The Twin Cities' Best Neighborhoods

What makes one neighborhood more desirable than another?

Image credit: Photos by David Bowman

Recommended by the Editor

The Top Ten Neighborhoods in Minneapolis

Minneapoils Neighborhoods: The Runners-Up

The Top Ten Neighborhoods in St. Paul

By: Quinton Skinner |   September 2011   |  From the print edition

Toward the end of our last interminable winter, METRO’s senior edit staff trudged over to the U of M’s West Bank to meet with scholars Will Craig and Jeff Matson from the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs—data assemblers and policy wonks who, we hoped, would assist us in the task of compiling detailed information on Twin Cities neighborhoods to produce numerical rankings.

This was no easy task, and in the months to come there were a few loaded pauses in which us journalists requested that information be phrased in terms that we could more easily understand (“Uh, can you repeat the part about the stuff?”). We felt the heavy lifting was worth the effort, though. When we looked over other magazines’ “best neighborhoods” issues, we saw that the prevailing trend was to punt: throw a few shouts out to trendy shopping districts, notable parks and architecture, dress it up with pretty pictures and declare the job done. A nice diversion, to be sure, but dodging the essential question of what makes one city neighborhood superior to another—and how to arrive at numbers to back it up.

Going in, we knew these rankings would stir up controversy. Whether we live in Uptown, Powderhorn or the North Side, we all tend to be boosters and proponents of the place where we hang our hat. Our purpose isn’t to suggest that your beloved district isn’t the right place for you. Instead we’ve tried to provide a transparent, numerical value that balances all of the various considerations that go into deciding where to live.

Over the course of the next several months we rolled up our sleeves with CURA, examined the raw data and made some tough decisions about what makes an appealing neighborhood—and how to express that quality with a bit of applied science. We had plenty of factors to consider, including housing cost, access to transportation, shopping and restaurants, diversity, schools and safety. CURA compiled the numbers and, with a bit of statistical magic, plugged that information into Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhood maps as drawn up by each respective city.

These very maps kicked up our first challenge. If you think comparing M-town to the capital is apples to oranges, you aren’t alone: as defined by the cities themselves, Minneapolis has 85 neighborhoods while St. Paul contains 17. Soldiering on in the face of this numerical disparity, we decided that the crucial issue would be our identification of what makes a great neighborhood, not how many there are—although because of their differing sizes we separated the cities in our rankings.

Our results are compelling and, in some cases, counterintuitive. Minneapolis’s Kenwood, by just about any standard a very nice neighborhood, stalls out at the middle of the list. The same with St. Paul’s Macalester-Groveland. In both cases, high housing costs dragged down their ranking (higher home costs lowered rankings, although holding housing value since 2008 raised them). We also learned quite a bit about how shifting the weight of various categories affected our outcomes—in one early version, Kenwood and Linden Hills’ high housing values left them nearly dead last in the list (rather than more or less in the middle of the pack, where they are now).  

Conversely, neighborhoods with more affordable housing costs could see their overall score plummet if they lacked goods and services, or if their public school test scores lagged behind. With all variables ranked, we were able to identify up-and-comers such as Victory and Near North, where affordable housing stock and rising amenities mark them as very nice places to be in the near future as trends shift and home buyers look for value.

Here are the values we settled upon, with the totals adding up to a potential score of 100. Our factors included transit (proximity to public transportation), safety (based on city crime statistics), schools (measured by standardized test scores), diversity (drawn from census data) and recreation (tallied from total green space). For food and gas, retail outlets, arts and culture, and bars, we relied on public data and ranked by sheer numbers (initially, we considered qualifying for quality, but soon discovered this would entail very subjective weighting).  

We understand that these values won’t be the same for everyone. If you don’t have kids, you’re not as interested in schools, and housing cost—again, measured by affordability and home value retention—isn’t as great a factor if you happen to be wealthy. But we balanced things out as equitably as we could from our vantage on what we love about the Twin Cities: transit, green space, diversity and a plethora of shops, culture and eateries. Here’s hoping you see things more or less the same way:

•     Housing Cost:    15%
•     Transit:     13%
•     Recreation:     13%
•     Safety:     12%
•     Schools:     10%
•     Arts & Culture:     10%
•     Diversity:     8%
•     Restaurants:     6%
•     Retail Outlets:     5%
•     Food/Gas:    4%
•     Bars:    4%

It was somewhat of a surprise to see Downtown West pop up as the top neighborhood in Minneapolis, but then a look at the data explained why. Trading off relatively steep housing costs and the rise in crime statistics that accompanies a high-density urban core, Downtown trounces all comers in terms of shopping, restaurants and culture. By our metric of valuing things to do, and a variety of choices, we ended up with Downtown Minneapolis as our top place to live.

Downtown St. Paul came in sixth on the other side of the river, in the top half of the pack but probably ranked higher than it might have five years ago (hello, Lowertown). A number of Minneapolis neighborhoods ranked high due to their proximity to Downtown, but areas farther south (Diamond Lake, Howe) cracked the upper echelons of the list because they straddle the balance between relative affordability and urban amenities.
So after a good deal of legwork and a huge assist from the urban-data experts, we’ve arrived at a detailed, statistics-based analysis that paints a vivid and intensely detailed portrait of the Twin Cities. Let the discussion (and fervent agreement, and equally contentious disagreement) begin.

See our list of the top ten Minneapolis neighborhoods; the runners-up; and our list of the top ten neighborhoods in St. Paul. Think we missed the mark? Let us know what makes your neighborhood great on our Facebook page, or tweet us @metromag using the hashtag #tchoods.