Minneapolis
City
Downtown Minneapolis (from the Mississippi River) Lake Nokomis Mill City Museum First Avenue Minnehaha Falls
Flag Seal Logo
Etymology: Dakota mni 'water' with Greek polis 'city'
Nicknames:  "City of Lakes",[1] "Mill City",[1] "Twin Cities"[2] (with Saint Paul), "Mini Apple"[1]
Motto:  En Avant (French: 'Forward')[3]
Show Minneapolis Show Hennepin County Show Minnesota Show the United States
Coordinates: 44°58′55″N 93°16′09″W / 44.98194°N 93.26917°W / 44.98194; -93.26917[4]
Country	United States
State	Minnesota
County	Hennepin
Incorporated	1867
Founded by	Franklin Steele and John H. Stevens
Government
• Type	Mayor–council (strong mayor)[5]
• Body	Minneapolis City Council
• Mayor	Jacob Frey(DFL)
Area [6]
• City	57.51 sq mi (148.94 km2)
• Land	54.00 sq mi (139.86 km2)
• Water	3.51 sq mi (9.08 km2)
Elevation [4]	830 ft (250 m)
Population  (2020)[7]
• City	429,954
• Estimate  (2022)[8]	425,096
• Rank	46th (U.S.) 1st (Minnesota)
• Density	7,962.11/sq mi (3,074.21/km2)
• Urban [9]	2,914,866
• Urban density	2,872.4/sq mi (1,109/km2)
• Metro [10]	3,693,729
Demonym	Minneapolitan
GDP [11]
• MSA	$277.6 billion (2022)
Time zone	UTC–6 (Central)
• Summer (DST)	UTC–5 (CDT)
ZIP Codes	55401-55419, 55423, 55429-55430, 55450, 55454-55455, 55484-55488
Area code	612
FIPS code	27-43000[4]
GNIS ID	655030[4]
Website	MinneapolisMN.gov

Minneapolis,^[a] officially the City of Minneapolis,^[13] is a city in and the county seat of Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States.^[4] With a population of 429,954, it is the state's most populous city as of the 2020 census.^[7] It occupies both banks of the Mississippi River and adjoins Saint Paul, the state capital of Minnesota. Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and the surrounding area are collectively known as the Twin Cities, a metropolitan area with 3.69 million residents.^[14] Minneapolis is built on an artesian aquifer on flat terrain, and is known for cold, snowy winters and hot, humid summers. Nicknamed the "City of Lakes",^[15] Minneapolis is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks, and waterfalls. The city's public park system is connected by the Grand Rounds National Scenic Byway.

Dakota people originally inhabited the site of today's Minneapolis. European colonization and settlement began north of Fort Snelling along Saint Anthony Falls—the only natural waterfall on the Mississippi River.^[16] The city's early growth was attributed to its proximity to the fort and the falls providing power for industrial activity. Minneapolis was the 19th-century lumber and flour milling capital of the world, and as home to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has preserved its financial clout into the 21st century. A Minneapolis Depression-era labor strike brought about federal worker protections. Work in Minneapolis contributed to the computing industry, and the city is the birthplace of General Mills, the Pillsbury brand, Target Corporation, and of Thermo King mobile refrigeration.

The city's major arts institutions include the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Guthrie Theater. Four professional sports teams play downtown. Prince is survived by his favorite venue, the First Avenue nightclub. Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota's main campus. The city's public transport is provided by Metro Transit and the international airport, serving the Twin Cities region, is located towards the south on the city limits.

Residents adhere to more than fifty religions, and thousands choose to volunteer their time. Despite its well-regarded quality of life,^[17] Minneapolis faces a pressing challenge in the form of stark disparities among its residents—arguably the most critical issue confronting the city in the 21st century.^[18] Governed by a mayor-council system, Minneapolis has a political landscape dominated by the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), with Jacob Frey serving as mayor since 2018.

History

Dakota homeland, city founded

Two Indigenous nations inhabited the area now called Minneapolis.^[19] Archaeologists have evidence to say at least since 1000 A.D.,^[20] they are the Dakota (one half of the Sioux nation),^[21] and, after the 1700s,^[22] the Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa, members of the Anishinaabe nations).^[23] Dakota people have different stories to explain their creation.^[24] One widely accepted story says the Dakota emerged from Bdóte,^[24] the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Dakota are the only inhabitants of the Minneapolis area who claimed no other land;^[25] they have no traditions of having immigrated.^[26] In 1680, cleric Louis Hennepin, who was probably the first European to see the Minneapolis waterfall the Dakota people call Owámniyomni, renamed it the Falls of St. Anthony of Padua for his patron saint.^[27] In the Dakota language, the city's name is Bde Óta Othúŋwe ('Many Lakes Town').^[b]

Purchasing most of modern-day Minneapolis, Zebulon Pike made the 1805 Treaty of St. Peter with the Dakota.^[c] Pike bought a 9-square-mile (23 km²) strip of land—coinciding with the sacred place of Dakota origin^[24]—on the Mississippi south of Saint Anthony Falls,^[33] with the agreement the US would build a military fort and trading post there and the Dakota would retain their land use rights.^[34] In 1819, the US Army built Fort Snelling^[35] to direct Native American trade away from British-Canadian traders, and to deter warring between the Dakota and Ojibwe in northern Minnesota.^[36] The fort attracted traders, settlers, and merchants, spurring growth in the surrounding region. Agents of the St. Peters Indian Agency at the fort enforced the US policy of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society, asking them to give up subsistence hunting and cultivate the land.^[37] Missionaries encouraged Native Americans to convert from their religion to Christianity.^[37]

Under pressure from US officials^[38] in a series of treaties, the Dakota ceded their land first to the east, and then to the west of the Mississippi, the river that runs through Minneapolis.^[39][d] Dakota leaders twice refused to sign the next treaty until they were paid for the previous one.^[51]In the space of sixty years, the US had seized all of Dakota land. In the decades following these treaty signings, the federal US government rarely honored their terms.^[52] After closing in 1858, the University of Minnesota was revived using land taken from the Dakota people under the Morrill Land-Grant Acts in 1862.^[53][e]

At the beginning of the American Civil War, annuity payments owed in June 1862 to the Dakota by treaty were late, causing acute hunger among the Dakota.^[57][f] Facing starvation^[59] a faction of the Dakota declared war in August and killed settlers.^[60] Serving without any prior military experience, US commander Henry Sibley had raw recruits,^[61] among them the only mounted troops were volunteers from Minneapolis and Saint Paul with no military experience.^[62] The war went on for six weeks in the Minnesota River valley.^[63] Some terrified American settlers traveled 80 miles (130 km) away from the massacre to Minneapolis for safety.^[64] After a trial described as by kangaroo court,^[65] 38 Dakota men died by hanging as ordered by Abraham Lincoln.^[63] The army marched 1,700 non-hostile Dakota men, women, children, and elders 150 miles (240 km) to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling.^[56][66] Minneapolitans reportedly threatened more than once to attack the camp.^[67] In 1863, the US "abrogated and annulled" all treaties with the Dakota.^[68] With Governor Alexander Ramsey calling for their extermination,^[69] most Dakota were exiled from Minnesota.^[70]

While the Dakota were being expelled, Franklin Steele laid claim to the east bank of Saint Anthony Falls,^[71] and John H. Stevens built a home on the west bank.^[72] Residents had divergent ideas on names for their community. In 1852, Charles Hoag proposed combining the Dakota word for 'water' (mni^[g]) with the Greek word for 'city' (polis), yielding Minneapolis. In 1851 after a meeting of the Minnesota Territorial Legislature, leaders of east bank St. Anthony lost their bid to move the capital from Saint Paul.^[77] In a close vote, Saint Paul and Stillwater agreed to divide federal funding:^[77] Saint Paul would be the capital, while Stillwater would build the prison. The St. Anthony contingent eventually won the state university.^[77] In 1855 with a charter from the legislature, Steele and associates opened the first bridge across the Mississippi; the toll bridge cost pedestrians three cents ($0.98 in 2023).^[78] In 1856, the territorial legislature authorized Minneapolis as a town on the Mississippi's west bank.^[73] Minneapolis was incorporated as a city in 1867, and in 1872, it merged with St. Anthony.^[79]

Water power, lumber, and flour milling

Minneapolis developed around Saint Anthony Falls, the only natural waterfall on the Mississippi, which was used as a source of energy.^[16] A 1989 Minnesota Archaeological Society analysis of the Minneapolis riverfront describes the use of water power in Minneapolis between 1880 and 1930 as "the greatest direct-drive waterpower center the world has ever seen".^[80] Minneapolis earned the nickname "Mill City."^[81][15] The city's two founding industries—lumber and flour milling—developed in the 19th century nearly concurrently. Flour milling overshadowed lumber for some decades; nevertheless, each came to prominence for about fifty years.^[h] The city's first commercial sawmill was built in 1848, and the first gristmill in 1849.^[83][i]

A lumber industry was built around forests in northern Minnesota, largely by lumbermen emigrating from Maine's depleting forests.^[86][87] Towns built in western Minnesota with lumber from Minneapolis sawmills shipped their wheat back to the city for milling.^[88] The region's waterways were used to transport logs well after railroads developed; the Mississippi River carried logs to St. Louis until the early 20th century.^[89] In 1871, of the thirteen mills sawing lumber in St. Anthony, eight ran on water power and five ran on steam power.^[90] Minneapolis supplied the materials for farmsteads and settlement of rapidly expanding cities on the prairies that lacked wood.^[91] White pine milled in Minneapolis built Miles City, Montana; Bismarck, North Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Omaha, Nebraska; and Wichita, Kansas.^[92] Auxiliary businesses on the river's west bank in 1871 included woolen mills, iron works, a railroad machine shop, and mills for cotton, paper, sashes, and wood-planing.^[93] Due to the occupational hazards of milling, by the 1890s, six companies manufactured artificial limbs.^[94]

Growing use of steam power freed lumbermen and their sawmills from dependence on the falls.^[95] Lumber was the main Minneapolis industry in 1870,^[96] before flour milling overtook it in the 1880s.^[96] Lumbering reached a statewide peak in 1900 when its decline began.^[97] After depleting Minnesota's white pine,^[98] some lumbermen moved on to Douglas fir in the Pacific Northwest.^[99] Sawmills in the city including the Minneapolis Weyerhauser mill closed by 1919.^[100]

Disasters struck the city in the late 19th century. Dug under the river at Nicollet Island, the Eastman tunnel leaked in 1869. Water sucked the 6 ft (1.8 m) tailrace into a 90 ft (27 m)-wide chasm.^[101] Community-led repairs failed and in 1870, several buildings and mills fell into the river.^[101] For years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers struggled to close the gap with timber until their concrete dike held in 1876.^[101] In 1870, and again in 1887, fire destroyed the entire row of sawmills on the east bank.^[102] In 1878, an explosion of flour dust at the Washburn A mill killed eighteen people^[103] and demolished several mills.^[104] The explosion cost the city nearly one half of its capacity, but the mill was rebuilt the next year.^[105] In 1893, fire spread from Nicollet Island to Boom Island to northeast Minneapolis where wind stopped it at the stone Grain Belt Brewery. Twenty blocks were destroyed and two people died.^[106]

Cadwallader C. Washburn founded Washburn-Crosby, the company that became General Mills.^[107][108] He learned of and adopted three flour milling innovations:^[109] middlings purifiers blew out the husks that had colored flour;^[110] gradual reduction by steel and porcelain roller mills combined gluten with starch;^[110] and a ventilation system decreased the risk of explosion by reducing flour dust in the air.^[111] Washburn and partner John Crosby^[112] sent Austrian civil engineer William de la Barre to Hungary where he acquired some of these innovations through industrial espionage.^[110] De la Barre carefully calculated and managed the power at the falls and encouraged steam for auxiliary power.^[113] Charles Alfred Pillsbury and the C. A. Pillsbury Company across the river hired Washburn employees and began using the new methods.^[110]

The hard red spring wheat grown in Minnesota became valuable—$0.50 profit per barrel in 1871 ($12.72 in 2023) increased to $4.50 in 1874 ($121.00 in 2023)^[114]—and Minnesota "patent" flour was recognized at the time as the best bread flour in the world.^[110] By 1895, through the efforts of silent partner William Hood Dunwoody, Washburn-Crosby exported four million barrels of flour a year to the United Kingdom.^[115] When exports peaked in 1900, fourteen percent of America's grain was milled in Minneapolis^[110] and about one third of that was shipped overseas.^[116] Overall production peaked at 18.5 million barrels in 1916.^[117]

Decades of soil exhaustion, stem rust, and changes in freight tariffs combined to quash the city's flour industry.^[118] In the 1920s, Washburn-Crosby and Pillsbury developed new milling centers in Buffalo, New York, and Kansas City, Missouri, while maintaining their headquarters in Minneapolis.^[119] Under increasingly consolidated management, plants on the Minneapolis mill properties generated hydroelectricity with surplus water.^[120] Hydroelectricity became the equal of flour milling as a user of the falls's power.^[121] Northern States Power bought the united mill companies in 1923,^[122] and by the 1950s controlled over 53,000 horsepower at the falls.^[123] In 1971, the falls became a national historic district.^[124] Hitherto "the backside of the city",^[125] the riverfront caught the attention of a convoluted network of private and government interests who sometimes fought. They developed townhouses and high rises, and rebuilt and renovated lofts—often neglecting affordability—revitalizing mills on both banks.^[126] The upper St. Anthony lock and dam permanently closed in 2015,^[127] and the region's three locks were under federal disposition study as of 2023.^[128]

Mississippi riverfront and Saint Anthony Falls in 1915. At left, Pillsbury, power plants and the Stone Arch Bridge. Today the Minnesota Historical Society's Mill City Museum is in the Washburn "A" Mill, across the river just to the left of the falls. At center-left are Northwestern Consolidated mills. The tall building is Minneapolis City Hall. In the right foreground are Nicollet Island and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.

Other industries develop

Minneapolis Star humorist Don Morrison wrote that the city doubled, tripled, then quadrupled its population every decade, and in 1922, the city's assessed property value was $266 million, "nearly 10 times the price paid for the entire midcontinent in the Louisiana Purchase."^[129] After the milling era waned, a "modern, major city"^[129] surfaced in 1900, attracted skilled workers,^[130] and depended on expertise from the university's Institute of Technology.^[131]

In 1886, businessman George D. Munsing found that itchy wool underwear could be covered in silk. His Minneapolis textile business—known then as Munsingwear, today owned by Perry Ellis^[133]—lasted a century and in 1923, was the world's largest manufacturer of underwear.^[134] In 1922, inventor David W. Onan founded Onan Corporation (bought by Cummins in 1986^[135]), that built and sold generators in Minneapolis.^[136] Onan brought electricity to midwestern markets before power lines covered the country, and supplied about half the generator sets the US military used during World War II.^[137] Frederick McKinley Jones invented mobile refrigeration in Minneapolis, and with his associate founded Thermo King in 1938.^[138] Medtronic, founded in a Minneapolis garage in 1949,^[139] and today domiciled in Ireland, as of 2022 usually appears in lists of the world's largest medical device makers.^[140]

Minnesota's computer industry was the largest and most varied in the US beginning in the 1950s, and in 1989 employed 68,000 people.^[141][j] Minneapolis-Honeywell built a south Minneapolis campus where their experience regulating indoor temperature earned them contracts controlling military servomechanisms like the secret Norden bombsight and the C-1 autopilot.^[143] In the 1960s, the Honeywell 316 and DDP-516 were nodes in ARPANET, the internet's precursor.^[143] The Honeywell Project from 1968 until 1990 advocated for peaceful means to replace the company's military interests.^[143] General Mills built computers for NASA in northeast Minneapolis in the 1950s.^[144] In 1957, Control Data began in downtown Minneapolis, where in the CDC 1604 they replaced vacuum tubes with transistors. Later Control Data moved to the suburbs^[k] and built the CDC 6600 and CDC 7600, the first supercomputers.^[146] A highly successful business until disbanded in 1990, Control Data opened a facility in economically depressed north Minneapolis in 1967, bringing jobs and good publicity.^[146] The University of Minnesota formed an educational computing group that placed three or four personal computers in every Minnesota school, and in 1991 the group's personnel released Gopher on a Macintosh SE/30 which ran until World Wide Web traffic surpassed Gopher traffic in 1994.^[147]

In the 1960s, developers and city leaders successfully contended with shopping attractions in suburbia^[148]—the pioneering Southdale Center^[149] and later the Mall of America.^[150] The new Minneapolis Skyway System and the Nicollet Mall brought with them a heyday for downtown.^[151]

Social tension

In many ways, the 20th century was a difficult time of bigotry and malfeasance, beginning with four decades of corruption.^[152] Known initially as a kindly physician, mayor Doc Ames made his brother police chief, ran the city into crime, and tried to leave town in 1902 according to historian Iric Nathanson.^[153] Lincoln Steffens published Ames's story in "The Shame of Minneapolis" in 1903.^[154] The Ku Klux Klan was a force in the city from 1921^[155] until 1923.^[156] The gangster Kid Cann engaged in bribery and intimidation between the 1920s and the 1940s.^[157] After Minnesota passed a eugenics law in 1925, the proprietors of Eitel Hospital sterilized people at Faribault State Hospital.^[158]

The city was relatively unsegregated before 1910,^[160] with a Black population of less than one percent,^[161] when a developer wrote the first restrictive covenant based on race and ethnicity into a Minneapolis deed.^[162] Realtors adopted the practice, thousands of times preventing non-Whites from owning or leasing properties;^[163] this practice continued for four decades until the city became more and more racially divided.^[164] Though such language was prohibited by state law in 1953 and by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968,^[165] restrictive covenants against minorities remained in many Minneapolis deeds as of the 2020s, and in 2021 the city gave residents a means to discharge them.^[166]

During the summer of 1934 and the financial downturn of the Great Depression, the Citizens' Alliance, an association of employers, refused to negotiate with teamsters. The truck drivers union executed strikes in May and July–August.^[167] Charles Rumford Walker explains in his book American City that Minneapolis teamsters succeeded in part due to the "military precision of the strike machine".^[168] The union victory ultimately led to 1935 and 1938 federal laws protecting workers' rights.^[169]

From the end of World War I in 1918 until 1950, antisemitism was commonplace in Minneapolis—Carey McWilliams called the city the anti-Semitic capital of the US.^[170] A hate group called the Silver Legion of America held meetings in the city from 1936 to 1938.^[171] In the 1940s, mayor Hubert Humphrey worked to rescue the city's reputation,^[172] and helped the city establish the country's first fair employment practices and a human-relations council that interceded on behalf of minorities.^[173] However, the lives of Black people had not been improved.^[160] In 1966 and 1967—years of significant turmoil across the US—suppressed anger among the Black population was released in two disturbances on Plymouth Avenue.^[174] A coalition reached a peaceful outcome but again failed to solve Black poverty and unemployment. Prince, who was bused to fourth grade in 1967, said in retrospect, "he believed that Minnesota at that time was no more enlightened than segregationist Alabama had been".^[175]

Between 1958 and 1963—in the largest urban renewal plan undertaken in America as of 2022^{[update][176]}—Minneapolis demolished "skid row". Gone were 35 acres (10 ha) with more than 200 buildings, or roughly 40 percent of downtown, including the Gateway District and its significant architecture, such as the Metropolitan Building.^[177] Efforts to save the building failed but encouraged interest in historic preservation.^[177]

In 1968, relocated Native Americans founded the American Indian Movement^[178] in Minneapolis,^[179] and its A.I.M. Survival School, later called Heart of the Earth,^[180] taught native traditions to children until closing in 2008.^[181] In a backlash of the "dominant" White voters, Charles Stenvig, a law-and-order candidate, became mayor in 1969, and governed for nearly a decade until 1977.^[182][183] After their marriage license was denied in 1970, a same-sex Minneapolis couple appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court in Baker v. Nelson.^[184] They managed to get a license and marry in 1971,^[184] forty years before Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage in 2013, and Obergefell v. Hodges did so nationwide in 2015.^[185]

Immigration helped to curb the city's mid-20th century population decline. But because of a few radicalized persons, the city's large Somali population was targeted with discrimination after 9/11, when its hawalas or banks were closed.^[186]

On May 25, 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded the murder of George Floyd;^[187] her video contradicted the police department's initial statement.^[188] Floyd, an African American man, suffocated when Derek Chauvin, a White Minneapolis police officer, knelt on his neck and back for more than nine minutes. While Floyd was neither the first nor the last Black man killed by Minneapolis police,^[189][190] his murder sparked international rebellions and mass protests.^[191] Reporting on the local insurgency, The New York Times said that "over three nights, a five-mile stretch of Minneapolis sustained extraordinary damage"^[192]—destruction included a police station that demonstrators overran and set on fire.^[193] The Twin Cities experienced ongoing unrest over racial injustice from 2020 to 2022.^[194]

Structural racism

Minneapolis has a history of structural racism^[195] and has racial disparities in nearly every aspect of society.^[196] Some historians and commentators have said White Minneapolitans used discrimination based on race against the city's non-White residents. As White settlers displaced the Indigenous population during the 19th century, they claimed the city's land,^[197] and Kirsten Delegard of Mapping Prejudice explains that today's disparities evolved from control of the land.^[160] Discrimination increased when flour milling moved to the East Coast and the economy declined.^[198] The I-35W highway built in 1959 under the Interstate Highway System^[199] cut through Black and Mexican neighborhoods.^[200]

The foundation laid by racial covenants on residential segregation, property value, homeownership, wealth, housing security, access to green spaces, trees and parks, and health equity shapes the lives of people in 2022.^[201] The city wrote in a decennial plan that racially discriminatory federal housing policies starting in the 1930s "prevented access to mortgages in areas with Jews, African-Americans and other minorities", and "left a lasting effect on the physical characteristics of the city and the financial well-being of its residents."^[202]

Discussing a Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis report on how systemic racism compromises education in Minnesota,^[203] Professor Keith Mayes says, "So the housing disparities created the educational disparities that we still live with today."^[204] Professor Samuel Myers Jr. says of redlining, "Policing policies evolved that substituted explicit racial profiling with scientific management of racially disparate arrests. ... racially discriminatory policies became institutionalized and 'baked in' to the fabric of Minnesota life."^[205][l] In 2020, government efforts to address these disparities include declaring racism a public health emergency,^[207] and zoning changes passed by the 2018 Minneapolis City Council 2040 plan.^[208]

Geography

The history and economic growth of Minneapolis are linked to water, the city's defining physical characteristic. Long periods of glaciation and interglacial melt carved several riverbeds through what is now Minneapolis.^[210] During the last glacial period, around 10,000 years ago, ice buried in these ancient river channels melted, resulting in basins that filled with water to become the lakes of Minneapolis.^[211] Meltwater from Lake Agassiz fed the glacial River Warren, which created a large waterfall that eroded upriver past the confluence of the Mississippi River, where it left a 75-foot (23-meter) drop in the Mississippi.^[212] This site is located in what is now downtown Saint Paul. The new waterfall, later called Saint Anthony Falls, in turn, eroded up the Mississippi about eight miles (13 kilometers) to its present location, carving the Mississippi River gorge as it moved upstream. Minnehaha Falls also developed during this period via similar processes.^[213][212]

Minneapolis is sited above an artesian aquifer^[214] and on flat terrain. Its total area is 59 sq mi (152.8 km²), of which six percent is covered by water.^[215] The city has a 12-mile (19 km) segment of the Mississippi River, four streams, and 17 waterbodies—13 of them lakes,^[216] with 24 miles (39 km) of lake shoreline.^[217]

A 1959 report by the US Soil Conservation Service listed Minneapolis's elevation above mean sea level as 830 feet (250 meters).^[218] The city's lowest elevation of 687 feet (209 m) above sea level is near the confluence of Minnehaha Creek with the Mississippi River.^[219] Sources disagree on the exact location and elevation of the city's highest point, which is cited as being between 967 and 985 feet (295 and 300 m) above sea level.^[m]

Neighborhoods

Minneapolis has 83 neighborhoods and 70 neighborhood organizations.^[222] In some cases, two or more neighborhoods act together under one organization.^[223]

Around 1990, the city set up the Neighborhood Revitalization Program (NRP), in which every one of the city's eighty-some neighborhoods participated.^[224] Funded for 20 years through 2011, with $400 million tax increment financing (TIF),^[224] the program caught the eye of UN-Habitat who considered it an example of best practices. Residents had a direct connection to government in NRP, whereby they proposed ideas appropriate for their area, and NRP reviewed the plans and provided implementation funds.^[224][225] The city's Neighborhood and Community Relations department took NRP's place in 2011^[226] and is funded only by city revenue.^[227] In 2023, two neighborhood organizations merged and others contemplated similar moves so they could combine reduced resources.^[227] In his 2024 proposed budget, the mayor suggested an increase in base funding for neighborhood organizations.^[228]

In 2018, Minneapolis City Council approved the Minneapolis 2040 Comprehensive Plan, which resulted in a city-wide end to single-family zoning.^[229] Slate reported that Minneapolis was believed to be the first major city in the US to make citywide such a revision in housing possibilities.^[230] At the time, 70 percent of residential land was zoned for detached, single-family homes,^[231] though many of those areas had "nonconforming" buildings with more housing units.^[232] City leaders sought to increase the supply of housing so more neighborhoods would be affordable and to decrease the effects single-family zoning had caused on racial disparities and segregation.^[233] The Brookings Institution called it "a relatively rare example of success for the YIMBY agenda".^[234] In 2023, a district court judge ruled that the plan violated the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act and that the city must abandon it.^[235] The city reverted to its previous decennial plan for 2030.^[236]

Climate

Minneapolis experiences a hot-summer humid continental climate (Dfa in the Köppen climate classification),^[237] that is typical of southern parts of the Upper Midwest; it is situated in USDA plant hardiness zone 5a.^{[238][239][240]} Minneapolis has cold, snowy winters and hot, humid summers, as is typical in a continental climate. The difference between average temperatures in the coldest winter month and the warmest summer month is 58.1 °F (32.3 °C).

The Minneapolis area experiences a full range of precipitation and related weather events, including snow, sleet, ice, rain, thunderstorms, and fog. The highest recorded temperature is 108 °F (42 °C) in July 1936 while the lowest is −41 °F (−41 °C) in January 1888.^[241] The snowiest winter on record was 1983–1984, when 98.6 in (250 cm) of snow fell.^[242] The least-snowy winter was 1930–1931, when 14.2 inches (36 cm) fell.^[242] According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the annual average for sunshine duration is 58 percent.^[243]