The front-page article a few weeks ago about Twin Cities activists who want I-94 removed and turned into a boulevard between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul barely hinted at the effect this would have on the economy of the region.
My first reaction was probably the same as yours: that definitely doesn’t happen.
There’s an obvious reason: it’s always hard to take down infrastructure. Moreover, progressive activists should first hash out their competing priorities. When that happens, things come to a standstill, as Minneapolis learned with its 2040 Comprehensive Plan, or Minnesota lawmakers showed during the 2024 session.
Who would win that fight? The reformers who want to restore neighborhoods and make driving in the Twin Cities a bit cleaner and nicer? Or those who halt housing development in St. Paul by imposing rent controls?
If you opened a few miles of prime real estate in St. Paul, bankers wouldn’t finance it and developers wouldn’t build on it. The city’s rent controls leave them unsure of a return on their investment.
YouTuber Ray Delahanty, who analyzes and compares American cities for their livability on his City Nerd channel, advocated closing the 12-kilometer stretch of I-94 in a video earlier this month. He pointed out that urban highways are being reconsidered in cities across the country.
“Something like I-94 reflects what is…an extremely outdated vision of what a city is and what a city should be,” Delahanty said in the video.
It is also a vision that is out of step with what cities are becoming. I think it would be fantastic to leave a highway that tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents rely on every day.
That includes the fact that commuting has fallen by about a third since the pandemic. Also amazing: Driverless cars may finally show up with the next upgrade of wireless networks to 6G. They will enable the data exchange that automated vehicles need.
Where we live and work, the very purpose of cities, is changing before our eyes, making it legitimate to question the usefulness of urban highways.
Cecil Smith, president of the Minnesota Multi Housing Association (MMHA), encouraged developers at a forum earlier this month to consider how living patterns have already changed as a result of remote work — and will do so again as automated vehicles take over. become the norm.
“It’s a premature discussion about the I-94 corridor, but it’s a really amazing thought experiment because then you realize that a really massive change could happen,” Smith said after his presentation.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation began a long-term process in 2016 to assess how I-94 is functioning between the two downtowns. It’s been almost 60 years since that stretch of highway was completed and it has reached the stage where enough repairs and improvements are needed to warrant some reconsideration.
Last year, the department published a list of eight alternatives for the route. A final decision is not expected for several years.
Our Streets, the advocacy group once known as the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition, produced a 91-page report in March advocating turning that stretch into a boulevard. It reflects the themes that the Congress for New Urbanism, the Washington-based nonprofit focused on urban design, identified in its “Highways to Boulevards” project.
Our Streets turned to Visible City, a St. Paul-based consulting firm, for economic impact estimates. It is estimated that approximately 60 new homes could be built on the Minneapolis portion of the existing freeway in a low-density scenario. Up to 235 in a higher density scenario, i.e. apartments, are possible.
On the St. Paul stretch, Visible City estimates a range of 505 new homes in a low-density scenario to approximately 2,000 in a higher-density scenario.
In addition, removing the major interchange on Huron Boulevard, near the Mississippi River bridge and the University of Minnesota, would make room for approximately 200 more low-density homes and more than 900 homes in high-density buildings.
Those estimates came from studying existing building patterns in neighborhoods near I-94, Jon Commers, director of Visible City, told me.
They do not take into account the effects of rent control, which St. Paul voters approved in a referendum in 2021.
“It’s widely regarded as perhaps the most extreme form of rent control in the country,” Jay Parsons, a consultant at Dallas-based Madera Residential, said at the MMHA event earlier this month.
“Even among rent control advocates, they realize you don’t want to completely discourage construction,” he said. ‘I know them [St. Paul City Council] have gone back and tried to change the regulations, but the uncertainty surrounding it has cast a cloud over developers and, more importantly, the financial services providers to those developers.”
Getting rid of I-94 between the inner cities is a gamble on many levels. There are arguments for this, but not as long as there is an unreasonable financial risk associated with the redevelopment.
