Is It Better to Live in Minneapolis or St. Paul?
A buyer called me from her hotel room in downtown Minneapolis on a Thursday evening during a relocation visit from her current home in Nashville, Tennessee. She had accepted a position at a healthcare organization whose offices were located in a part of the metro that sat roughly equidistant between the two downtowns, which meant her commute would be comparable from either city. She had spent three days in Minneapolis and had liked it considerably. She had spent one afternoon in Saint Paul and had liked it differently, in ways she was having trouble articulating but that felt real and significant. She was flying home on Saturday and had been hoping that the visit would produce a clear preference between the two cities. Instead it had produced a more complicated impression in which both cities felt genuinely appealing but in ways that seemed to reflect different values and different daily life visions. “I expected to visit and know which one was right,” she told me. “Instead I visited and understand less than I did before I came. They feel completely different from each other in ways I did not expect. Can you help me understand what the actual differences are so I can figure out which one fits me?” Her observation that the two cities felt completely different from each other was exactly right, and it was the most important observation she could have made because it reflected a truth about Minneapolis and Saint Paul that many people who have not spent time in both cities do not fully appreciate. They are not the same city. They are two distinct cities that happen to share a metro area, and the differences between them are real, specific, and consequential for the daily life of anyone who chooses between them. Here is the complete honest picture. The Fundamental Character Difference The most important thing to understand about Minneapolis and Saint Paul is that their characters are genuinely different in ways that go beyond size and go beyond superficial aesthetic differences to reflect something deeper about the identity and orientation of each city. Minneapolis is the younger of the two cities in character if not in formal age. It is the city that has more consistently embraced reinvention, that has rebuilt and reimagined its built environment more aggressively, and that has been more willing to tear down the old to make room for the new. The result is a city that is more visually contemporary, more architecturally varied, more commercially dynamic, and more oriented toward the energy of what is currently happening rather than toward the preservation of what was here before. Minneapolis is a city that feels like it is trying. It has invested heavily in its downtown, in its riverfront, in its light rail network, in its trail system, and in the many urban amenities that have made it one of the more livable major cities in the country by various quality-of-life metrics. The investment shows. Minneapolis feels polished, ambitious, and actively engaged in being better than it was. Saint Paul is the older city in character as well as in formal history. It is the state capital, the city where Minnesota’s political and institutional life is anchored, and a city that has a more settled and more historically rooted sense of its own identity than its younger sibling across the river. Saint Paul did not tear down its Victorian commercial corridors. It did not raze its river bluffs for mid-century development. It has a built environment that reflects the accumulation of its history in ways that Minneapolis has more aggressively edited. Saint Paul feels quieter, more residential, more neighborhood-oriented, and more comfortable with being exactly what it is rather than aspiring to be something more or different. It has a specific and genuine charm that many people who discover it fall deeply and specifically in love with. It also has a specific and genuine challenge in the form of a downtown that has struggled with vitality and a commercial landscape that has been less aggressively reinvented than Minneapolis. The Neighborhoods The neighborhood character of the two cities reflects the broader character difference described above and is one of the most practically relevant dimensions of the comparison for buyers who are choosing where to live. Minneapolis neighborhoods in the most desirable residential areas, including Uptown, Linden Hills, the Kenwood and Lowry Hill areas, Northeast, North Loop, and Seward, offer a range of urban residential experiences that are well-developed, highly amenitized, and in many cases genuinely beautiful. The combination of the Chain of Lakes with the residential neighborhoods that surround them produces an urban living environment in the Uptown and Linden Hills areas that is among the most consistently sought after in the metro and that commands price premiums reflecting that demand. Northeast Minneapolis has developed over the past fifteen years into the arts and creative quarter of the city, with a concentration of galleries, studios, breweries, independent restaurants, and creative workspaces that give it a specific and genuine character as a place where making things is part of the neighborhood identity. The neighborhood attracts artists, designers, young professionals with creative interests, and the general community of people who value an authentic urban creative environment. The North Loop, which has been developed largely in the past fifteen to twenty years from former warehouse and light industrial buildings, provides an urban living environment of genuine quality in buildings with the industrial aesthetic that converted warehouse residential projects produce. The proximity to downtown, to Target Field, and to the many restaurants and bars that have followed the residential development has made the North Loop one of the most active and most sought-after urban neighborhoods in Minneapolis. Saint Paul neighborhoods have a different character that reflects the city’s more residential and historically settled orientation. The Summit Hill and Summit Avenue corridor, which contains one of the most extraordinary concentrations of Victorian residential architecture in the Midwest, is a genuinely beautiful and genuinely prestigious residential