywhere all over the sidewalk, so I decided to take a picture. At first I thought nothing of it. I see this all the time. I soon realized that these things are just solutions to one of man’s problems: how to keep the grass green when it doesn’t rain. This is especially important in a dense metropolitan area where green space is scarce. Here, it is important to keep the little vegetation as healthy as possible, but you don’t want to have to hire someone to take care of less than 20 square yards of grass on a downtown plaza. Our wonderful solution is to have a machine do it for us by installing pipes in the ground. Now, as long as we have the water resources we can keep our grass as green as can be no matter what Mother Nature has in store for us.
I walked a little further to 9th and Nicollet where they are soon going to begin building a new residential high rise. It will be called, very cleverly, The Nicollet. This is our solution to population density problems. Minneapolis is in steady growth right now. The whole metropolitan area including the near suburbs is up to 3.5 million people. Building out from Minneapolis is no longer an option because we’ve gone as far out in every direction as we reasonably can. So we must build up. Which is exactly what The Nicollet is doing. This will be the biggest residential building in the Midwest outside of Chicago. I did a little research about who will actually be living in these condos. The results were not entirely shocking. The price range for a condo is going to be $275K to $3Million. What this means is, we are going to have an even deeper separation between economic classes in the city. Maybe this isn’t the best solution after all.
