No Place Like Home – Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and Ownership Options

BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE

Neighborhoods of Minneapolis

What makes a home? What makes it feel right for you? In the real estate industry, the cliche is “Location, location, location.” In an urban setting, this can be shortened to “Neighborhood.” Neighborhoods have identities, and they may or may not fit with our own identity. A cute little website called Hoodmaps kind of nailed it for my neighborhood (see picture page 11.)
To research Minneapolis neighborhoods requires tremendous focus and mental fortitude. According to Wikipedia, the city officially recognizes and contains 83 neighborhoods. And Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is the only source that is both up to date and not full of stupid malarkey. Because in addition to the 83 real neighborhoods, there are many colloquial terms for areas that are not neighborhoods, but sound like they are (such as Uptown and Dinkytown) and there are eleven “communities” that the city uses to group them, some of which have the same name as a neighborhood. It’s a lot for a city with only 57.5 square miles (about 1/6 of it water) and about 425,000 people (again, according to Wikipedia.)
Due to the NRP, a now sunsetted program that still exerts a powerful influence, almost every neighborhood in Minneapolis is represented by an officially recognized voluntary nonprofit neighborhood association, or NA. Many of them are known by their acronyms, and a few of them have the same acronym as another one. Some NA’s represent more than one neighborhood, including the one I live in, which merges two neighborhoods not even in the same larger community – Standish (part of Powderhorn, the community, not the neighborhood) and Ericsson (part of Nokomis.) Also, over time, the names can change.
The name-change of the major south Minneapolis lake, Bde Maka Ska, affected a lot of groups that had used the name Calhoun. In the neighborhood world, CARAG became South Uptown in 2018, ECCO became East Bde Maka Ska in 2021, and West Calhoun became West Maka Ska in 2020. (Bde means Lake, more or less, in the Dakota language.) The community they are grouped in is still known as Calhoun-Isles, however.

To get around to what this all has to do with housing and homes – the real estate industry decided they were going to play this game too, but without rules. So, you have real estate listings under neighborhoods that may or may not exist. Also, people want to rename things for other reasons, especially those unofficial ones. Recently there has been a movement afoot to rename Old St. Anthony, the area where St. Anthony Main and the riverside reside, as simply Old Town.
In 2020, homesmsp.com, a blog created by a conglomerate of Re/Max realtors, published a neighborhood guide that was accurate at the time. But there have been a few mergers and neighborhood name changes since then. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to buy or sell in Minneapolis, this might be a good resource (remember the median prices have changed as well) – tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-2020homes.

A smaller site is Redfin’s blog, which published what should be very up to date: “12 Popular Minneapolis, MN Neighborhoods: Where to Live in Minneapolis in 2025.” Except eleven of the twelve are actually the eleven official communities, and then the first one, Bryn Mawr, is a neighborhood that is in the north of Calhoun-Isles. Well to be fair, this piece was written by an author who lives out in Seattle. Apart from that, it’s a good source, with up-to-date median rent amounts and median home prices: tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-homes2025.
The final real-estate site we are highlighting is aimed at renters. VeryApt.com headlines their page “Best Neighborhoods in Minneapolis,” but the ones they describe are not all in Minneapolis, nor are they all

neighborhoods. For instance, in highlighting Como Park, they don’t even mention St. Paul’s existence and call it a suburb. Whereas actual suburbs – Falcon Heights, for example – are presented as Minneapolis neighborhoods. Still, resources for renters are rare, so here’s a link if you want to check it out for its amenities, and median rents on various apartment sizes: tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-apthoods.
Local lifestyle magazines such as Mpls/StPaul (mspmag.com) often do profiles of neighborhoods which can be very informative, especially if recent. A recent one titled “The 2024 Insider’s Guide to Downtown Minneapolis” was a revelation. It made me want to live downtown even more. tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-downtown

First ring suburbs of Minneapolis

Location can be translated to the suburbs, if you don’t seem to thrive in the city itself. We won’t even get into rural living, although that is a thing with its own attractions. It’s not really our wheelhouse, as an urban paper. Maybe in a future article. Like the neighborhoods in the cities, the huge number of Twin Cities suburbs each offer a very different version of that catch-all place name, “the metro area.” To keep within the limits of this piece, we’ll just look at first ring suburbs, those that share a border with Minneapolis.
The homesmsp.com blog did a guide to first-ring suburbs of both cities in 2022, so fairly recent for statistical purposes. The Minneapolis-adjoining cities are Lauderdale, St. Anthony, Columbia Heights, Fridley, Brooklyn Center, Robbinsdale, Golden Valley, St. Louis Park, Edina, and Richfield. Besides a schools rating and a wealth of statistics, it offers a pretty good

capsule profile of each burb, like this excerpt from the one for Golden Valley: “Its hills and valleys include parks and nature areas, with parts of Minneapolis Theodore Wirth Park that rivals NYC Central Park within its borders… Much of it was developed in the 1950s and 1960s. This makes it a good suburb in which to find mid-century modern homes. Tyrol Hills, bordering Minneapolis on both the north and south sides of I-394 is a treasure trove of custom designed mid-century and modern homes on generous lots. Golden Valley does not have its own school district… parts are in the Hopkins school district, parts in the Robbinsdale school district.” tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-burbs

Owning, co-operatives, co-housing, renting?

Another attribute of home is whether you rent, own, or hold possession through some other mechanism such as housing co-operatives. (Or want to, if you’re making a change.) Conventional wisdom, at least in the US, has always been that “it’s better to own,” but I have done all of the above, and I think that’s a terrible oversimplification.
The homesmsp.com blog offers articles exploring both sides of the question. No doubt other resources do as well. One piece from December 2024 is titled “Why owning a home is worth it in the long run,” which at least admits by implication that there are downsides. (And as John Maynard Keynes famously noted, “In the long run, we are all dead.”) Another piece from September of 2024 exposes the horrors of a particularly cruel insurance scam, the deliberate misdiagnosis of hail damage. (As a condo owner, I have seen this trick performed on a multifamily industrial scale. It’s ugly.)

Housing co-operatives are one alternative that can offer people of modest means a way to build wealth and have secure housing with less risk and expense, and also are a favorite of wealthy people, which ought to tell you something. Housing co-ops can do this because they have a range of different financial models, from zero equity, to limited equity, to a model that is little different from a condominium. And both condominiums and co-ops have an elected board, representational democracy for owner-members, and reserve funds.
Finally, there are various models of village living in cities, such as co-housing, a more collectivized mode than co-ops, or multi-generational living, which was the only kind of living for thousands of years and is now experiencing a comeback. Here is a piece about that – tinyurl.com/DKRatSSP-Generations.