Talk:Neighborhoods of Minneapolis

Other business districts

What a bore for the previous author to ONLY mention Uptown and Dinkytown as known unofficial business districts -- which happen to be the most white might I mention. How about we see a mention of Eat Street on Nicollet Avenue (which has actually spurred condo development derived from its district name unlike the "popular" ones), West Broadway, East Lake Street and Midtown, Lyn-Lake (which is NOT Uptown), 50th and France Avenue, Warehouse District. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Davumaya (talk • contribs) 17:43, January 4, 2007

Communities AND Neighborhoods

There should be a section here for communities as well as neighborhoods, with a better explanation of their differences. The city breaks itself down into communities composed of neighborhoods. The communities should be listed as well(see map of Minneapolis). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.122.211.122 (talk • contribs) 21:28, June 1, 2005

Lake St isn't only E-W running street that isn't a number.

The information on E-W running streets could use a little attention. Franklin is an exception to the stated rule. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Edkohler (talk • contribs) 20:01, November 8, 2005

Phillips Map

It might be noted that the graphic accompanying the article is outdated. Phillips has since been split into different neighorhoods: Ventura Village, West Phillips, East Phillips, and Midtown. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.73.52.36 (talk) 23:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC).

Other notes about the map

It would be good if we could get a map to specify where each neighborhood is; like is done for Minnesota on its page, highlighted within the map of the United States. Highlighting each neighborhood within a map of Minneapolis would be a nice feature for the neighborhood articles. matt91486 01:45, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

This has now been done. Eco84 | Talk 18:44, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I would propose we further your efforts by updating the map to possibly do a few things such as all the names of the neighborhoods (more for clicking on larger veresions) so that visitors will always know where they are in relation to other neighborhoods. A real super-badaz advancement is to actually have the map be clickable to go to different neighborhoods. A different option would be to indicate landmarks such as downtown Minneapolis, the Mississippi River, 35W, 94, etc.

Also lastly, I am thinking about a bloated master map for demonstration purposes which shows all the n'hoods, communities, landmarks, and districts and informal places. .:DavuMaya:. 09:34, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Proposals for template change

I have created two alternatives to the current Minneapolis neighborhood template. They are available for viewing on the template talk page. The two templates categorize each neighborhood according to what community it is located in. Currently, the communities and neighborhoods are listed separate from each other. Eco84 | Talk 00:20, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

• I like alternative #1 best. Good job.--Appraiser 11:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Unofficial designations

Since Neighborhoods of Minneapolis is mostly about official neighborhoods, I've reworked the commercial districts section into "unofficial neighborhoods." Most of the content is still there, just reframed to note the different ways unofficial neighborhoods relate to the official neighborhoods. I'd suggest that further discussion of commercial districts go to the general Minneapolis, Minnesota article.--Natcase 03:25, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

And I just did something similar for "Local areas" renaming it "City regions." Any better titles are welcomed. I took the previous authors' lead in tying the section together by street suffixes (N,S,E,W,NE,SE) and tried to just make it all make sense. Anyway, folks please have at it...--Natcase 04:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes..... crap, I hate it when you guys record each individual edit you do instead of more mass edits :) Its harder to track what has been changed. Anyway, it looks better but still not great. I can't imagine a better way to organize this information yet. Oddly we know more about the "unofficial" Minneapolis than the official one. Perhaps the next goal should be to gather actual information on each neighborhood to determine an overall history of how neighborhoods came into effect. I think as an encyclopedic article, people will want to know the history more than what currently exists as we see it because they can always go to Wikitravel for Uptown-esque info. .:DavuMaya:. 20:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

If you have Javascript enabled, on the History page there are two columns which you can use to select two versions, then press the button to view the differences between those two versions. Just as if there had been a single large edit. -- SEWilco (talk) 04:20, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Map of neighborhoods

I've tagged the image Image:Mpls.png as having no source information. I'm pretty sure the image is from the city's website [1] and if so would not be a work of the federal government. Someone might want to create a free map of Minneapolis to replace it. Eóin (talk) 22:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I've created a replacement, but it's not the greatest. Seeing how Image:Mpls.png has been deleted, it'll have to do until someone can make a better one. Eco84 | Talk 00:02, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Useful images

Anyone working on articles about individual Minneapolis neighborhoods might benefit from the images taken by Max Hailperin, whose blog All of Minneapolis documents his journey walking Minneapolis neighborhood by neighborhood, in alphabetical order. Images are licensed CC-BY-SA-4.0 and include both neighborhood landmarks (churches, libraries, etc.) and less notable buildings/locations (community gardens, walking paths, houses, stores). The project is, as of January 2019, in the Ls, so about half of neighborhoods have been walked (and photographed) so far. If you do upload them over on Commons, make sure to tag the pages with {{licencereview}} so a reviewer can confirm their external license (example here). Best —Collin^{t c} 15:09, 18 January 2019 (UTC)

Community divisions--out of date?

I've been checking this page and its sources for information on official communities and cannot find any official City of Minneapolis source that discusses the communities of Minneapolis. Half of the references on the page are broken (likely just since the city overhauled the website) and the others don't give information on the communities existing. I even looked at a few neighborhood organizations' official websites and can't find anything. The city and the organizations define neighborhoods by their boundaries and not within larger Communities.

Anyone know--is this still a thing? Would have to restructure a bit of the neighborhoods and areas' articles individually to truly update it. Malvoliox (talk) 17:49, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

digging in a little more to this mystery, there are a only few larger areas that do have community organizations acting as overarching neighborhood organizations: Phillips and (Greater) Longfellow have full neighborhood/community orgs -- though phillips neighborhood network seems to have a broken website. Northeast also has a lot of organizations representing the area, though they aren't consistent in their definitions of Northeast/the "East Side". Some include neighborhoods in the old 'university' community -- see Eastside Neighborhood Services. Others like the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District represent a smaller portion of Northeast. Malvoliox (talk) 18:11, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for trying to improve the article. The City of Minneapolis has active links to maps of communities and refers to areas as communities in official documents. A few official examples of maps of communities include this one last updated on 3/8/2022 and this one updated June 7, 2019. The Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan published in 2020 referred to communities, such as on Page 321 when it stated, "The area of study includes portions of the Phillips Community, Corcoran Neighborhood, the Longfellow Community, and the Seward Neighborhood."

It is also important not to conflate community, neighborhood, and neighborhood organization in Minneapolis. They are all different, but sort of overlapping. There are 11 communities, 84 neighborhoods and 70 neighborhood organizations. Obviously the 84 neighborhoods are grouped into the 11 communities. For neighborhood organizations, it is a bit different. See this and this. Most neighborhood organizations follow neighborhood boundary lines while some organizations are a grouping of a few adjacent neighborhoods. The groupings of neighborhoods are still within a community boundary (e.g., Near North Willard-Hay organization is all within the Near North Community; Nokomis East organization is all within Nokomis).

It seems like communities are still a thing in Minneapolis based on the above. Did you find any sources stating that the city is doing away with the community distinction? Without confirmation of that officially or in reliable sources it encroaches on original research to infer that the communities are no longer relevant.

Thanks for starting the discussion. Minnemeeples (talk) 19:26, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

That makes sense. I would still argue that, while it's useful to use communities as a category and continue to mention them later in the article if we don't know for sure they're not a thing, it might not fit as well in the lead as it used to. If the consensus of other encyclopedia type folks is that they are indeed an essential distinction, it makes sense to keep. If we were writing this article now, I doubt that anyone would feel it important to structure the discussion of neighborhoods around communities as an official designation. I'd say this conversation is worth continuing to have for the sake of accuracy.

I will note -- the sources you share don't seem to fully support the significance of communities at present. The 2040 plan refers to the 2 communities that are more consistently established outside of the city designation (Longfellow and Phillips are the two that have any kind of organizational structure of their own that I can find). Sadly, the 2040 plan had to be paused in many ways when it was taken to court -- so its conception as a current document can also be called into question. The GIS map you linked from 3/8/22 is the only map or list with communities that I've seen yet with updates more recent than 2020--and the one updated in June 2019 doesn't even have communities in it.

I'll also note that NCR (Neighborhood and Community Relations) has plenty of documentation about engaging "underrepresented communities" and about working in neighborhoods, but not a lot of language about communities as a formalized structure. They're the descendant of/new manager of the NRP that initially created the neighborhood and community designations, and even their use of 'community' in the name does not seem to refer to this grouping.

The main reasoning I had is that, in all the city's current language about neighborhoods-on their website and anything released in the past 2 years-communities as defined here are not mentioned. The city website's Community and Neighborhood page only refers to neighborhoods, cultural districts, and 'youth' engagement -- seeming to use the word 'community' in the more colloquial sense for the third group.

My initial reasoning for looking into communities was around the Calhoun-Isles community, a name that refers to the old name of the lake. The only documents that have been shared here, the ones you linked too, came prior to the renaming of all the neighborhoods named after Calhoun (namely, the former ECCO, CARAG and West Calhoun), and these older documents still use the name Calhoun-Isles. It seems unlikely that the city intends to keep using this name, but we don't have a new one in place--and the more looking to find evidence of its existence I did, the more I saw that all the official maps are outdated -- with old neighborhood names -- or come from links to the former city website.

While I'm at it, I can't find a source saying that the neighborhoods are defined by council and not by CPED/NCR. Interesting that the lead phrases it as a council designation. Have you been able to find a citation for this detail? Malvoliox (talk) 16:27, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the continued conversation! The communities are important of the history of the city (see this map from 1925) and a relevant feature today. An article of Minneapolis neighborhoods would be incomplete without discussion of communities.

I would caution against making too many profound inferences about whether communities are still a thing from some of the content you have viewed on the current iteration of the City of Minneapolis website. It used to have very detailed demographic and historic profiles of communities and neighborhoods (e.g., Phillips Community as archived in 2011). The website in 2024 is more service focused (e.g., how to contact look up you neighborhood and who to contact your neighborhood organization) without much of the background, demographics, and history it used to have. And in place of that history, the city seems to be using its website to tout its own current-day political initiatives and goals (e.g., new cultural district designations, George Floyd Square community engagement, economic revitalization, youth, and etc.) That doesn't mean communities were officially eliminated or no longer relevant.

You still find community-level information via the city's page, such as the maps I posted above. If you go the Community and neighborhoods page you mentioned and scroll to the bottom there is a link for "Income, demographics and population of Minneapolis and Saint Paul neighborhoods" that takes you to a MNCompass page for Minneapolis-Saint Paul Neighborhoods: Minneapolis-Saint Paul at a glance--that page has the map of communities. If you click on a community, it provides you with detailed demographic data at the community level.

The community was not a level of local government. As such, a city website focused on city services and current political goals is not going to have much focus on communities. However, communities were and are an important grouping of neighborhoods, often with distinct identities and characteristics, for which present-day demographic data is still available. Minnemeeples (talk) 15:18, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks so much for clarifying -- and providing a few more sources! It's especially cool to see those earlier community boundaries. Just wanted to understand how it does work & avoid misinforming -- this makes a lot of sense.

Malvoliox (talk) 17:50, 18 April 2024 (UTC)