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Nick Magrino

Minneapolis, Minnesota
Commenter for
1 year 9 weeks

Recent Comments

Posted on 03/28/13 at 10:36 am in response to Does the Midwest matter? Notes on the geography of greatness

This was a really nice piece.

Posted on 03/14/13 at 12:04 pm in response to 10 years after Iraq War: What do we have to show for it?

It's really astonishing how quickly the Iraq War has left the country's popular conscience, and also how quickly everyone forgot about the WMDs a couple years into it. Er...what were we talking about again? Sorry, I was looking at my phone.

Posted on 03/12/13 at 11:30 am in response to Minneapolis apartment development booms, but not in the burbs

As a city resident/booster who lives, works, and shops in Downtown Minneapolis: I'm pretty sure that if you were to look back in newspapers and magazines every few months back to, say, the Industrial Revolution, you'd see the exact same stories about the "new trend in urban living!!". Like I said, I live in the city and love it, and the surprising freedom you have when you aren't chained to a $300 or $400/month car payment and accompanying mindset.

But there were just some Strib...

Posted on 03/07/13 at 10:45 am in response to The great senior sell-off: Our next housing crisis?

I seriously wonder about the design life of many of these suburban tract houses--don't say homes...you can't buy a feeling. Not necessarily in the St. Louis Parks or even the Minnetonkas of the world, but in the Chaskas and the Elk Rivers, the belt of beige vinyl siding out in the third-ring and beyond. Taking out thirty year mortgages on what will then be decades-old buildings built with balloon construction using toothpicks and imported drywall doesn't seem like a great investment. How...

Posted on 02/26/13 at 01:39 pm in response to How to make sure housing doesn’t bring down the economy again

I've talked about this a bit elsewhere on the web, but I've gotten really skeptical about the whole premise of subsidizing housing, whether it's the mortgage interest deduction, or "affordable" new construction where we explicitly pay a developer to build a building, rent the units for $1200, and then have the government pay half the rent. It just seems very convoluted.

In theory, there's a natural progression in the market. Older units are more affordable. There's a whole article in...

Posted on 02/07/13 at 01:06 pm in response to Dayton delivers 'surprises' throughout State of the State speech

"'This was ‘Gov. Divisive’ at his worst,' Davids said. 'He’d rather talk about gays getting married than jobs for Minnesotans.'"

Literally laughed out loud at that one. Uh, what'd you guys do from 2011-2013?

Posted on 02/01/13 at 11:51 am in response to A boom is underway in Uptown

Your first sentence says a lot about the whole country--the economy is fine where it should be. Cities are booming. If the main lasting consequence of the Great Recession is that some strip malls in Elk River never fill up and some "townhomes" in North Las Vegas never sell, so be it.

Also, there's lots of info on Uptown projects here:

http://urbanmsp.com/viewforum.php?f=15

Posted on 01/30/13 at 02:05 pm in response to Qualities every city should have: Grading the Twin Cities

"Sitting in the canyon between Dayton's and the IDS in 1973 was a choking experience I can't imagine that has improved."

Emissions standards have changed a lot since then, and the busses on Nicollet Mall (regular auto traffic isn't allowed) are largely hybrids now. I walk down Nicollet Mall and a couple other downtown streets every day and have rarely noticed air quality issues, though from what I hear it was probably rather bad back in the day.

Posted on 01/29/13 at 10:50 am in response to Global warming: The idea that technology will save us is a pipe dream

I agree that imagineering new technologies to replace cheap fossil fuels is probably a pipe dream, and we're going to huge lengths to avoid talking about real solutions.

The most important part of this equation, by far, is land use. If you don't want your kids to end up living in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max world, stop trying to figure out a way to make the suburban development model work with biodiesel, and instead stop building more Chanhassens.

Posted on 01/25/13 at 10:47 am in response to Dayton offers game-changing transit plan

Can we please stop quoting Mike Beard/other conservative legislators when they talk about public transit subsidies? At a certain point, we're just promoting misinformation. Road construction and maintenance hasn't been paid for by the gas tax in ages. The Blue Line runs at a lower operating subsidy than almost all bus lines in the city. Just because it's repeated over and over again doesn't make it accurate, and we have to stop thinking about building freeways into farmland as our default...