Our Somali neighbors make Minnesota better.

This is incredibly bad for researchers and the public at large. Want to know if corporate entities are buying up land for a data center? Out of luck. Want to know if private equtiy is buying up homes in your neighborhood? NOPE! Just a massive loss for public transparancy and accountability. (2/x)

Nostalgia is an underappreciated driver of NIMBYism. My experience in Florida was that the older anti-development activists talked more about sadness and anger at losing the beloved (and somewhat imagined) small, quaint beach town of their memories than about any other reason for disliking growth.

Even more evidence that building new housing decreases rents: Researchers tracked the residents of a newly built luxury condo building and found that they freed up less expensive apartments nearby. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

This 53 year old man who lived in my neighborhood w/no criminal record & who had been in the US for 30 years, was detained and thrown into a cold cell for days, caught pneumonia and COVID there and deported. He finally died. I am so angry. www.kptv.com/2026/02/21/n...

👀The federal judges in West Virginia, where ICE has been pulling over and detaining people on the freeway, are literally screaming about ICE's tactics. "It is an assault on the constitutional order," Judge Goodwin says. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Gonna "yes, and" this a bit: while basically true, most people who claim they're doing this are still terribly un-strategic about it. Far more common is landing cheap dunks on someone for kudos from those who already agree with you, while telling yourself you're doing it to persuade bystanders.

He's so close to getting it....

"It remains to be seen if this administration will take the unprecedented step of openly defying a court order, which could trigger a constitutional crisis" -Every media outlet like a year ago

Picked the kiddo up from preschool by bike on Thurs and Fri, for the first time since November. Didn't tell him I was going to. We stepped out the door of his school and he squealed "BIKE!!!" in excitement as soon as he saw. 4-year-olds agree: best way to travel.

RETVRN (The Pho place and the taqueria can stay)

If the most popular florist in town has ample parking available at 12pm on Valentines Day, it’s probably not necessary to have these parking mandates in our code! One-size-fits-all parking for “retail” is arbitrary, hurts small businesses, and isn’t needed!

UPDATE: He was just released. This shows that just indiscriminately took someone because they were Latino. Their illegal tactics continue so we still need neighbors to patrol, observe, and support our immigrant community.

Good thread on an important wrinkle often missed by both sides of the "institutional investors buying up houses" story.

I know it's cheesy, but the bright sun, warm weather and trickling sound of melting snow everywhere feel symbolic today. Winter isn't remotely over. But spring will come.

Need to stress that, like the Pretti killing, this terrorism is happening in extremely mixed use residential neighborhoods. Cafes and restaurants just down the street. The St. Paul Curling Club that's put out so many Olympians competing *this week* is like two blocks away.

Really important paper, 🧵, & results. No one, including me, has good solutions for this, but it's a huge problem for social science that we all know & expect that ~every paper with a null finding as the main result goes in the file drawer.

This is the aftermath of an ICE kidnapping a few blocks from my home in St. Paul—an hour ago. A quiet street full of broken glass and at least three wrecked cars. The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance. He was on a stretcher and covered by a sheet, though a cop said he was alive.

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No due process, no court dates, no access to lawyers, inhumane living conditions, and rampant abuse against detainees— all under the guise of immigration enforcement. It's systemic torture in these concentration camps. The regime are deliberately pushing these people to breaking point for sport.

Thinking a lot lately of @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social's magnificent book "A Paradise Built in Hell." Time and again people organize to take care of each other in response to disaster (and this is a non-natural disaster but similarly imposed on a whole community) in ways the state can't and won't.

By the way, for those of you not in MN: Homan’s strategy was to withdraw some agents, so it felt like we were in the denouement of the crisis, and then escalate hard against observers. They’re being incredibly aggressive with observers now. National media may not want to check out just yet

Before Keith Porter, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti… ICE killed a father after he dropped his kids off at school. We didn’t hear much about it because he was undocumented. They said he was trying to flee & shot him in the back of the neck. Silverio Villegas-González. Don’t forget him.

Everything you’re hearing from the Trump administration is a lie. Today was one of the most active days in Northeast since the entire Operation Metro Surge began. Nothing is changing on the ground in Minneapolis, no matter what headlines Trump and Homan try to create.

Axios had a story today about how hard Minnesota’s economy is being hit and how slow the recovery could be. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to say that if you want to support the Twin Cities, you should plan a visit for this summer, spend some money here, & see how amazing it is for yourself.

2026 is starting out strong for parking reform as a couple prominent college towns repeal *all* of their parking mandates: let's hear it for Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Missoula, Montana!

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I don't think this is specifically a left thing. I think people who are very strident are often people who think of their politics in starkly moralistic ways. "If you can't see that my position is obviously correct, it must be that you are morally defective. And I can't reason with that."

Anyone talking about black blocs, or trying to use WTO '99, Occupy, RNC 20xx, or even BLM, as the blueprint for the ICE/DHS resistance in MN is committing a category error. Your seasoned-activist rules of engagement don't apply. This is not really protest or activism, and its goals are different.

Horrifying beyond words.

Interestingly, what is typically the most “safe” mutual aid work—like delivering food to people in need—is now the most necessarily secretive, while that which is typically “risky”—directly confronting armed agents of the state—is unavoidably public and open.

I remember saying, over family dinner, sometime in late 2015 or early 2016, "Can we call Trump the fascist candidate yet?" I still hold it was obvious if you paid attention back then that was the campaign he was running—the rhetorical style, the preoccupations, the explicit pitch to his supporters.

This was only about two time-lapsed minutes of the Alex Pretti memorial ride in Minneapolis today. I'd guess there were at least 5x more people there than this, and probably significantly more than that. Absolutely mind blowing love and support showing up on bikes today.

My 5-yo asked what "ICE out" meant. "People want Trump's police to leave our state." "I heard there are men taking people away. Are those Donald Trump's police?" "Yes." "Were all those people outside on TV because of this?" "Yes." "... Is that why [Classmate] doesn't come to school anymore?" Fuck.

Continuing to defend our community -- for who knows how long we'll have to -- is daunting. But NOT continuing to do so is unthinkable. That's what the fascists in charge fundamentally don't understand.

Or, in the words of George W. Bush at Trump's first inauguration, "That was some weird shit." Bush, notably, is as responsible as anyone for laying the groundwork for the Trump admin's authoritarian moves (Patriot Act, creation of DHS and ICE). But every other word out of his mouth was "freedom."

America has always had cruel, racist, or xenophobic policies whose proponents couch them in the language of America's shared civic heritage—freedom, democracy, and the like. This new thing where open fascists talk in ways that are contrary to any shared US cultural touchstones breaks my brain.

The non-Hispanic white population of Minneapolis was 403k in 1970 (out of 434k). Today it's about 250k (out of 430k). Imagine the decay, vacant lots and empty storefronts, if people hadn't immigrated, while suburbanization continued apace anyway. I'm supposed to resent this? Immigrants saved us.

Uff da

The same kinds of solidarity you're hearing about in the Twin Cities are happening in rural Minnesota too. 1) People are overwhelmingly decent when it comes to their neighbors, 2) Rural areas aren't the monolith that many assume, and 3) Immigrants have revitalized many small Midwestern towns.

As usual, moms are doing a huge amount of work behind the scenes. www.minnpost.com/metro/2026/0...

Very cool new work on congestion pricing - exciting both for the results and the methodology.

Awful to even try to catalogue the harm being done here in MN. Educational harms, students out school? At least months. Economic harms, from empty, half-functioning businesses? At least years. Civic and psychic harms, from shattering the basic sense of safety? Decades. Stolen neighbors? Forever.

Homan using language like "in theater", Trump comparing ICE in Minnesota to the Venezuela operation *while talking to Tim Walz*, Miller and Vance using literal Nazi rhetoric on the regular.... These people all think they're at war with liberal cosmopolitan America. That's not a metaphor.

Petition for people with no connection to Minnesota but strong opinions about Will Stancil to simply shut up about recent drama. *Tens of thousands* of people are doing community defense and mutual aid. Keeping that story in the national press is crucial. Making one guy the main character is not.

Press conferences and social media posts have not changed conditions on the ground. Another person taken today off of Central Ave and Northeast middle school had to delay letting kids leave because of ICE presence in the area. The federal government continues to make our community less safe.

Big year for land use reform in Virginia! Including a full repeal of parking mandates which will be the nation's strongest state-level parking reform if it passes.

It is wild to me that a military incursion to steal another country’s resources so the president can have a personal slush fund in Qatar is like the 5th most scandalous thing currently happening.

Anyone in #caleg wanting to take on this cause regarding #AB2097 reform?

There isn’t any indication that immigration activity has changed in Minneapolis. In fact, this afternoon, federal immigration agents began staging at Holy Rosary Catholic Church located in East Phillips. This activity is disgraceful and creates an unsafe environment for our neighbors. 1/