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People said it couldn’t be done. They said “Chet, you should reschedule, it’s going to rain really hard and everyone will get wet!”

I said, “Please don’t call me Chet. This ‘Chet Wedgely’ thing was meant to be a joke but now it’s catching on.” And then, showing uncommon courage, I refused to cancel the cat tour. As a result, 300 hearts were touched and the sun never stopped shining. That’s 10 times the number of people who attended last year’s Wedge neighborhood cat tour.

Attendees (the ones who kept count) reported seeing over 50 cats. Most cats were spotted at windows — but others were seen on porches, rooftops, in strollers, on leashes, or scampering through yards. A man at 28th and Dupont emerged from an apartment building holding a cat and wearing a giant cat head. As one Reddit user put it, “does anyone else think this is kinda fuckin weird?”

Continue reading “Cat Tour Draws Hundreds to the Wedge”

Nationally 30% of adults have an arrest or criminal record. That can make it much harder to find housing. And to the degree there are racial disparities in our criminal justice system (as of 2012, black people were arrested by Minneapolis police at 6.5 times the rate of the non-black population), this results in disparities in who is eligible for housing.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued legal guidance that “where a policy or practice that restricts access to housing on the basis of criminal history has a disparate impact on individuals of a particular race, national origin, or other protected class” could violate the Fair Housing Act.

Continue reading “A Fair Housing Proposal in Minneapolis”

Researchers at the Metropolitan Council have produced a slide show titled “We still need more housing.” The numbers come from permit data collected across the 7-county Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Below are some of the slides, capturing the scale of our regional housing shortage. View the whole thing here.

Continue reading “Met Council: We Still Need More Housing”

[This local news coverage made possible by readers like you.]

Dallas-based developer High Street Residential has plans for a grocery store and 130 apartments at 47th and Cedar Ave near Lake Nokomis in South Minneapolis. The site’s existing grocery store, Bergan’s, would be replaced with a Lunds and Byerly’s.

Continue reading “Grocery and 130 apartments planned for 47th and Cedar Ave S”

“Some people did something.”

That’s as far as the Star Tribune is willing to quote Ilhan Omar — speaking about 9/11 — in their editorial painting the Muslim Congresswoman as an equally guilty combatant in a “war of words” with Donald Trump. They found Omar’s words to be lacking in reverence: “the seeming nonchalance of the phrase stings.”

Here’s just slightly more context for Omar’s quote:

Continue reading “Star Tribune makes embarrassing false equivalence between Ilhan Omar and Donald Trump”

In 1998 Mueller Park’s basketball court was cut in half after decades of racist complaints about basketball in the park. Over the years, neighbors made connections between basketball and crime; basketball and drug dealing; basketball and discomfort with strangers in the neighborhood. Concerned residents were quoted in the neighborhood newspaper saying things like: “ruffians”… “many of whom I do not recognize”… “descending on our park by the carload”… “music on full blast.”

A Park Board representative in the early 1980s admitted the obvious: “I do think some racism is involved.”

Continue reading “After history of anti-basketball racism, sport could make comeback at Mueller Park”

We saw a noticeable uptick in local gaffes in 2018. Some would attribute this disarray to the fact Minneapolis elected five new members to the City Council in 2017. Personally, I happen to subscribe to the old adage: “to bloop is human.” These bloopers served as the basis for Wedge LIVE’s least popular new segment in 2018.

Continue reading “Worst of Wedge LIVE 2018: A Year of “Disarray””

2018 was a big year. The year of Minneapolis 2040. The year of the Red Yard Sign. The year Wedge LIVE was declared “Best Website in the Twin Cities.” The year that an elected official tried to shut down this website by attempting to trademark the name “Wedge Live.” The year that same elected official couldn’t stop barking “Balls!” during meetings at city hall.

Let’s take a look back at some of 2018’s top local moments.

Continue reading “2018: A Look Back at the Year that Was”